To most road warriors, having your internet traffic encrypted is very important. To some, the only way to do it is to use your corporate VPN server. However, whilst not common, there are some public hotspots that are not properly configured to have VPN traffic pass through it, so you are left to using an non-secure connection. It is ok if you are browsing but what if you need to access your personal Gmail account? Lifehacker's gina Trapani has a simple solution that uses your browsers SOCKS proxy support. It works on all platforms but afaic, works best with Firefox. :)
Try it out!