Starbucks is now offering free Wi-Fi for everyone for all customers in its company-owned stores in the United States and Canada as a part of an ongoing commitment to enhancing customer service. No Starbucks card required, no username or password needed, no time limits, and unlimited usage. Starbucks is working with AT&T in the U.S. and Bell in Canada as its Wi-Fi providers.

Starbucks was one of the first chains to offer Wi-Fi, using T-Mobile some years ago. Customers were allowed 2 hours of free Wi-Fi access provided with use with a Starbucks Card to login.

So much daily business is done currently within the walls of a Starbucks with a coffee in hand and to have free Wi-Fi seems fantastic. However, is it safe?

As with other public Wi-Fi networks, there are risks involved with connecting to public hotspots. To minimize your exposure you should be aware of several basic items. Following all of these items does not mean you are entirely protected against malicious attempts and personal exposure.

When you are on a public network you should turn off your file sharing and public folder sharing. In Windows it is located in the Control Panel and then Network and Sharing options. For Mac it is located under System Preferences and Sharing.

As for web surfing it isn’t a big deal (to me) to surf the web, in a general sense. However, be cautious to entering in usernames, passwords, credit card info, etc. to websites that are not encrypted. As a general “rule of thumb” you can tell by looking at the website address and if it starts with an “https” instead of “http.” However, there are sites where you enter login information on a website starting with “http” that submits securely to “https” and that is fine as well. As always, make sure you have your anti-virus and malware software up to date.

The iPhone 4 pre-order was made available today. Were you able to get one?

If you were like me you went to the Apple website and tried… and tried… and tried, only to receive the “Your request couldn’t be processed.” The Apple’s online pre-order system used an eligibility check for existing AT&T customers, which appears to have been the cause of the issue. Additional problems arose for users who attempted to pre-order using the Apple retail store software from the App Store and found the software hung up at a “processing” screen while checking eligibility for their upgrade.

Even with all of the “processing” issues, the pre-orders for the iPhone 4 stopped from the AT&T website as of around 1:30pm Pacific from the AT&T website. So I guess in between all of the problems there were people that were able to get their hold on the prized iPhone 4.

As if the problems of today is not bad enough rumors have been circulated that a potential AT&T security breach worse than the one encountered days before with the iPad 3G email addresses being leaked. AT&T reports it has been unable to reproduce the issue but users are reporting that they are logging into their AT&T accounts only to find out they are looking at someone else’s account information. Talk about a case of “when it rains, it pours.”