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Wayport has been something of a pioneer for road warriors, offering telephone-enabled cubicles - known as Laptop Lanes - at major airports across the U.S.

Timbuktu Pro, which is available in both Mac and Windows, is clearly aimed at Mac users. The PC version, while functionally similar to the Mac edition, appears to be something of an afterthought, since functionality is limited.

Whilst RealVNC is freeware and a very basic remote access package with minimal security, TridiaVNC Pro shows what can be done with open source software.

Boingo uses a similar network aggregation model seen on ISP networks from the likes of iPass and GRIC. But it goes further with its business model, collecting and distributing usage revenues amongst the various network operators whose Wi-Fi hotspots it uses.

Like iPass, GRIC is one of the world's two major internet roaming facilitators, with services aimed at both business and consumer users.

Since our last look at this product in June 2002, BT has completed roaming arrangements with several other networks and now has quite a healthy coverage of most major cities in the U.K.

Like the GRIC service reviewed elsewhere, iPass acts an intermediary/facilitator for internet service roaming. Unlike GRIC, which primarily serves consumers, iPass is more tailored for the enterprise.

GoToMyPC takes a radically different approach to remote access. Instead of requiring users to dial into the host PC, the host PC maintains a passive out bound only link with GoToMyPC's servers.

Now in version 11, pcAnywhere is one of the longest-running remote access applications for the PC. We can remember using an early DOS edition in the mid-to-late 1980s.

Unlike the data acquisition tools here, WinTasks is intended to give administrators a view of the running state of a system, helping to identify and track malicious activity.

As an alternative to costly proprietary tools, we sourced a variety of open source software, with the goal of emulating as much of the feature-sets offered by closed source products, such as EnCase and ProDiscover.

EnCase from Guid-ance Software has been at the vanguard of forensics software for some time - and with good reason.
Now in version 4.14, the solution is a powerful ­ collection of correlation and analysis tools, designed to make the forensic investigator's job as easy as possible.

Guardware produces a variety of innovative products, all of which have been well received. It was interesting, therefore, to see a keyboard product with integral fingerprint reader from this Hungarian company (although the keyboard is actually made in China).

The SafeGuard Biometrics product is straightforward in concept and execution, making use of smartcard and biometric technology to provide strong identity verification for workstation and network access, as well as making the same functionality available to other services such as email clients and the use of certificates.

The U.are.U Pro for Active Directory from Digital Persona is, as its name suggests, a product to bring biometric identity verification to a Windows Active Directory environment (including Windows Server 2003). It may be fully integrated at server level or used on a standalone workstation.

Now in version 3.6, the Tsunami VPN appliance sports a simpler management interface and new tools for managing access rules, as well as the ability to send password expiration warnings to remote users who authenticate against NT domains.

This product is built upon Sun's very secure Trusted Solaris 8 operating system, which has been used by the U.S. Department of Defense for over 25 years. It is a hardened version of the Solaris operating system platform for deployment of high-security desktops, database servers, firewalls, and communication gateways.

Many companies are looking to secure their networks from wardriving attacks and the current advice is to put a VPN behind a wireless access point. With this in mind, the following product should be ideal. The aim of the product is to secure access to network infrastructure from wireless clients using the wireless transport layer security (WTLS) protocol, which is a wireless version of SSL.

The NEC TouchPass system will appeal to systems administrators looking to integrate biometric verification into the organizational network access security routines.

Aventail was probably the first company to conceive and market the idea of the clientless SSL VPN. However it has only recently brought out its own hardware appliance that does such a job.