Wireless hotspots are great, but unless you don't care about your privacy, you have to be careful what information you send/transmit through the connection. I recently found out an interesting feature of ssh: being able to double as a SOCKS proxy. Provided your internet connection is fast enough, it's a very useful way to transmit secure information from anywhere in the world. Setup sshd on your computer (assuming it's accessible from the internet), and then from your remote computer, simply open a SOCKS connection like so:
ssh -D 9090 user@server.com
Note that the port (9090 in this case) can be any port you want. Then configure a SOCKS-capable browser (such as Firefox) to use this newly created proxy. Note that in many cases it won't go through the SOCKS proxy for DNS lookup (for example, on Firefox you would have to change network.proxy.socks_remote_dns from about:config to true). But for most of us, this is more than enough security on a wireless hotspot.