When we use the Internet away from home, e.g. in cafes or hot-spots, we're never sure whether our data is being sent encrypted or as "plaintext". The all-powerful OpenSSH package comes to our aid. To carry out this task we need a shell account on a trusted server. All we have to do is connect to our shell with the -D <port_number> option to create a local SOCKS 5 server on port 1025. When choosing a port, keep in mind that as regular users we have access to ports above 1024, while ports below that number are reserved for the root account.

ssh -D 1025 login@ip-address-of-our-ssh-server

After running this command, we open TCP port 1025 for listening on our local machine. This is a kind of encrypted proxy that we can now connect to.
Now we can configure Firefox: Edit->Preferences, the Advanced->Network tab, the Connection field, the Settings button. We choose "Manual proxy configuration", in the "SOCKS Host" field we type localhost and port 1025, and choose SOCKS v5. And this way we have a fully encrypted connection.