Step Aside, Harry Potter: Microsoft Vets Give Apple Devices Their Own Cloak Of Invisibility

Public WiFi hotspots are notorious for being the playgrounds of snoops.If you ever use Apple devices on an open network, you'll want to take a look at Cloak, which uses VPN tech to keep your data safe.

Cloak is a response to hacker tools like Firesheep and Reaver, which can snag important data while you're shopping from the comfort of your local coffee shop on your iPad, iPhone, or MacBook. The way to foil hackers is to use a VPN to protect your connection. Cloak uses VPN tech, but it's designed to be simple and unobtrusive.For example, although Cloak uses a variety of servers, it chooses the best server for you in the background.

An interesting twist to Cloak's story is that the security service was cooked up by three former Microsoft employees. Now with Bourgeois Bits, the Microsoft vets are tapping their experience making Microsoft products for Mac.

Free to light users, Cloak makes its money from people spend a lot of time on unprotected networks. The free plan covers two hours of protected connectivity (or 1GB of data) per month. Moving up to the first paid plan gets you 20GB of data per month (with no time restrictions) for $8 and the top plan offers 50GB for $15.