![]() Consumer Reports White Paper Evaluating VPNs It was pretty obvious that I would need to start paying more, and I was willing to do that but I still wanted to find a way to choose a VPN that truly provided security and privacy. I started looking at a few of the podcaster-recommended VPNs and in general, they were quite a bit more expensive than what I have been paying for. You really have no way of knowing whether these lists are of good VPNs or only ones that were willing to pay the site owner to be on the list. These Top Ten lists often do not disclose the fact that they are getting paid for what you choose. You know I love me a good affiliate link, but I am pretty good at making sure you know when there’s something in it for me. Unfortunately, many, if not all of these “Top Ten” lists are either paid for by the VPN vendors or are all affiliate links. The second option is possibly even worse. But do you really know anything about those VPN providers? Do you know that the podcaster evaluated them thoroughly from a security perspective? Or are they just the ones that offered advertising money? The first option isn’t a terrible way to go, because if you hear about a VPN from a tech podcaster, it’s reasonable to assume they’ve used it themselves and done some sort of evaluation. ![]() Choose from one of the many “Top Ten Best VPN Provider” lists.Buy one of the ones advertised by your favorite tech podcasters.This is much harder than you would think. It was time to start evaluating VPN offerings that were in active development. Hopefully, that foundation helps you get your brain around why you might want to use a VPN. I haven’t ever done that to bypass paying for something (I’m looking at you, Star Trek in Canada on Netflix), but I did once use it to tunnel into Britain because the idiots running the Olympics in the US didn’t air the US women’s gymnastics competition! It can also be used to view content that is restricted in your geographical location. It could be for nefarious purposes, but it could also be to protect one’s identity in a political regime that is problematic. There are also those who use a VPN to obfuscate their IP address. But with a VPN running, they only see that you tunneled out to your VPN provider’s server, but after that, they can’t see where you went. Our Internet Service Providers (ISPs) see all of the destinations of our network activity. ![]() This use isn’t as much about security as it is about privacy. Many security-minded NosillaCastaways also choose to always run a VPN, even if they’re at home just surfing the net. With a VPN from your house to your employer, you can function exactly as though you are at the office with access to internal servers and services. With a properly-configured VPN, you won’t be susceptible to those attacks.Īnother main use of a VPN is to “tunnel” into your employer’s network. When on a shared network, man-in-the-middle attacks can easily occur where bad actors spoof real websites in hopes of getting you to give up your login credentials to your bank or worse. A VPN allows you, as the user, to send and receive data across public or shared networks as though you were directly connected to a private network. But when you go to a coffee shop or hotel, you’re either on a public network or at the very best a shared network with everyone else in that hotel or coffee shop. When you’re at home, behind your password-protected WiFi (or wired Ethernet), you’re on a private network. ![]() This may be a refresher for every single one of you, but I’d hate to leave anyone wondering about this. Refresher on VPNsīefore I describe my hunt for a new VPN, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about what problems a VPN solves. It’s clearly time to find a new VPN after all. He said, “I like to quit software applications before they quit me.” I also heard from a few NosillaCastaways that they’d tried to get support for and they got nowhere. Dan Moren came up with a great way to think about end-of-lifed apps during an episode of Clockwise. I also said that since it was pretty much end-of-lifed, I’d be looking around for alternatives. In my article about the conversation, my bottom line was that I was cautiously optimistic, and that you could keep using for the foreseeable future. I reached out to the folks at Ziff-Davis, and had a nice conversation with them about their plans to incorporate ’s feature into one of the many other VPNs they had purchased. He wanted to know what this meant for the product. Last October, alert NosillaCastaway John Shaffer let me know that the VPN I’ve been recommending for many years,, had been sold to Ziff-Davis.
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