I use WireGuard (Fritz!Box and iOS) to establish a permanent secure channel between my two homes and to connect with my mobile devices to my home network.
I use a VPN offered through Bahnhof, my ISP in Sweden. https://bahnhof.se/ The VPN is known as āIntegrity VPNā https://integrity.st/ and is part of the ā5th of July Foundationā. https://5july.org/ It uses the WireGuard protocol. https://www.wireguard.com/ While many companies talk about how important your privacy is to them, Bahnhof actually has a long history of demonstrating this commitment. Here is an article from Torrentfreak published in 2018. The ISP That Fights For Privacy and a Free Internet Bahnhof: The ISP That Fights For Privacy and a Free Internet * TorrentFreak
2 Likes
Iāve been using Freedome VPN on my devices for several years. I mostly use it when Iām traveling. I do also use Cisco AnyConnect VPN to connect to my employer, but only every 90 days when I have to change my password.
Iāve tried several VPNs, mostly to reach āhomeā for streaming services I couldnāt watch while I was abroad. In my opinion, ExpressVPN offers the best service for this purpose. Both MLB and Netflix are adept at identifying VPN connections and denying access to their services. ExpressVPN appears to have the best success in bypassing these restrictions, at least in my experience.
At home, I have AT&T Gig service, and I also appreciate that ExpressVPN is very fast. When Iām visiting sites I donāt necessarily trust, it doesnāt affect my online experience by slowing everything down to a crawl.
How would you rate Cloudflareās 1.1.1.1?
Our office uses GlobalProtect from paloalto networks and Fortinet from Cisco systems.
Other than hooking up to your employerās network (instead of your own or the local one, say, in a cafĆ© or hotel) or accessing material restricted from the country youāre in or from the IP youāre at (say, a news article (note: streaming services may know the IPs of VPNs and bar them)), people use VPNs for privacy and piracy, so your own IP address doesnāt show up in your ISPās logs or the logs of a web site youāre visiting.
I use hide.me VPN when I use one (which is only while traveling); and since I donāt travel that often, I want one I can subscribe to through Apple on a monthly basis only when needed. Most of those available through Apple require a yearly commitment. The rest of the time I just rely on Private Relay on all my devices.
Tunnelblick https://tunnelblick.net
For the first question, I answered āAll the Timeā but that is not technically true. There are many times when a website wonāt work with my VPN enabled. I canāt give any examples off the bat, but it happens sometimes, and it is annoying that I have to disable it just to complete a form or even access the website or something else on a website. But aside from that it is on all the time.
I guess I am dense but I donāt understand the difference in question 2 between āPrivacyā and āAnonymityā. In my mind, they seem pretty similar. I guess as noted, one is to hide the IP address one is to hide identity, but it seems that doing one will do the other, no? But what do I know?
I forgot about Tunnelblick. A startup I worked with a couple of years ago used it. It had the advantage of being free, but it was not the easiest to set up. Overall, though, it seemed to work well.
Nope. When Iām out and about, I just use my phoneās cellular connection. And I canāt remember the last time I visited a coffee shop for any reason.
When Iām traveling and Iām on a hotel network, there may be someone snooping, but as I wrote before, just about every web site (and especially anything with potentially sensitive data) is already HTTPS encrypted.
I really donāt care if some random spy sees that Iām visiting my bankās web site, or streaming video from YouTube. As long as they donāt see the content of my session, Iām fine with it.
1 Like
For work, I use Tunnelblick, provided by my employer. At home, I have Intego Privacy Protection. The latter, incidentally, often uses servers that Google balks at, requiring a captcha to proceed.
Thank you for helping. Everything you said is common knowledge that I have gleaned from mentions of VPNs over the years.
What is never said is how you actually set up and use any given VPN. Having tried to use one in the past, I found that downloading and installing one does nothing. Apparently they need to be configured somehow. Or they do nothing I can see or monitor. I understand what you can do but Iām astonished that nobody has ever explained how.
Can anyone help me find any articles explaining what to use a VPN for, how to configure it after installing it, and how to verify it works? Will it create a connection to a home machine with sharing turned on over the internet? Iāve often wanted to do that.
Yeah, a bit complicated but instructions are pretty good and make it fairly painless. Also, I guess I should have named the VPN as actually FrootVPN (https://frootvpn.com) using Tunnelblick. Itās not actually free but pretty nominal - $2.99/mo. Usually use the server in Sweden, good reliability and get really good speeds.
I had Nordvpn for 3 years until about 3 years ago. Being polite, their tech support was useless (the comment above about āerase your phone, letās see if that worksā resonates), and it would drop constantly. I donāt think it ever stayed up for a full day on phone or mac. And it wouldnāt tell me itād dropped, I had to notice. Useless. Iām surprised it topped the poll.
It depends greatly on the specific VPN.
My experience (with remote access VPNs like Cisco AnyConnect and OpenVPN on Windows) is that you install the software. Then you configure it with things like:
- The name/address of the server youāre connecting to
- The user name and password for the connection (or youāll have to type them in whenever you connect)
- Any options (e.g. split tunneling, exceptions for LAN connections like your printer, etc.)
Some of these may be automatically populated by the installation script (e.g. the one my IT department gave me to do the installation).
Then when you want to connect, click on its icon (in the Windows system tray. Presumably thereās a menu-bar icon on Mac versions) and tell it you want to connect. Provide login credentials if requested and it should connect soon afterward. Once connected, your network traffic will be shunted through the VPNās connection (via specially-crafted entries in your computerās routing table).
If it is doing its job properly, you shouldnāt notice it is running. All your network traffic will flow from your computer to the VPN server and from there to its destination (possibly making a few hops through the VPN providerās network on the way). Without network diagnostic tools (to see that the routes have changed), you shouldnāt notice any change.
When youāre done with the session, click its icon and tell it to disconnect. The app should remove the routing table entries and close the network connection to the VPN server.
I would like to assume that private-browsing VPNs behave similarly. Hopefully with a more user-friendly configuration interface (e.g. select the server from a list of options instead of making you type it in manually). But I havenāt used those products, so I canāt be sure.
1 Like
I used PrivadoVPN (https://privadovpn.com) when a website wouldnāt let me buy because it is US based and Iām not. I can understand not offering shipping outside the US but I was buying a gift for delivery to my parents who do live in the US!
1 Like
I use two different VPNs (one at any one time) on all my devices, since there are certain sites that work with one but not the other. Iāve been using personalVPN (formerly known as WiTopia) (https://www.personalvpn.com/) for many years and continue using it because it generally seems to not slow my system, and itās been around so long that I have faith in it just due to its longevity. Unfortunately, there are a few sites that seem to have problems with it, but work OK with the other VPN I use sometimes, that being 1.1.1.1 (https://1111-w-warp.en.softonic.com/), which I chose because of its advertising that it was secure and fast, and like personalVPN, it does seem to not slow the system down (though admittedly I havenāt noticed the actual speed boost it claims to provide). Since they both appear in the VPN option in Settings and connect when I set them to connect (again, only one at a time), Iām just assuming they work as advertised - Iām not enough of a techie to delve into the inner workings to investigate further. There are of course some sites that work with neither VPN, and likely simply donāt work with devices connected via any VPN, Ticketmaster being the most annoying.