h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Do many folk on here use VPN's? If so, what to you find to be their main pro's and con's? I'm not really sure I get the whole privacy thing and how important that is in the context of day-to-day browsing.

I've been trying a VPN and so far my experience has been mixed. It's certainly been interesting/amusing to see google search results coming in from Belgium or Australia (I live in the UK) and I guess if I were any dodgy browsing (prawn..) it would be nice to know that those search terms and visited pages weren't being tracked by anyone, but would they routinely be for the for the vast majority of the population anyway?

Do VPN's stop your ISP knowing what you are browsing? I don't see how; surely as the providor of your internet they must be able to know what sites you are visiting, if they were forced to reveal that.

So far, I've found that some sites don't play nice with VPN on and I have to disable it to access the site (Just Eat for example!)

Interesting - I have been using VPN for working at home when I need to access certain software that is stored on a remote server, but it is a 'lite' version of what I see at work when I access that server so there are limits to what I can do with it, yes (not that I have tried using it to browse Just Eat ).

Is a VPN really necessary, outside of business applications?

That's pretty much my question . However a quick internet search reveals that VPN's for personal use are very much a thing.Is it just paranoid nerds that use them outide of work from home applications? My free trial will end in a few days- free VPN's don't seem to exist so just wondering if there's any reason to pay for it (around £4 per month).

I guess a VPN would pay off for a class that's conducted via ZOOM. Trolls ahve been breaking into ZOOM classes and causing trouble.

I live in China. Numerous websites are blocked. Using a VPN is the most practical way for me to circumvent Chinese censors. I have one on right now, in fact.

Also, certain websites that are still available in China, nonetheless have greater restrictions on their use. No doubt placed upon them by the Chinese government in the first place. For example, any time I try to use Zoom without a VPN, I'm required to verify a valid Chinese phone number. However, I don't HAVE a valid Chinese phone number, and so I can't log-in to Zoom.

By contrast, if I use the VPN to connect to Zoom through an American server, nobody gives a damn whether I have a phone number --- so it works perfectly. This is fortunate, because part of my job now *requires* me to connect to connect to Zoom in order to do it.



Plus, there are a lot of times that a video is available in one country and not in another. For example, several years ago I tried to share a video with a friend who lives in Canada, but she couldn't see it because it wasn't "available" in her country. VPNs didn't exist then (as far as I know), but if they had then she could have used one to see the video.

Lots of video-streaming services still have this problem even today --- Netflix being the most prominent. Which means as far as TV goes you'd have to sign up for multiple streaming services to get all the content you want. But if you do a little extra research then you can just turn on your VPN to some other country and bam! there's the show you want. Like magic.

(If you're fool enough to still be using Netflix anyway.)

In short, in my opinion the best thing about VPNs is that they facilitate the free exchange of information, which is always a good thing.



Also, even though I'm not building any nuclear bombs or making nerve gasses, I still just personally don't like the idea of governments randomly spying on me. It's wrong.

And I don't like (badly) targeted advertising either. I don't pretend to fully understand the technical explanation, but VPNs also prevent both of those. So that's good too.



Now I admit they're not for everyone. (Indeed, most all of you reading this probably won't have any good reason to pay for one at all.) In fact, if I hadn't come to China, I expect I never gotten one in the first place. But it was absolutely worth every penny. Enough so that I'd even consider still paying for it after leaving.

So there you go.

AND, even IF your ISP can still save your browsing history with a VPN on (which I'm not sure they can), that's no guarantee that they will. Nor does it mean that they'll automatically hand that information over to the government even if they do. So it's another line of security against government data-mining either way.

If I'm not mistaken, I believe using a VPN encrypts your data to and from the VPN so your ISP would not have access to your browsing traffic.

I only use one for work, but I've considered using one full time. You don't have to pay for one necessarily. I believe you can make a personal VPN. I've considered doing so using an older computer I'm no longer using and running it on Linux.

Hmm, Thanks for that Mr X (always assumed you lived in the US for some reason ). Y'know, for around the same price as a pint of beer per month I can keep my VPN after the free trial expires. I don't need to have it on all the time either and can switch it off when it causes sites to misbehave. So I think I'm pretty much sold on keeping it.

You get free VPN with Opera browser.

"Hmm, Thanks for that Mr X (always assumed you lived in the US for some reason )."


'Cause I always used to. I moved to China a couple years ago.

See up there, I said I probably wouldn't have gotten a VPN otherwise. Look.