Hi, Yes I tried 2 solutions, both of which do work. I'll add some explanations for those who are curious what vpn can do for you. But in short, these are usable for us: www.proxpn.com, iphone as well as mac, and: www.getcloak.com .
So what does vpn do for us, normal iphone users? An example. If you are at a coffee shop and you get your mail from an old server at your provider, then your phone must log in to the mail service, so you can get your own mail. To do that, the phone in your hand needs to send your email credentials, i.e. your mail username and mail server password, over to the email server from which you want your mail to be sent to you. By design, email protocols do not encrypt anything. Normally, that is not an immediate problem. But when you are on a wifi hotspot, to your phone that is the same thing as if you connect to your private wifi lan at home. And at home, every computer can see and connect to all others. Likewise, In a coffee shop, all devices on the coffee shop's same wifi spot, can see each other as well. With a specialized program running on a laptop or on an Android phone from someone else in the shop, folks are able to see all traffic from all people, including from your own phone, that runs by inside the coffee shop's wifi network. Your phone is transmitting your email username and password through the air, so everything and everyone around you, can catch that, if they know how to do that. And it's not hard. If people have your email password, they can visit sites, and ask for a password reset by email. And because the stranger now has access to your mail, they can change your password on your important sites, and that account of yours is then hacked. You don't want that to happen, do you? Luckily, modern email servers allow you to set up an encrypted connection, starting from your phone all the way through the wifi and through the net, over to your mail server, so that's a better deal if you can have encrypted email, because no one along the way can read your traffic if it is encrypted. For that to work, your email provider must support secure mail using something called ssl. If you use ssl connections to get your mail while you are on an untrusted wifi network, then you're good to go. Unfortunately, not all and every internet service supports encrypted connections, so it would be nice to have a general solution, that covers not just your email traffic for your phone, but all traffic from and to the phone. And that's what vpn can solve. A vpn eliminates this problem. Let me explain it this way. At home, your network is safe, because you own it. So, how awesome would it be, if you could make an encrypted connection from your phone in the coffee shop to your house, and then get safely on to the internet from there.Then, no one can look at your traffic. Well of course they can, but they will only see static noise, rubbish, garbage coming by, because that's what encryption does. If you had a vpn server running at home, then you could connect to it using your phone, while you are in a coffee shop, or in anotheruntrusted wifi network, and because it's vpn, virtual private network, your phone encrypts your traffic, sends it home, and the vpn server there, then throws it on to the internet just as usual. So if you had a vpn server yourself, you could communicate through it in a very safe way, because folks around you cannot see what you are doing, and therefore not get a hold of your passwords as they fly through the air, from your phone to the open wifi. Unfortunately, running a vpn server at home is not easy. I've tried it, and boy is it frustrating. For me it worked, and then it stopped working. I managed to fix it, and something else broke. You can have a vpn server using a windows xp box at home, and you can also do it on a mac at home, and probably on windows 7 or 8 but I'm not sure of those, but most people will agree that it is troublesome. So therefore, commercial companies exist that do a good job. The principle is the same. Now, you make an encrypted vpn tunnel using your phone, not to your house, but into the commercial vpn server, run by the company you choose. From there, your traffic is decrypted, and then sent on, through the regular internet. To the service you are using, it will lokk as if you are physically located at the same place where the vpn server is. It's not very expensive, a few bucks a month ranging from 3 or 4 to ten, depending on who you choose. And it's a nice way to protect yourself from other machines seeing your traffic. I was in Turky, and from my hotel, I could not listen to Dutch radio streams. But when I turned on my vpn, which was allowed, my tunnel ended in the Netherlands, and from there, the hotel could not block me from listening to my favorite local news stream, because the vpn connection is encrypted, so filters inside the hotel wifi prohibiting me from doing stuff, can't catch the traffic. Pro xpn is a service that has a 7 day trial. If you like it, you can go premium, which means that you then get access to your iphone vpn as well. Within 7 days of purchase, no questions asked, you can get your money back. Pro xpn has an iphone app, too. This app creates a profile for your iphone. If you've never seen this before, it's something that changes all necessary settings inside your iphone, in one single go. For instance, some time ago, with pro xpn, you still had to go into your iphone vpn settings, and then enter loads of stuff. A username, a password, ports, choice of protocol and what not. But once you install the pro xpn iphone app, the app creates a profile, and all we need to do now, is accept to install it, and off you go, because the app creates all your necessary iphone vpn settings. That's a breeze. If you now want to be protected by pro xpn, simply go into iphone settings and turn on vpn. You can verify that it's working, if you see the vpn icon in the iphone status bar. Pro xpn also has a mac app. It's accessible and I'm using it daily. In this app, you can choose where you want your vpn traffic to emerge on to the big internet. If you listen to Leo Laporte's podcast called security now, which is on www.twit.tv , then you'll get a promo code, which gives you 20 percent off, not for the first month, but for the lifetime of your account until you cancel. I don't want to give out this promo code, because the security now podcast is really a thing you will want to listen to, if you are security aware, or at least interested in it, and I'd like not to spoil Leo's efforts. I myself have pro xpn. There is also a thing called cloak. Basically the same thing. It creates a profile, and setting up is a snap. You can buy a lasting subscription, but this thing allows you to buy a month pass for 10 bucks, so that you can get vpn when you want it, and not have it and not pay for it, if you decide so. Cloak has the advantage of automatically protecting your traffic, if the app sees that you are now connected to a wifi network that you did not explicitly trust. In other words, you are always protected, unless you go off wifi, which is normally reasonably safe, and all shields are also down if you decide to trust your home wifi network. Cloak turn on and off your vpn connection as needed. I did not personally try the cloak mac app, but I did have it on my iphone and it works fine and accessibly. Hth, Paul. On Jun 5, 2014, at 12:23 PM, Chris Moore <apple.geek.ch...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello, > > Anyone know of an accessible Open VPN client for the Mac? > > I have tried TunnelBlick, but I can't access the icon which appears in the > menu. > > Any suggestions? > > Chris > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. 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