That was very helpful. Yes, it appears that VPN would not be of
great benefit to me. For some time I wanted to know what it was for and
now I know. Thanks much.
From The Believer. . .
By way of the Chariots of the
Gods cameth the Aliens who
dwelt amongst the humans,
and bringeth much knowledge.
On 3/28/2015 5:34 PM, Sabahattin Gucukoglu wrote:
That will depend on what uses you intend to put it to.
VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) typically extend internal, private networks
across the Internet, for business uses. They do this by tunnelling the traffic
that needs to traverse the Internet inside an encrypted session between devices
at the edges of the network that face the Internet. Internal devices then
appear to be communicating with other internal nodes that are really distant
from them, essentially using the Internet and encryption as a substitute for
private leased lines where the security guarantees of the public Internet alone
are inadequate. These days, all Internet traffic that is not encrypted should
be considered vulnerable.
The useful side-effect of the VPN technology, as it applies to VPN services, is
that you can essentially purchase access to a virtual leased line solely for
accessing the Internet. You obtain a VPN account and then route all your
traffic, including Internet traffic, through it. That means that the Internet
sees traffic from the vantage point of the line owner, and not yourself.
People thus use VPNs for, say, browsing more anonymously.
Typical uses for VPN services are: geoblock circumvention (the VPN endpoint is
in another geographic region than you), anonymity and/or privacy (the endpoint
is supposedly in a place less harbouring of interests that are in conflict with
one’s own than one’s own service provider or government), content restriction
avoidance (a corporate or governmental restriction that you find undesirable),
deep-packet-inspection avoidance (network-level discrimination, filtering or
modification of data occurring on one’s own network that is made harder or
impossible by the encryption layer of the VPN).
Some people also use VPNs solely so they can access public Wi-Fi access points,
but in my opinion this is a rather pointless thing to do, because it really
only serves to obscure the underlying vulnerability of unencrypted data and the
risks of using public Wi-Fi; still, it’s true that on an open Wi-Fi access
point, if you use a VPN, anybody with a packet sniffer can no longer see which
websites you visit, whereas, presumably, the people who run your VPN server (or
all the providers your Internet traffic passes through) will be less willing or
likely to try to monitor your web browsing habits. Naturally, once again,
unless it’s encrypted by SSL or other direct means, it’s insecure. Many
websites offer SSL, and you should use that wherever it’s available.
So to answer your question: it’s entirely possible that you don’t need a VPN at
all, for either iOS or Mac. :)
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