Here’s how the Internet works: Imagine you sitting at home, writing a message to a friend in another city. You write that message on a postcard and deliver it by post, shortly after it arrives at the recipient and everything is okay.
But underway, how many people do you think might have read your message? And do you care if anybody did read your message?
Well, most likely nobody did – but they could if they would.
The carrier (post office and mail man) can easily read your message, it’s not encrypted or locked away in any way, it’s there in plain text, wide open. They can easily see what you wrote – and to where you are sending it.
Anybody else can see it too, but only if they have the right means to do so, ie. they must know how to “sneak a peak” somewhere along the route of your postcard.
That’s pretty much how it works when you send an e-mail. Your Internet Service Provider can easily read it, along with most other traffic that goes through your Internet connection. And everybody else who has the means (usually hardcore computer geeks) can read it too.
Now, that doesn’t mean you need to get paranoid, because let’s face it, you’re probably not that interesting to spy on, compared to so many else, right? 🙂
But still, wouldn’t it be nice knowing that whatever traffic goes from your computer through your Internet connection, and out on the Internet, cannot be traced easily back to you or seen by everybody who has the means to do so?
The answer is quite simple: IPVanish – and it’ll cost you $10 a month, including a ton of other features.
With IPVanish, you get access to 39+ servers in 15 countries worldwide. That means, if you’re surfing from Europe but you want to listen to Pandora Internet Radio, you will simply use your VPN subscription and tell the software that you want to make it seem as if you’re based in the United States right now – and Pandora will let you in and happily play music for you. If you visit Pandora from your Internet connection in Europe, without VPN or any other kind of voodoo magic, they will tell you “sorry, we don’t support your country”.
That’s just one great thing about VPN. Another great thing is encryption. The connection between you and the VPN server is encrypted with minimum 128bit (256bit in most cases), giving you complete privacy.
Want to hide your ass on your smartphone? Easy, just enable VPN on that too.
Don’t have anything to hide, don’t care if everybody knows what you’re doing? That’s good, most of us probably feel that way, but that doesn’t mean VPN can’t be of use, like in the case of Pandora Internet Radio, or Netflix, or Hulu, or many other services that only works in certain countries, even if you’re legally paying for those services, they will only serve you if they can see your computer is located in certain countries, and that’s where a VPN service will help you out – it simply makes it seem as if you’re somewhere else.
This article was merely an introduction to VPN and my favorite VPN provider, IPVanish. In upcoming articles we will focus on how to get it working, the security and much more, so stay tuned and be sure to subscribe to RSS feed and/or follow on Facebook / Twitter.
For me, it’s really important to hide your identity while your are on the internet. Internet is just like a place where everyone can access your information. Just be careful. Do not tell all personal stuff on your social network. I saw many people placing their phone number on Facebook and that’s totally surrender to spammer =)
Leaving your phone number on Facebook invites far worse than spammers!
Unbelievably, I know people who do just that though – they leave email addresses, phone numbers and physical addresses all over the web and then preach how they use a VPN to protect their identity whilst surfing 😀
It sounds like a great offer. In addition, I also think it’s a decent price for this kind of service.
Yeah Jack, 10$ is a good price, I’ve used two similar services and they were more like 29 or 19$ per month…
$10 a month is nothing for this valuable service, never heard of IPVanish but youve definately wet my appetite…cheers mate
The price is pretty fair for an enormous offer. I would be very much willing to spare my $10 just to make sure that my important messages are not being sneaked.
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My friends are convincing me to go VPN and I am practically sold to the idea. I’ll make sure that IPVanish will be part of my to-consider list.
Wow – Seems legitimate. I wonder how it will effect Google’s (and other Search Engines) Search Results. Seems worth it to try out – the advantages seems to out weight the cons. Thanks for mentioning the awesome tool.
i read it somewhere that using VPN could slow down your internet connection, and also its illegal to use it, isn’t that so !??
I’ve never heard that VPN should be illegal, maybe in China and similar countries where the government needs to know your every move. In my experience, VPN only slows down your Internet connection if you have picked a bad provider or maybe a little bit if you decide to run through a server on the other side of the world.
Thanks Klaus… 🙂
yes, the use of VPN is illegal, but here in the Philippines that was not so important to the government. bypassing to the network securities is just like a hobby for almost local Filipinos
I have to say that is the most affordable I have seen out there for an vpn service. I will interested into looking more into it and see if you have any restrictions.
Well its a really greatest and cheapest way of hiding our identity on internet. Thanks a lot for the share.
Internet is full of bad people, that is why you should take any precautions you can. Antivirus programs, vpn services, firewalls.. All of these help and it never a bad idea to have more tips on hiding. Thanks for sharing this.
Sending privacy message to person by knowing other people where he/she lives etc. are quite very awkward way of communicatiob with other people in the different location/countries in the previous years but today there are lots of technologies are available in the market which can able to send your data in very private manner and number of seconds without knowing anyone.