Nowadays you can’t trust any website or your internet provider to have your best interest in mind. Today, the new trend is to collect data on you to sell for big profit. Facebook has a track record for being invasive about this, and Twitter is another to blame. Twitter claims they just sell your tweets, but I have a feeling they collect more then they say. All the sites you visit want something from you and if you are not paying for it, you are the product – not the customer!
Most sites you visit don’t just collect what you do on their site, they extract cookies and browsing history. Some sites can even collect your saved favorites. I think if they can do that, they can also download passwords. In time we may not have any privacy online due to evolving technology-rich, user experience websites that enable communicating and sharing data between friends and family effortlessly as spoken word (which we do less and less everyday).
Anyway, I do have a topic for today and that is encrypting your online presence so these websites and your provider cannot collect anything on you. To encrypt online activity, which is highly recommend; I use StongVPN with an OpenVPN connection and Viscosity as my connection client. I have used other VPN services in the past and none have the up-time reliability or customer service StrongVPN has. Do a Google review search on them.
A VPN for you newbies is a 128-2048 bit secure encrypted tunnel from your computer to a VPN server, and from there is the internet. With this connection everything you do online is anonymous, as your IP will never be seen and no information about you is released, only the VPN server IP and location is. This is the same encryption used by the DoD and USG. That means no one can ever collect information on you, not even your internet provider!
If you are a frequent mobile hotspot user, this is another reason to get a VPN connection because hotspots are prime places for anyone, especially thieves to eavesdrop on everything you do online. Lets say you pay a bill or log-in to online backing, anyone can get your account numbers with the right software. In my earlier tutorial on Network Security, I show how easy this is. If you have a VPN connection, no one can get this information because the connection from you to the VPN server is encrypted.
Other reasons where a VPN is handy, if you are traveling overseas and want to make a Skype call, you can log into a USA VPN server (or a server in whatever country you live) and make cheap domestic calls rather then expensive international calls. Much in the same manner, I use my VPN to connect to servers in London, so I can watch my favorite BBC UK shows on UK only websites that are normally inaccessible in the USA.
I started with PPTP which is normally all you need to surf anonymously and is the cheapest, VPN L2TP offers a little more security but both became to slow for all the multimedia and feature rich websites I view. As an online developer, I quickly out grew these for that reason as well, but if your needs are simple it maybe a good starting point. It depends on what level of security you need. PPTP is what all the free web based anonymous surfing pages like HideMyAss, Proxify and Anonymouse use as well as the open-source TOR application. When I upgraded to OpenVPN the download/upload speed difference was a huge improvement, not to mention the superior security of an Open connection. StrongVPN has several package specials to choose from, but I find the $85 a year OpenVPN package the best deal and a Viscosity free license is included. With the same package, you also get PPTP and VPN L2TP for encrypting cell phones and tablets. If you decide to get an account with Strong, please say ray@okray sent you, I get some credit.