Why VPN?
Why VPN?
1. Protect your traffic as it goes through an untrusted network. This can be a public WiFi hotspot like Starbucks, or even a wired connection at a public place like a hotel. While the big ISP's can be trusted to not snoop and archive your email and web surfing activities (or can they?), who knows what the hotel operator or WiFi hotspot company might be doing with your traffic? Worse yet, you may THINK you're attching to McDonald's free WiFi, but there are crooks who sit in parking lots and turn on "free" WiFi routers that you might accidentally think are the official ones. The crooks re-route your traffic through the laptop in their front seat and back out through the real free WiFi connection so everything looks normal to you, but in reality they are grabbing all your traffic to analyze and use later. Another very new threat is "Sidejacking" where a hacker running special software can listen in on nearly any unencrypted WiFi connection. Only a VPN connection can protect your data, regardless of what path it takes.
2. To get to some site or service that is blocked. Some services are blocked from specific countries, particularly Skype. Using a VPN service with servers in an allowed country, these services are now available. It is also the case that there are people in countries where their ISP's block access to the IP addresses where their citizens may learn more about their governments or powerful people. Some content providers, like HULU and the BBC also block traffic that does not come from approved countries like the UK or the US. And finally, if your employer blocks you from ebay or Facebook at the office, you can still connect to these services if you connect to a VPN service first.
3. Prevent your ISP from purposely slowing down your connection based upon what kind of traffic you are generating. More and more ISP's - Cable companies and DSL operators - are watching what kind of traffic you are passing through their lines. And if there are too many people on their system, they can go in and purposely slow down the connection of people who they think are doing "less important" things. Like FTP'ing files to a website, participating in a torrent, or downloading articles from a Usenet server. Yes, they can figure out the type of activities you are doing by "sniffing" the packets as they flow through the system. And then they single you out and slow down your connection. When your data is encrypted and sent to a VPN server, your ISP is not able to see what you are sending through the line, and therefore cannot determine whether it is OK to speed throttle your connection.
4. And, of course, some people want to hide their identity. Personally, we're not too cool with this. The only reason most people want to hide their identity is because they are doing something that they don't want to get caught at. Something that probably hurts someone else. Uncool. If this is why you want to use a VPN, we feel sorry for you.
