The why and wherefore of VPNs

It’s not VPNs that are bad, rather people’s unrealistic expectations of privacy. And, in a pay-per-click age, honesty.

Search online for “why I need a VPN” and you’ll find flashy websites framing all sorts of shoddy prose on the perils of “unprotected” browsing. Such diatribes should be taken with a pinch of salt. Yes, there are companies that sell your data. Yes, there are brutal regimes that punish anyone caught browsing websites that go against their ideologies. Yes, Google is mostly blocked in China. And yes, a VPN might help you with this. But it’s perhaps not as essential as people think. Anyway, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. A VPN is an encrypted tunnel between two, generally distant, machines. There are a variety of protocols by which one can achieve this, but they all enable the client machine to access resources (web pages, VOIP services, internal company resources)…

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APC (Digital) - 1 Issue, June 2022

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