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hidevpn · 4 years

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Best VPNs in 2020 for PC, Mac, & Phone – a hundred% SECURE

Finding the first-class VPN to maintain you secure on-line feels not possible. There are loads of VPNs out there, and every one claims it’s the great.

Our experts have spent months cautiously testing over three hundred services to decide which of them do what they promise—and do it nicely. We linked to these VPNs from everywhere in the international, with what is a vpn researchers jogging exams in internet-confined international locations, including China and Russia, testing their safety, their reliability, and the speed of their connections.

We even made a few calls to Google and PayPal to analyze rumors surrounding some VPNs. We additionally delisted numerous shady VPNs: While they hadn’t but been caught sharing consumer information, we’re involved that quickly, they'll.

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We can genuinely say that once our rigorous trying out and reviewing, our top 10 VPNs will hold you secure, shield your records, and provide you with lightning-rapid streaming speeds.

The Best VPNs – Full Analysis (Updated October 2020) Our group is spread throughout more than forty nations round the world, and we conducted masses of exams over numerous months to discover which VPNs presented the excellent speeds, protection, and reliability. We browsed, downloaded, streamed, and torrented for weeks on end to convey you those confirmed consequences.

1. NordVPN – Great Balance of Price and Performance

Dedicated torrenting profile: Yes, P2P distinctiveness servers available Works with: Netflix (a couple of libraries), Hulu, BBC iPlayer, Vudu, Amazon Prime Video, SkyTV, Disney+, and plenty of others Available on: Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Linux, Chrome, Firefox, and routers Data logging: Strict no-logs coverage Money-again guarantee: 30 days NordVPN is our #1 VPN recommendation. It provides splendid all-round cost, with exquisite capabilities and overall performance at a charge few can beat.

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Don’t Use If:

You need to pay with PayPal. It does that to shield your privacy, however a few humans nonetheless like PayPal.

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ExpressVPN – Speedy, Safe, and Reliable

Dedicated torrenting profile: No (but all servers guide P2P hobby) Works with: Netflix, BBC iPlayer, Hulu, Disney+, HBO NOW, Spotify, Amazon Prime Video, and lots of others Available on: Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, Chromebook, Kindle Fire, browsers, and routers Data logging: Strict no-logs coverage Money-back assure: 30 days ExpressVPN’s state-of-the-art deal October 2020: Get 3 months absolutely loose on your annual subscription with this modern-day provide! It’s no longer for positive while this deal will end so it’s high-quality to test the deals web page to see if it’s nevertheless available. ExpressVPN may be our second desire standard, however don’t permit that idiot you. It’s taken a pinnacle spot in lots of assessments, together with first-rate VPN for iOS gadgets, torrenting, and routers, because it’s a strong, reliable option.

ExpressVPN has three,000+ high-pace servers at one hundred sixty global places. It’s additionally one of the fastest VPNs we’ve tested. We performed lots of velocity checks to verify this, and we’ve protected our UK consequences underneath in your evaluation. As predicted, connecting to close by servers yielded the satisfactory consequences. But we were also impressed with the fact that our connections to the US and Australia were also proper—simply 22% and 35% drops, respectively. This is terrific information for streamers and torrenters round the sector.

The cut up tunneling function allows you to tailor ExpressVPN on your needs by using deciding on which apps and services are encrypted. I tested it through streaming my nearby Netflix library in my browser at the same time as making sure BitTorrent was installation to run thru the VPN. It took handiest a second to installation and worked flawlessly.

There’s more: ExpressVPN will let you get right of entry to your preferred content, even on platforms that don’t support VPNs. Thanks to the MediaStreamer characteristic and the VPN’s ability to blast via geoblocks, our researchers had been capable to look at Netflix, Hulu, and BBC iPlayer from six one of a kind countries on smart TVs, Amazon Fire TV sticks, Apple TV, gaming consoles, and other gadgets

ExpressVPN helps P2P connections on all servers, so you don’t need a torrenting profile. The app’s Smart Location feature chooses the pleasant server for you. It took me just 15 mins to torrent a movie, so it became rapid and easy manner.

ExpressVPN offers 256-bit encryption and OpenVPN aid throughout all systems, offering strong protection. Additionally, you get DNS leak protection and a Network Lock placing—in different words, a kill transfer to your connection.

ExpressVPN’s revolutionary TrustedServer era guarantees that every ExpressVPN server constantly masses the exact identical comfortable, up-to-date software, greatly reducing safety risks. TrustedServer also allows ExpressVPN servers to operate the usage of best RAM. Because the servers by no means write to the tough force, it's miles impossible for any records to be stored on the server after a reboot—even by accident. This gives extraordinary tiers of safety.

We turned to our researchers in Asia once more to check out ExpressVPN’s ability to bypass censorship. We’re happy to report that it continuously bypassed the Great Firewall of China, so it’s a pinnacle select for areas with heavy censorship, too.

Customer provider is also on factor, with helpful 24/7 stay chat support and specific setup guides for the various supported platforms. Every time I tested the stay chat function, I changed into talking to a beneficial consultant in under mins.

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weekendwarriorblog · 4 years

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The Weekend Warrior Home Edition 8/14/20 – SPUTNIK, THE SILENCING, FREELAND, SPREE, THE BAY OF SILENCE

Another week, another batch of movies to get through in hopes there’s one or two worth writing about… and then writing about all of them anyway. (Sigh). I hope there are people reading this, at least. If so, go to the bottom of this column and drop me a line!

Before I get to this week’s movies, I want to give a special congratulatory shout-out to the wonderful Melanie Addington, because this is the final week of the 17th annual Oxford Film Festival. I have to say as someone who regularly covers a couple other bigger festivals, she’s done such an amazing job pivoting to the virtual world, to the point where what usually is a five-day very localized festival turned into a nationwide digital festival that’s been stretched out for 16 weeks! Those bigger festivals like SXSW and Tribeca could take a lesson from Oxford, because what usually are two highly-anticipated festivals every year became a whole lot of nothing thanks to COVID. It’s like they gave up, rolled over and just died. Oxford, meanwhile, has done Zoom QnAs with a lot of the filmmakers and casts from its films to help maintain the community feeling that makes the festival such a great destination for those in-the-know. (I haven’t even gotten into the amazing drive-in screenings or the year-round On Demand program they’ve been having over the past couple months.)

Anyway, OFF ends this week with the world-premiere of a movie that was supposed to open at SXSW, Mario Furlani and Kate McLean’s debut feature FREELAND, starring Krisha Fairchild from Trey Shults’ movie, Krisha. Freeland is a similarly strong indie r drama, this one starring Ms. Fairchild as Davi, a black market marijuana farmer in Humboldt County, Norther California, who sees her way of life changing when she’s forced to go legal after California legalizes marijuana. Instead, these changes might run her out of business. It’s a beautifully-shot (Furlani is also the cinematographer) character drama that spotlights Fairchild giving another memorable performance, surrounded by an equally excellent cast that includes Lily Gladstone from Certain Women. I hope a good distributor like IFC or Magnolia will scoop this up for release, as I think it’s an interesting look into the pot business from a unique perspective. I also think it could do VERY well at the Indie Spirits. You can watch Freeland for a couple more days (at least) with a QnA with cast and crew on Thursday night right here.

Also, check out the Eventive site for the final week line-up which includes a TON of shorts. (Be mindful, that some of the content, specifically The Offline Playlist, will only be watchable if you’re in Mississippi.)

Also starting this week on Thursday is the 5th Annual Dallas-based Women Texas Film Festival (aka WTxFF), also going virtual this year, which I don’t really know that much about, but it’s run by my friend, Justina Walford, and she generally knows her shit when it comes to movies. Its mission pledge is right there in the title, but all the movies in the festival have a woman in at least one creative role. You can check out the full list of movies playing here, although they are geoblocked to Texas unfortunately. The festival’s series of panels and QnAs, though, can be watched anywhere in the United States, and those should be good.

Let’s get to the regular releases….

This week’s “Featured Flick” is Russian filmmaker Egor Abramenko’s SPUTNIK (IFC Midnight), a sci-fi thriller taking place in 1983 after an incident the Russian spaceship Orbit-4 that leaves one of the cosmonauts in detention after the death of his commander. Oksana Akinshina (who was in The Bourne Supremacy) plays Tatyana Klimova, a psychologist sent to study the surviving cosmonaut, Konstantin Veshnyakov (Pyotr Fyodorov), and she learns that he brought back something with him from space.

I was a little worried about this movie, only because the opening reminded me so much of my experience watching the original Russian film Solaris so many years ago. Its quizzical opening in space leads to Akinshina’s character being introduced in a way that’s so slow and talkie that I worried about what I should expect from the movie as a whole. Thankfully, about 20 minutes in, we meet the creature that’s seemingly come down from space inside the cosmonaut, and it immediately changes the very nature of the film.

I don’t want to spoil too much about why the movie gets so interesting, because it’s not non-stop creature kills, although the movie does get quite exciting every time this creature emerges, particularly when it’s being fed various Russian convicts. Even so, the film always remains fairly cerebral about the creature’s origins and its relationship to the cosmonaut, who abandoned a child before his fateful space accident. Adding to the grey area about whether Tatyana should ally herself with Konstantin is her supervising officer, played by Fedor Bondarchuk, who clearly wants to use the creature as a weapon, knowing that both Konstantin and his “other” only trusts Tatyana, so they all need her.

Needless to say, the creature design is absolutely fantastic, and the comparisons this movie is going to get to Alien are quite apt, because the creature is on par with the xenomorph. I only wish I could see it better since it only comes out in the dark, and watching a movie that plays with light like this one does is just not conducive to watching on a laptop. (In fact, if you’re in a position to see Sputnik in a theater, even a drive-in, and you’re not averse to subtitles, I’d recommend going that route.)

Sputnik might fool you at first into expecting something in the vein of the original Solaris. In fact, it’s more in line with The Invisible Man, a creature feature that explores one man’s inner demons through the lens of science fiction. This probably would have been a better Venom movie than the one we actually got.

Jamie Lannister himself, Nicolaj Costar-Waldau stars in THE SILENCING (Saban Films) the English language debut of Belgian filmmaker Robin Pront (The Ardennes), a dark action-thriller set in the rural area of Echo Falls where a serial killer is hunting and killing young women and girls.

Robin Pront’s The Silencing is usually the type of movie I’d enjoy, if only I haven’t seen the exact same movie so many times before. I wasn’t sure whether it’s Costar-Waldau’s alcoholic hunter Rayburn Swanson, whose daughter disappeared years earlier, or it was cause of Annabelle Wallis, the town’s sheriff, Alice Gustafson, whose troubled brother Brooks (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) is caught up enough in the towns drug issues to act as the movie’s second-act red herring. Throw in the Native American aspect of the movie, and you’re right back at Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River, which was just a much better version of this movie all around.

Adding to the lack of originality is the fact that there are now so many television shows about serial killers, which is a shame since Pront’s previous film showed so much promise but also suffered from similar issues. Costar-Waldau gives a credible performance, maybe slightly better than Wallis, but we’ve seen this movie so many times before that even trying to throw in a twist or two goes awry since no one ever commits. The major plot twist about halfway in has an opportunity to change everything but instead, it’s negated mere minutes later.

Slow and grim, The Silencing suffers from being an overused genre that’s been done so much better before. It’s already been playing on DirecTV but will be in select theaters, On Demand and Digital this Friday.

Next up is the thriller THE BAY OF SILENCE (Vertical Entertainment), starring Claes Bang from The Square as Will, whose girlfriend and baby momma Rosalind (Olga Kurylenko) vanishes with their twin daughters and baby son, and her father Milton (Brian Cox) seems to know more than he’s telling. The film is written and produced by British actor Caroline Goodall (who has a small role in this one), adapted from Lisa St. Aubin de Teran's 1986 novel and directed by Dutch filmmaker Paula van der Oest, who has made some decent films like Black Butterflies and the Oscar-nominated Zus & Zo.

We meet Will and Ros as they’re having a romantic moment in the titular bay in Luguria, Italy, and after a few odd occurrences, Ros vanishes with her twin girls and the baby boy they had together. It doesn’t take long for Will to find her, but she seems to have gone insane, and Will needs to find out what happened.

Honestly, it’s not worth getting too deep into this movie’s plot, not so much due to spoilers, but more because there are just so many WTF moments that happen out of the blue, and then the next moment they’re forgotten. For whatever reason, the movie just doesn’t allow any of the tension or mystery to build, and even the most horrificly grim plot turn is handled so matter-of-factly.

There’s no question that van der Oest is a fine filmmaker, something you can tell from the general look of the movie, but the pacing and tons is generally all over the place as nothing happens and then a LOT happens. Bang’s decent performance is countered by a lot of overacting from Kulryenko, and while Cox plays a much bigger role in the story than you might expect, his scenes do very little to elevate the film’s plodding tone.

The Bay of Silence is a highly uneven and bland thriller that tries to offer a twist a minute with very of them ever really connecting, instead feeling grim and tedious and like a lot of wasted potential. Oddly, it feels more original than The Silencing above but just doesn’t come together even as well.

Where do I even begin with Eugene Kotlyarenko’s SPREE (RLJE Films) except that it stars Stranger Thing’s Joe Keery as Kurt Kunkle “of Kunkle’s World,” a social media vlog where he tries to get viewer’s attention and likes. He finally decides to go on a killing spree (get it?) while picking up passengers in his car ride service Spree (see?), until he encounters a stand-up comic (Sasheer Zamata) who fights back.

Listen, I understand fine why a movie like Spree might get made, since it’s meant to be relevant to the youngsters, who are much like Kurt, totally obsessed with their own social media and getting attention. The idea of some kid becoming a serial killer just to draw more attention to himself is not exactly incredible. I found Kurt so annoying that I didn’t think I would ever be able to have any empathy for him, and I was right.

We basically watch Kurt driving around and killing various people, most of them pretty horrible, granted, but Keery comes off more like a bargain-basement Christian Bale in American Psycho. Zamata is generally the best part of the movie, which is why the last third starts to get past some of the movie’s earlier problems to become more about an actual influencer showing Kurt how it’s done. (Zamata’s “SNL” castmate Kyle Mooney can’t really do much to make their scenes together funnier, since it’s just another sleazeball hitting on her.)

David Arquette also has a few funny scenes as Kurt’s father, but what’s probably gonna throw a lot of people off and make or break the movie is that so much of it is made to look like it was filmed on a smartphone, complete with running commentary from the viewers that you’re supposed to read, and presumably enjoy? Me, I just found it annoying.

Spree is gonna be one of those love-it-or-hate-it movies depending on which side of the age gap you’re on. To me, it just seemed way too obvious and not something I could possibly recommend to anyone over 19.

Okay… Documentary time!

I really wanted to like Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ BOYS STATE (A24/Apple TV+), which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and received Special Jury Prize at SXSW Film Festival, but it’s a pollical doc that deals with a subject that just didn’t interest me very much. It follows a thousand teen boys from Texas who come together to form a government from the ground up, and that’s the problem right there. The fact this is all about guys. I just couldn’t get interested enough to watch the whole thing since it seemed obvious how it would turn out. Boys State was supposed to open in select cities last month but instead, it will be on Apple TV+ Friday after getting a few drive-in preview screenings, cause that’s just the way things are going these days.

Willa Kammerer’s Starting at Zero: Reimagining Education in America (Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation/Abramorama), which will open in Virtual Cinema Friday after a Virtual Premiere tonight. It seems very timely, as it deals with investing in high-quality early child education. Just as timely is Muta’Ali Muhammad’s Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn (HBO Documentary Films), which premieres on HBO tonight, looking at the events around the 1989 murder of teenager Yusuf Hawkins by a group of white men in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Erik Nelson’s doc Apocalypse ’45 (Discovery/Abramorama), which will be in theaters this Friday and on Discovery over Labor Day weekend, is about the end of World War II, using never-before-seen footage with narration by 24 men who were there for it.

Quiver Distribution has two movies out this Friday, both which could probably be seen as young adult movies – not really a genre I like very much, so your mileage may vary?

ENDLESS from director Scott Speer (Midnight Sun) is a romantic drama starring Alexandra Shipp (X-Men: Apocalypse) as graphic novelist Riley, whose boyfriend, Nick Hamilton’s Chris gets stranded in limbo after he’s killed in a car crash. Taking the blame for his death on herself, Riley struggles to find ways to reconnect with Chris in the afterlife.

I wasn’t sure if this movie would be for me, since I’m not a very big fan of young adult movies generally. So many of them have hard-to-believe high-concept premises involving two lovelorn teens – Midnight Sun being a good example. Unlike so many of these movies, Endless isn’t based on a popular book, and I was a little worried about Speer’s skills as a director and whether he could avoid turning this into a very obvious teen version of Ghost. There’s a little bit of that but on a whole, the movie isn’t a complete waste of time. For instance, Shipp is decent in this sort of dramatic role, probably better than Hamilton, and it avoids getting too weepy thanks to DeRon Horton’s animated Jordan, who befriends Chris in limbo and quickly becomes the movie’s frequent saving grace.

Otherwise, the movie feels like any other soppy teen romantic drama, being very predicable with way too much overacting, particularly from Fammke Janssen as Chris’ Mom. Even though the relationship between Shipp and Hamilton works fine, unless you’re on board with the whole concept of the latter spending the entire film as a spirit, you’re going to have a hard time fully enjoying the movie.

In Bobby Roth’s PEARL, Larsen Thompson plays the title character, a 15-year-old piano prodigy whose mother Helen (Sarah Carter from The Flash) is murdered by her stepfather (Nestor Carbonell). She’s sent to live with Jack Wolf (Anthony LaPaglia), an unemployed film director, who used to be one of her mother’s ex-lovers, who also might be Pearl’s father. I know! Let’s spend an entire movie going back and forth trying to figure it out, okay?

I don’t have a ton to say about this movie, but if for some reason, you want to watch it just cause you’re a fan of Carter from The Flash, you should know that she appears in the movie via a series of black and white flashbacks to show her relationship with Jack, but those might be the best part of a very bad movie.

Thompson just isn’t a very solid actor to carry this, and Roth must have pulled a lot of favors to get this movie made ‘cause it wasn’t financed based on the script. Her relationship with LaPaglia just seems kinda creepy. Things just gets worse and worse, especially when Pearl goes to school and the other girls act like they’re in prison. There’s also Barbara Williams as Pearl’s alcoholic grandmother – the fun just never begins, does it?

At its worst, Pearl comes across like a Lifetime movie – not the first time I’ve used this statement this year and probably not the last. It’s just very dull and not a very good movie; LaPaglia is way too good an actor who deserves better than this.

Also on VOD this week is Kevin Tran’s Dark End of the Street (Gravitas Ventures), an indie horror movie involving a community in the suburbs plagued by someone who is killing the residents’ pets. This wasn’t a terrible movie but I had a hard time getting past the general premise about killing pets, so it was hard to get into what Tran tried to do in terms of putting a twist on a tried-and-true horror genre. Maybe I’ll give this another try after finishing this column.

Also, Ben Galland’s action-comedy Gripped: Climbing the Killer Pillar (1091) follows Rose (Megan Kesley), a L.A. gym climber who falls for rugged outdoorsman Bret (Kaiwi Lyman) as they embark on a trip to climb the “Killer Pillar” in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, only to get caught on a cliff edge.

The Metrograph’s Live Screening Series is continuing with a great line-up over the rest of August with the Satoshi Kon Retrospective continuing with Millennium Actress playing until midnight tonight, plus Masaaki Yuasa & Koji Morimoto’s popular 2004 film Mind Game starting Wednesday night at 8pm. Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001) will screen on Friday at 8pm, and then Monday, Jenna Bliss’ animated The People’s Detox (2018) will join the screening library. To become a digital member, it’s only $5 a month or $50 for a year, which is a great deal for the amount of movies you see.

Film at Lincoln Center’s Virtual Cinema will stream Paulo Rocha’s 1963 film Change of Life starting Friday while Film Forum will stream Weiner Holzemer’s doc Martin Margiella: In His Own Words about the fashion designer, as well as Bert Stern’s Jazz on a Summer’s Day which is a 1959 documentary about the fashion photographer filming the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival with the likes of Louis Armstrong, Hoagy Carmichael, Mahalia Jackson, Thelonious Monk and many more.

Apparently, Netflix has a new movie out on Friday called Project Power, starring Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but I received ABSOLUTELY NADA about it from Netflix, so this is all you get. Watch out, Netflix, there are a lot of streaming options out there now!

Speaking of drive-ins (which I was WAY up there), on Wednesday, you can catch the latest in Amazon Studios “A Night at the Drive In” series. “Movies to Make You Open Your Eyes,” which will screen Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Jordan Peele’s Get Out.

Next week, more movies not in theaters!

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

#TheWeekendWarrior #Movies #Reviews #OxfordFilmFestival #Sputnik #Spree #vodun #TheSilencing #TheBayOfSilence #BoysState #Pearl #Endless

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arpitram · 5 years

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4 Best reasons to start using VPN :

A VPN or virtual private network is service that allows you to create a secure and private connection from a device to the network. Just think of it as an online service you use to hide your digital footprints by masking your real IP address and encrypting your Internet traffic. Thanks to the regulation of internet by governments around the world and cyber-attacks by nefarious online elements, VPN has become the need of the hour. Just as you protect your personal information like your phone number and address, you now need to protect your online information. If you are still not convinced about the importance of VPN services, this article is just for you. Here we will talk about 4 important reasons as to why you should start using a VPN right now.

Reasons Why You Should be Using a VPN

While there are myriad of benefits of using a VPN, there are four important points that everyone should consider before giving up on VPN services.

A VPN Protects Your Traffic, Data, and Privacy

A VPN Lets You Unblock Any Content You Want

With a VPN, You Can Bypass Bandwidth Throttling

VPNs Offer a Better Gaming Experience

We will be talking about all these points in detail in the upcoming section. Feel free to jump to the section that you want to read.

1. A VPN Protects Your Traffic, Data, and Privacy

Have you ever experienced an online ad following you across websites? It might be for a product that you search for or already bought. Doesn't it feel creepy to be served ads for things you have searched in the past? Well, it happens because tracking pixels on websites track your searches and then tailor the ads for you.

The above situation that I described is just a fraction of problems that you as an internet user have to deal with while going online. I have not even mentioned the privacy problems that come with using internet. Just to give you a taste of what I am talking about, consider the fact that your internet service provider or ISP is probably selling your internet usage data to make money off you while you are already paying them for the service. In short, if you are going online without a VPN, you’re exposing yourself to the following risks:

- Giving hackers a free pass to eavesdrop on your online communications when you use public WiFi.

- Making it easy for cyber-criminals, government surveillance agencies, and ISPs to see what you type on unencrypted websites, what web page you search for, and what files you download (just to name a few examples).

- Letting your ISP sell your browsing data to advertisers.

- Ending up in legal trouble for torrenting files, and leaking your IP address to every member of the Swarm (total number of people downloading and uploading a torrent).

Using a VPN prevents all these horrible scenarios. VPN encrypts your connection using encryption technologies, such as IP security (IPSec), Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), Transport Layer Security (TLS) and more. When you use a VPN anyone snooping in on your connection, whether it's your ISP, online tracking pixels, or hackers, see gibberish data.

2. A VPN Lets You Unblock Any Content You Want

Few things are as annoying in life as hearing about a cool new TV series only to later find out you can’t watch it because it’s only available on streaming platforms that don’t work in your country. Sky Go, Hulu, HBO GO, BBC iPlayer – you name it. There are tons of websites that won’t let you enjoy their content simply because you’re from “the wrong” part of the world.

Yes, they have their reasons for doing that (copyright regulations and licensing fees), but that hardly makes it fair. Worst of all, you’re gonna deal with geo-restrictions even if you live in a country where you have access to all the content you want. After all, it’s no longer going to be available the moment you go abroad on vacation, or temporarily move outside the country for work.

geoblocking

And don’t forget about Internet censorship! If geo-blocks aren’t a concern, the government telling you what you can and can’t watch online should be. Many oppressive regimes force national ISPs to block various websites nation-wide. Take China for example. Due to its strict internet policies, its residents and visitors cannot access popular websites like Facebook (although, I am not crying for that), YouTube, Twitter, Netflix, and more. Oh, and then there are firewalls. You know - the kinds of restrictions you’ll deal with at work or school if the network admin has to block websites like Facebook or Instagram to comply with the workplace or school policies.

How does a VPN help you with all that, you ask? Simple – it masks your real IP address, which contains data that leaks your geo-location (info that geo-blocks need to be efficient), and which firewalls also use to enforce restrictions. You can even select which country you want your connection to seem to originate from. For example, you can select USA as your VPN connection country and then your connection will seem to originate from the US allowing you to access all the geo-restricted content.

3. With a VPN, You Can Bypass Bandwidth Throttling

Did you ever notice a sudden decrease in online speeds whenever you were downloading something, watching an online video, or Skyping with your friends? That’s basically bandwidth throttling in action. It’s when your ISP reduces some of your Internet speed because you’re using up “too much data.” ISPs are pretty clever and they hide the bandwidth throttling in fine prints so most users are not even aware of it. You might have a fast 50 Mbps internet connection. However, it won't be the same everywhere as ISPs generally throttle speed if you are torrenting or streaming 4K content.

Bandwidth Throttling

ISPs might claim they’re doing that to prevent network congestion, which is understandable. However, usually, ISPs use bandwidth throttling to pressure users into buying pricier subscriptions and data plans. They also get to save money that way by making sure they don’t need to buy more expensive equipment to process user data faster.

Using a VPN can alleviate this problem. A VPN encrypts your Internet traffic, making sure your ISP can’t see your Internet activity. Without that info, your ISP can no longer throttle your bandwidth since they won’t see what you’re doing online.

4. VPNs Offer a Better Gaming Experience

Playing online with your friends is extremely fun – at least until you have to deal with an annoying IP ban or geo-blocks preventing you from playing in the same region as your friends. That’s where a VPN comes into play.

It hides your IP address and encrypts your traffic, making sure you can evade IP bans from sore loser admins, prevent bandwidth throttling from ruining your fun, and join matches in any region you want no matter where you are in the world. If you play online multiplayer games, a VPN can help reduce ping time and lag if it has a solid server in that country. This is a huge gain if you compete in online gaming competitions as every millisecond matters at pro-level gaming tournaments.

Gaming

Besides that, you also get other additional perks:

You no longer have to worry about DoS/DDoS attacks from jealous players targeting you and ruining your killstreaks.

You get instant access to banned or uncensored video games (extremely useful if you live in or travel through Australia).

No longer having to wait a week or two until a new game gets released in your region since you can just “pretend” you’re from another region where the game is already available.

How to Choose the Right VPN Service

With nearly 1,000 (or more) VPN providers on the market, picking the right one can feel like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Also, since we are using multiple devices, it's not fun to choose a VPN service and find that it's not available on multiple platforms. After all, you don't want to use different VPN services for Windows, Android, iOS and other platforms. That's why, before you choose a VPN service, make sure that you focus on some key features to have a slightly easier time finding the ideal VPN for you:

- A no-log policy

- Powerful encryption

- Cross-platform compatible apps

- Kill Switch features

- P2P support

- Lots of speedy servers

Of course, that doesn’t narrow things down too much as many VPN services claim to offer all these features. Looking up dozens of VPN providers, and closely analyzing all their features is a huge time-sink – not to mention how it takes a lot of effort. That's why we took it on ourselves to test out all the major VPN service providers. If you want a shortcut, we recommend that you check out Private Internet Access (PIA). Their VPN service offers military-grade security, is user-friendly, and you can run it on up to 10 simultaneous devices. Overall, Private Internet Access is a great VPN. If you’d like to read an in-depth review of the service, just follow the link.

Source :

For more understanding and learning, you can connect me on www.arpitram.com or www.arpitram.in. See you all with more interesting thoughts on the world of IT world.

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googletechsolution-blog · 5 years

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Want To Maintain Your Privacy On the Internet? Then Use A VPN.

At the beginning of the Internet, client protection implied going on the web with nobody else in the room. Things are vastly different today, to a great extent in light of the fact that the true plan of action of the Internet is information gathering. In any case, how agreeable would you say you are with the way that your nearby Internet supplier records each webpage you visit, regardless of whether you've set your program to its "private" mode? Or on the other hand that a pornography site can tell you're signing in from postal division 11225 and that Time Warner Cable TWC +0% is your ISP? What about the universal Facebook Like fastening that shows apparently all over the place? Regardless of whether you click the catch or not, Facebook has just been advised of the site you're visiting. Regardless of whether you confide in these elements to be capable stewards of your information, the progressing Snowden disclosures are making it very certain that this sort of data can finish up with the legislature.

The straightforward truth is that you have almost no protection when you're on the web. Envision a couple of outsiders peering behind you, accepting notes as you surf the web, with unclear guarantees to total and anonymize their discoveries, and you have a progressively practical picture. A standout amongst the best approaches to paw back your protection on the Internet is to utilize a VPN (virtual private system) administration. The prominence of these administrations has developed significantly in the wake of Snowden's NSA disclosures and the steady features of client information burglary.

What is a VPN and what would it be able to do?

The fundamental reason behind a VPN administration is straightforward. Ordinarily, when you call up a website page or play out a hunt, the interchanges way is from your PC straightforwardly to the Internet. Frequently, this information transmission is in plain content. Anybody with access to your system can catch this traffic, seeing which locales you visit just as what you enter in pursuit boxes and installment fields. This data is effectively attached straightforwardly back to you through your PC's IP address.

With a VPN administration, a mediator is opened in the middle of your PC and the Internet. This go-between is really a physical server, constrained by the VPN supplier, and recognized by its own IP address.

A VPN gives scrambled information between your PC and a private server.

A VPN builds up support between your PC and the Internet, offering information encryption and online obscurity. Picture affability, Private Internet Access.

With a VPN association empowered, the majority of the traffic between your PC and the VPN server is naturally encoded. Anybody seeing your traffic presently will see strings of ambiguous content, numbers, and images. The character of the destinations you demand and the substance you submit are basically private. Note that this encryption is going on to the information going between your PC and the VPN server. Since not all sites bolster encryption, the information exchanges between the VPN server and the Internet happen to a great extent in plain content. Fortunately, the utilization of a VPN server implies that information is for all intents and purposes difficult to follow back to you. Why? Since the PCs of numerous other VPN clients are likewise being steered through a similar server and IP address. With a solitary server taking care of the web solicitations of a few clients at the same time, anybody gathering up the decoded information from the VPN server to the Internet will see a pack of apparently inconsequential demands all originating from a similar IP address. This information is useless for anybody attempting to relate web perusing movement with a solitary person. A VPN gives secrecy by means of security in numbers way to deal with protection.

The encryption of traffic to and from your PC makes VPNs a significant instrument to utilize when signing on to Wi-Fi hotspots offered at shops, inns, airplane terminals, and other open spots. As I wrote in a before story on information security, these systems are intrinsically risky and make incredibly obvious objectives for programmers.

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Another VPN advantage is that suppliers offer access to servers situated in a few unique pieces of the world. You can course your information through a server situated in another nation. As a virtual vacationer, you can get to content, that for either political or monetary reasons, is forbidden to inhabitants of your nation, a limitation known as geo-blocking. You can just choose a VPN server situated in a nation where that content is allowed. This works in light of the fact that geoblocking depends on a server's IP address to decide a client's physical area. What's more, it is the IP address of the VPN server, not your PC, that the geoblocking site will see.

Indeed, even with a VPN empowered, your perusing propensities can at present be followed by promoters and internet-based life contents using treats and different advancements. In the event that you need to maintain a strategic distance from that too, a compelling arrangement is to change your program to private mode while utilizing the VPN.

Picking a VPN administration

There is no lack of VPN suppliers to look over. While some do offer the administration for nothing, those records commonly accompany promotions, have slower execution, and can have data transfer capacity limits. Most paid administrations charge between $5-10 every month (less with a year-long responsibility), a truly sensible cost to pay for keeping up your protection and security.

Since the general purpose of utilizing a VPN is to keep others from checking your traffic, the absolute first thing you'll need to do before joining is to peruse the VPN administration's protection approach. It ought to be straightforward, with no legalese, and ought to expressly express that they don't keep up logs of your system movement with the VPN server. This is a pivotal point in light of the progressing Snowden disclosures. Organizations can be subpoenaed for information. A VPN administration that genuinely values your protection won't gather your perusing information in any case.

The following thing you'll need to know is the place the VPN supplier's servers are found. Putting a VPN server in the middle of your PC and the Internet fundamentally includes idleness, which implies your download paces will be slower than expected. On the off chance that you have a quick Internet association with start with, you may not see much distinction. In any case, the more prominent the geographic separation between your PC and the VPN server, the slower your downloads will be. A client situated in the U.S. associating through a VPN server in Australia, for instance, may see unreasonable buffering when spilling video. So for general web use, you need to ensure the supplier has servers accessible in your locale of the nation. On the off chance that you travel, you'll need a to see servers that are in closeness to your goals. What's more, in case you're keen on going around the geoblocking of substance on specific sites, you'll need access to servers in a nation where that content is allowed.

Two administrations that I've been utilizing normally, with extraordinary outcomes are Private Internet Access and TunnelBear. The two organizations give clear information approaches on their sites and offer administration for both work area and cell phones, with help for Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS gadgets (Private Internet Access bolsters Linux also).

Private Internet Access furnishes technically knowledgeable clients with the capacity to pick among various encryption and verification conventions. TunnelBear's interface is commanded by a basic on/off switch and offers auto-setup for the two its iOS and Android applications, so you don't need to go fiddling around with your gadget's Settings menu to make a VPN association. Prior I referenced the twofold fisted combo of VPN + private perusing mode to maintain a strategic distance from promotions and trackers. TunnelBear has a novel component, named Maul Trackers, that offers another method to hinder this sort of information gathering.

TunnelBear costs $5 every month and can be utilized on one PC and two cell phones at the same time. Private Internet Access is $7 every month and can be utilized on five gadgets at the same time. The two administrations are accessible at limited rates for a yearly membership.

In the event that you need the capacity to assume responsibility for your protection and security while on the web, a VPN administration is the best, simple to utilize arrangement available to you.

If you are interested to collect more information about our services, just dial Optimum Customer Service number 1-888-260-1297.

#How to contact optimum customer service?#how to reach optimum customer services #how to use a vpn #optimum customer service phone number #vpn services #internet services

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ruxashes · 6 years

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https://www.change.org/p/timvision-freeskamitalia

FREE SKAM ITALIA

Skam Italia was basically made "private" by timVision, the house who distributed the show. The show used to have its own website and all the clips, the chats, photos and all the contnents that usually were free now are not on the site anymore. If you wanna watch the clips you need to be subscribed to Tim vision and pay for it. They basically made it impossieble for people who are not paying to see e the clips. The italian and international fandoms are pissed off, also the cast is pretty mad about it too.

So here's a petition to restore skam Italia the way it was before, not on Timvision but back on the official site, not geoblocked, with all the contents and available to everyone.

I don't know if it will help or if it will be useless, but we really wanna be heard.

So please, if you have a spare minute sign the petition

Thanks

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neptunecreek · 7 years

Text

Online Censorship and User Notification: Lessons from Thailand

For governments interested in suppressing information online, the old methods of direct censorship are getting less and less effective.

Over the past month, the Thai government has made escalating attempts to suppress critical information online. In the last week, faced with an embarrassing video of the Thai King, the government ordered Facebook to geoblock over 300 pages on the platform and even threatened to shut Facebook down in the country. This is on top of last month's announcement that the government had banned any online interaction with three individuals: two academics and one journalist, all three of whom are political exiles and prominent critics of the state. And just today, law enforcement representatives described their efforts to target those who simply view—not even create or share—content critical of the monarchy and the government.

The Thai government has several methods at its own disposal to directly block large volumes of content. It could, as it has in the past, pressure ISPs to block websites. It could also hijack domain name queries, making sites harder to access. So why is it negotiating with Facebook instead of just blocking the offending pages itself? And what are Facebook’s responsibilities to users when this happens?

HTTPS and Mixed-Use Social Media Sites

The answer is, in part, HTTPS. When HTTPS encrypts your browsing, it doesn’t just protect the contents of the communication between your browser and the websites you visit. It also protects the specific pages on those sites, preventing censors from seeing and blocking anything “after the slash” in a URL. This means that if a sensitive video of the King shows up on a website, government censors can’t identify and block only the pages on which it appears. In an HTTPS world that makes such granularized censorship impossible, the government’s only direct censorship option is to block the site entirely.

That might still leave the government with tenable censorship options if critical speech and dissenting activity only happened on certain sites, like devoted blogs or message boards. A government could try to get away with blocking such sites wholesale without disrupting users outside a certain targeted political sphere.

But all sorts of user-generated content—from calls to revolution to cat pictures—are converging on social media websites like Facebook, which members of every political party use and rely on. This brings us to the second part of the answer as to why the government can’t censor like it used to: mixed-use social media sites. When content is both HTTPS-encrypted and on a mixed-use social media site like Facebook, it can be too politically expensive to block the whole site. Instead, the only option left is pressuring Facebook to do targeted blocking at the government’s request.

Government Requests for Social Media Censorship

Government requests for targeted blocking happen when something is compliant with Facebook’s community guidelines, but not with a country’s domestic law. This comes to a head when social media platforms have large user bases in repressive, censorious states—a dynamic that certainly applies in Thailand, where a military dictatorship shares its capital city with a dense population of Facebook power-users and one of the most Instagrammed locations on earth.

In Thailand, the video of the King in question violated the country’s overbroad lese majeste defamation laws against in any way insulting or criticizing the monarchy. So the Thai government requested that Facebook remove it—along with hundreds of other pieces of content—on legal grounds, and made an ultimately empty threat to shut down the platform in Thailand if Facebook did not comply.

Facebook did comply and geoblock over 100 URLs for which it received warrants from the Thai government. This may not be surprising; although the government is likely not going to block Facebook entirely, they still have other ways to go after the company, including threatening any in-country staff. Indeed, Facebook put itself in a vulnerable position when it inexplicably opened a Bangkok office during high political tensions after the 2014 military coup.

Platforms’ Responsibility to Users

If companies like Facebook do comply with government demands to remove content, these decisions must be transparent to their users and the general public. Otherwise, Facebook's compliance transforms its role from a victim of censorship, to a company pressured to act as a government censor. The stakes are high, especially in unstable political environments like Thailand. There, the targets of takedown requests can often be journalists, activists, and dissidents, and requests to take down their content or block their pages often serve as an ominous prelude to further action or targeting.

With that in mind, Facebook and other companies responding to government requests must provide the fullest legally permissible notice to users whenever possible. This means timely, informative notifications, on the record, that give users information like what branch of government requested to take down their content, on what legal grounds, and when the request was made.

Facebook seems to be getting better at this, at least in Thailand. When journalist Andrew MacGregor Marshall had content of his geoblocked in January, he did not receive consistent notice. Worse, the page that his readers in Thailand saw when they tried to access his post implied that the block was an error, not a deliberate act of government-mandated removal.

More recently, however, we have been happy to see evidence of Facebook providing more detailed notices to users, like this notice that exiled dissident Dr. Somsak Jeamteerasakul received and then shared online:

In an ideal world, timely and informative user notice can help power the Streisand effect: that is, the dynamic in which attempts to suppress information actually backfire and draw more attention to it than ever before. (And that’s certainly what’s happening with the video of the King, which has garnered countless international media headlines.) With details, users are in a better position to appeal to Facebook directly as well as draw public attention to government targeting and censorship, ultimately making this kind of censorship a self-defeating exercise for the government.

In an HTTP environment where governments can passively spy on and filter Internet content, individual pages could disappear behind obscure and misleading error messages. Moving to an increasingly HTTPS-secured world means that if social media companies are transparent about the pressure they face, we may gain some visibility into government censorship. However, if they comply without informing creators or readers of blocked content, we could find ourselves in a much worse situation. Without transparency, tech giants could misuse their power not only to silence vulnerable speakers, but also to obscure how that censorship takes place—and who demanded it.

Have you had your content or account removed from a social media platform? At EFF, we’ve been shining a light on the expanse and breadth of content removal on social media platforms with OnlineCensorship.org, where we and our partners at Visualising Impact collect your stories about content and account deletions. Share your story here.

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