Tag Archives: Virtual Private Network

Weekly output: VPN guidance, new Verizon plans, Supreme Court rules on content moderation, Dish Wireless, Mark Vena podcast

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The weather outside is as good as spring gets around D.C., and it was made even more pleasant by catching up with friends at the Nats game this afternoon and seeing our rebuilding team go on a hitting spree and beat the Detroit Tigers 6-4.

Screenshot of the U.S. VPNs guide as seen in Safari on an iPad mini 6, with a VPN connection active as indicated at top right.5/15/2023: 10 Best VPN Services of 2023, U.S. News & World Report

My first writing for U.S. News since last May was once going to consist of updating a few comparisons of virtual private network services, but then another freelancer backed out and my editor asked if I could take on some extra work. (Cardinal rule of freelance writing: Try to be the person who solves an editor’s problems, especially if the editor can offer more money for a rush delivery.) So my contributions here wound up including profiles of seven VPN services–Hotspot Shield, Private Internet Access, PrivateVPN, PureVPN, TunnelBear, VyprVPN, and Windscribe–plus guides to cheap VPNs and VPNs for streaming video and four of those comparisons (Surfshark versus ExpressVPN, NordVPN versus IPVanish, NordVPN versus ExpressVPN, and Surfshark versus NordVPN).

This VPN immersion left me with a real dislike of the marketing tactics many of these services employ, so I unpacked those trust issues for Patreon readers this week. They also got my own picks for VPN service.

5/16/2023: Verizon ‘myPlan’ Condenses Wireless Menu to 2 Plans, Plus Optional Perks, PCMag

Verizon solved one problem with its old spread of unlimited plans by paring them down from six to two, but in the bargain it left potential customers with as much of math exercise as before–and, if they had appreciated the streaming-media freebies of the old plan, a sense of getting shortchanged.

5/18/2023: Supreme Court: Lazy Content-Moderation Doesn’t Mean Platforms Aided Terrorists, PCMag

I suspected that the Supreme Court would decide that Twitter, Google and Facebook overlooking some of the ISIS terrorist cult’s abuse of their platforms did not amount to aiding and abetting that abomination, but I didn’t expect a unanimous opinion. Or one written by Justice Clarence Thomas, who in 2021 suggested that social platforms needed stricter regulation.

5/19/2023: Dish Wireless: We’ll Meet June Deadline to Cover 70% of Americans With 5G, PCMag

I was going to write up this Wednesday-afternoon session from the wireless trade group CTIA’s 5G Summit on Thursday, but then the Supreme Court upended my plans.

5/19/2023: S03 E54 – SmartTechCheck Podcast, Mark Vena

We talked at some length about the court’s opinion on this episode of my analyst friend’s podcast (also available in video form) before turning our attention to car and smart-home security.

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Weekly output: Data Privacy Day, PBS digital strategy, trust in traditional media, Huawei charges, Trump’s DoJ on Facebook, VPN reality check

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This week featured a personal record of sorts: three stories published in a day, each at a different outlet and one at a first-time client.

1/28/2019: Big tech firms still don’t care about your privacy, The Washington Post

I wrote most of this essay about the fauxliday that is “Data Privacy Day” in an hour or two on Friday of the previous week.

1/28/2019: PBS’ most-of-the-above digital-video strategy, FierceVideo

This piece started with my researching streaming-TV options for a relative and discovering that none included the local PBS station. Fortunately, it ended with Boston’s WGBH telling me that it expects to be one or two “over the top” video services by this fall.

1/28/2019: New study finds trust in traditional media (mostly) transcends partisanship, Columbia Journalism Review

This is my first byline at CJR. This publication offering an exceptionally author-friendly contract encourages me to make sure that it’s not the last.

1/29/2019: Huawei allegations, Al Araby

i made a quick appearance on this Qatar-based news channel, overdubbed live into Arabic, to recap two new rounds of federal charges against the Chinese telecom-hardware giant.

2/1/2019: Why Trump’s DOJ doesn’t want to break up Facebook, Yahoo Finance

I wrote up assistant attorney general Makan Delrahim’s talk at the State of the Net conference Tuesday, outlining why he seems uninterested in revisiting the Department of Justice’s approvals for Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

2/1/2019: Why VPNs won’t always keep you safe online, Yahoo Finance

The immediate motivation for writing this reality-check reassessment of virtual-private-network services came from a comment a reader left on Monday’s Washington Post story, but I’ve had the idea floating around my head for a while.

Black Hat priorities: don’t get pwned, do get work done

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LAS VEGAS–I took my own phone and laptop to the Black Hat USA security conference here, which is often held out as a bad idea.

Before I flew out to Vegas Tuesday, I got more than a few “Are you bringing a burner phone?” and “Are you leaving your laptop at home?” questions.

Black Hat backdropBut bringing burner hardware means dealing with a different set of security settings and doesn’t address the risk of compromise of social-media accounts. And writing thousand-word posts on my phone risks compromising my sanity.

So here’s what I did with my devices instead:

  • Put my laptop in airplane mode, then enabled only WiFi to reduce the PC’s attack surface to that minimum.
  • For the same reason, turned off Bluetooth and NFC on my phone.
  • Set the Windows firewall to block all inbound connections.
  • Used a loaner Verizon hot spot for all my data on both my laptop and phone–I even disabled mobile data on the latter gadget, just in case somebody set up a malicious cell site.
  • Connected only though a Virtual Private Network on both devices, each of which were set to go offline if the Private Internet Access app dropped that encrypted connection.
  • Did not plug in a USB flash drive or charge my phone through anything but the chargers I brought from home.
  • Did not download an update, install an app, or type in a password.
  • Did not leave my laptop or phone alone in my hotel room.

Combined, this probably rates as overkill–unless the National Security Agency or a comparable nation-state actor has developed an intense interest in me, in which case I’m probably doomed. Using a VPN alone on the conference WiFi should keep my data secure from eavesdropping attempts, on top of the fact that all the sites I use for work already encrypt their connections.

But for my first trip here, I figured I’d rather err on the side of paranoia. (You’re welcome to make your case otherwise in the comments.)

Then I showed up and saw that everybody else had brought the usual array of devices. And a disturbing number of them weren’t even bothering to use encryption for things as basic as e-mail.

Another part of the world where I need to use a VPN

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I spent last week in London with my family–yes, actual vacation-esque time! It was great, except for when I was trying to keep up with news from back home.

My first stay across the Atlantic since the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation went into force May 25 brought home the unpleasant reality of some U.S. sites’ continued struggles with this privacy law. And instead of experiencing this only briefly in a Virtual Private Network session on my iPad, I got a full-time dose of it.

The biggest problem is sites such as the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times that have blocked all European access instead of providing the privacy controls required by the GDPR.

That’s not the fault of the GDPR–its provisions were set two years ago–but is the fault of Tronc, the long-mismanaged news firm formerly known as Tribune Publishing. Tronc could afford to pay $15 million to former chairman Michael Ferro after he quit facing charges of sexual abuse but apparently couldn’t afford to hire any GDPR-qualified developers. I hope the LAT can fix that now that Tronc has sold the paper, but it may be a while before I can link to any Tribune stories without annoying European readers.

With my client USA Today, the issue isn’t as bad: It provides EU readers with a stripped-down, ad- and tracking-free version of the site, which you can see at right in the screenshot above. What’s not to like about such a fast, simple version? Well, I can’t see comments on my own columns, and simply searching for stories requires switching to Google… by which I mean, Bing, since right-clicking a Google search result doesn’t let you copy the target address, and clicking through to a Google result will yield an EU-specific USAT address.

The simplest fix for these and other GDPR-compliance glitches was to fire up Private Internet Access on my laptop and connect to one of that VPN service’s U.S. locations–yes, as if I were in China. It seems a violation of the Web’s founding principles to have to teleport my browser to another continent for a task as simple as reading the news, but here we are.

Bandwidth battles in China

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SHANGHAI–Crowded gadget trade shows like CES and Mobile World Congress usually entail connectivity complaints. But when you put the gadget show in China, you level up the complexity, thanks to the need to run a Virtual Private Network app to preserve access to U.S. sites blocked by China’s Internet filters.

In theory–and in every PR pitch from a VPN service advertising itself as the surefire way to stop your ISP from tracking your online activity–that should add no difficulty to getting online. You connect, the VPN app automatically sets up an encrypted link to the VPN firm’s servers, and then you browse as usual.

PIA VPN exit-server menu

The reality that I’ve seen at CES Asia this week while using the Private Internet Access Windows and Android apps has been a good deal less elegant.

  • Often, the PIA app will connect automatically to the best available server (don’t be like me by wasting selecting a particular U.S. server when the app usually gets this right) to provide a usable link to the outside world. But it’s never clear how long that link will stay up; you don’t want to start a long VoIP call or Skype conference in this situation.
  • On other occasions, the app has gotten stuck negotiating the VPN connection–and occasionally then falls into a loop in which it waits increasingly longer to retry the setup. Telling it to restart that process works sometimes; in others, I’ve had to quit the app. For whatever reason, this has been more of a problem on my laptop than on my phone.
  • The WiFi itself has been exceedingly spotty whether I’ve used my hotel WiFi, the Skyroam Solis international-roaming hotspot I took (a review loaner that I really, really need to send back), the press-room WiFi or, worst of all, the show-floor WiFi. Each time one of those connections drop, the VPN app has to negotiate a new connection.

If you were going to say “you’re using the wrong VPN app”: Maybe I am! I signed up for PIA last year when the excellent digital-policy-news site Techdirt offered a discounted two-year subscription; since then, my client Wirecutter has endorsed a competing service, IVPN (although I can’t reach that site at the moment). Since I don’t have any other trips to China coming up, I will wait to reassess things when my current subscription runs out next April.

Also, it’s not just me; my friend and former Yahoo Tech colleague Dan Tynan has been running into the same wonkiness.

To compound the weirdness, I’ve also found that some connectivity here seems to route around the Great Firewall without VPN help. That was true of the press-room WiFi Thursday, for instance, and I’ve also had other journalists attending CES Asia report that having a U.S. phone roam here–free on Sprint and T-Mobile, a surcharge on AT&T or Verizon–yielded an unfettered connection.

At the same time, using a VPN connection occasionally left the CES Asia site unreachable. I have no idea why that is so.

What I do know is that I’ll very much appreciate being able to break out my laptop somewhere over the Pacific in a few hours and pay for an unblocked connection–then land in a country where that’s the default condition.