Few days back, I’d written about how you can by pass internet filters and access the blocked websites or web services. However, there was one method which I didn’t mention in it and that is VPN (Virtual Private Server).
First of all, I’ll give a small intro to VPN, it’s basically a gateway for you to access the internet from a remote computer by connecting through your existing internet connection.
Are you nuts ? What’s the point of connecting to the Internet from another machine when I’m using internet to connect to that machine itself ?
Valid question, here are some of the scenario and situations where you’ll need a VPN :
1. Your Office Firewalls are smart : If you work in a corporate where firewalls are installed and the web filtering is on then you can’t access various web services which you want to access. At that time, you can connect to a VPN and can access the internet without any problems.
2. Admins can see what you are doing : Because all the traffic goes through a server in your office, admins can trace that what you are trying to see and if at all you don’t feel comfortable with this then you need a secure VPN.
3. You are in a country where Free movement of Internet is not free : If you are in China, UAE or many Middle East countries then you certainly need this service to access various services which are blocked otherwise by the govt. of these countries.
4. You want to access the services which are U.S. based only : Few services like Hulu are not available to the internet users outside U.S. and if you want to access any such service then you’ll need a VPN.
I checked Veralinx IPundercover (you can call it anonymous proxy but it’s a VPN) recently and found it attractive for various above mentioned reasons and what was impressive about the service that it’s a no fuss service. Let me elaborate it here :
1. I registered for the service and chose my username and password.
2. Downloaded the client from my account
3. Installed it and ran it, gave username and password.
That’s it. The whole procedure didn’t took more than 3 min. and I was all ready to go.
I didn’t have to do any configurations at all. I love many shows at Hulu and as I’m from India, I can’t access Hulu from here and using IPundercover, I was able to see all the hulu shows without any problems. Rather I was impressed with the speed because I was able to watch the Terminator’s episode 1 without much pauses at the speed of 512 Kbps and that too when I was using the VPN, so I was expecting that it would be slow, but speed certainly impressed me.
While testing the software, I noticed that there is only windows version available and that is one of the negative which this service has, but soon my answer was complete. IPundercover is based on OpenVPN and so any client which is based on OpenVPN can be used (ZeroShell has excellent guide on various client for different OS to setup the OpenVPN). Here you’ll find the configuration of the OpenVPN client for IPUnderCover.
I think that Veralinx IPundercover is an excellent service (for anonymous internet browsing) and the charges are nominal too and I can suggest this to anyone at any point of time.
Image credit : Security in Uncertain World”” by PrASanGaM
