(No, this email's not real, it's http://deadfake.com)

John,

Give HMA a look as well ... http://www.hidemyass.com/

I used them 2 years ago to watch the summer olympics through another country, and I liked their philosophy at the time.

> how do you evaluate the security of buying a VPN service from someone else? 

Good question ... I don't have a good answer, but I imagine there's a strong word-of-mouth factor in the right circles.

> My emotional reaction to using a service like this is that they
> could be snooping on all my traffic,
> but not using a VPN this risk certainly exists with my ISP snooping on all my traffic. 

I'd worry a lot more about my ISP, for sure. The ISP business model is much murkier than the VPN provider, plus any blanket warrants or subpoenas would hit the bigger ISP's before a smaller VPN provider.

Having said all this ... if you don't mind some sweat equity, how about DigitalOcean?  You could set up a small server for $5/month and set up OpenVPN or something like that, and probably get by ok with that, if you can put the puzzle pieces together to make it work.

Keep us posted!

Sp



Sean Phelan
(321) 698-7987
SitesBySequoia.com - Web Sites, Social Media and E-mail            Marketing

On 2/27/2014 11:00 AM, John Mort wrote:
And experienced the requisite outrage at how ISPs mess with your connection and such.

Then I watched this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx3LRfE-XiI
And learned how a VPN can improve your connection at home and secure your connection in public wifi..

Now I'm considering this: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/

Up to now, I've always just run an SSH tunnel to my machine at home in order to be able to browse securely.  Lately though, that connection has been pretty crappy.  I'm not sure if my machine, my router, or my ISP is to blame.  But between the increase in security, the potential increase in performance, and the fact that it would only cost $40/year to have someone else manage something like this for me even if I only use it when my home system is down for some reason, I'm tempted.

Here's my question, how do you evaluate the security of buying a VPN service from someone else?  My emotional reaction to using a service like this is that they could be snooping on all my traffic, but not using a VPN this risk certainly exists with my ISP snooping on all my traffic.  How do you determine who is less untrustworthy?  Does anyone here use a service like this?


_______________________________________________Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group                  http://mhvlug.orghttps://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlugUpcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm)                         Vassar College  Mar 5 - 11th Anniversary Meeting - Home Network Show and Tell  Apr 2 - Nginx: High-Performance HTTP Server, Reverse Proxy, and IMAP/POP3 Proxy Server  May 7 - Google App Engine

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Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group                  http://mhvlug.org
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Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm)                         Vassar College
  Mar 5 - 11th Anniversary Meeting - Home Network Show and Tell
  Apr 2 - Nginx: High-Performance HTTP Server, Reverse Proxy, and IMAP/POP3 
Proxy Server
  May 7 - Google App Engine

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