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Tunnelblick safety12/28/2023 ![]() It’s the same team that produces OpenVPN, so I would trust them a little more. OpenVPN offers PrivateTunnel, with a pay-as-you-go connection plan that is fairly inexpensive. It’s an open-source project that I have high confidence in. ![]() On the iPhone/iPad side I use OpenVPN (), but again I’m connecting back to my on VPN server with it. I generally use Tunnelbear for very specific purposes (such as location shifting) and take steps to make sure that no other traffic is going through their VPN endpoint (I use Little Snitch firewall rules to accomplish this). They do get good reviews, and I’ve had a $5/month subscription with them for about three years now. Note that this is not open-source, and so your confidence in it in terms of privacy should be very low. That being said, if my purpose is to connect to a VPN so that it appears I am somewhere else, such as if I want my internet address to be in the UK to watch soccer, I’m forced to use one of the commercial VPN providers, and for that I use Tunnelbear. The use case is typically that I’m away from home, on an insecure network, and want to lock down / encrypt everything going over that network. I run my own VPN server (which I personally built and maintain) to connect Tunnelblick to when I’m away from the home network, so the encrypted tunnel goes from my Macbook, through the Tunnelblick VPN, into my own server, and from there out onto the internet. I have very high confidence that it hasn’t been compromised. Also, the programs are not open source, so I can’t look through the code to assure myself that there is no back door or other security risk.įor that reason, I use Tunnelblick on the Mac (), which is an open-source VPN program. The only assurance I have that my traffic isn’t being decrypted, stored, or otherwise manipulated is that the app seller tells me that they don’t. The longer reason…all of them provide their own server to connect to, which means that my VPN internet traffic is going through an endpoint that I don’t control. The short answer is that I don’t trust the apps on the App Store for VPNs. Here’s my reply to my student’s question: ![]() I ran into this when I wanted to watch World Cup soccer matches not shown in the US but available in the UK I set up a VPN connection to a server in London so that it appeared I was in that city, and then watched the games on the BBC. You want to appear to be somewhere else in the world.You are away from your home network, possibly on an unsecured network such as in a café or an airport, and want to encrypt all of the network traffic coming to and from your computer (even traffic that isn’t normally encrypted).There are two primary use cases for a VPN: I thought my rather long-winded reply might be useful to others wondering the same thing, and it’s appended below. Recently one of my students asked for a recommendation on a VPN app for his Macbook.
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