Imagine that in the yard on August 16, 1969, you are sitting in the USSR and you insufferably want to listen to psychedelic American rock at the Woodstock festival. You open Soviet newspapers – and there about the achievement of a milkmaid from Norilsk. You turn on the Soviet radio – and there are Pesnyary and VIA New Electron. You go to the Soviet cinema, and there is only the “White Sun of the Desert.”
- You take a small sapper shovel.
- You stick it in the ground.
- You dig a tunnel under the Atlantic.
- You get out in the USA.
You are seized by the American security forces and taken to prison. But in that short time, while you are being transported there, you hear Jefferson Airplane on the radio, and you pronounce with a bold Russian accent: “Total pile it.”
What is a VPN?
At first you need to understand what is a vpn and how does it work. VPN is a technology that allows you to make a virtual digging and use networks and resources to which you cannot connect directly.
For example, you have a file server in your office that you can connect to only while in the office. If you work from home today, these files are not available to you. But if a VPN server is configured in the office, you can connect to it from home – and then you are as if in the office, all office resources are available to you. You can print a raunchy message on an office printer.
Or, for example, you ended up in a totalitarian state that blocked all sites about cacti. And you urgently need to read about cacti. You take a VPN service that allows you to connect to the Internet through a country where cacti are legalized. You connect via VPN, and it’s as if you are in another country. No one else will stand between you and the cacti. Also in YouTube you will be shown local advertising.
How is the VPN Network Works
This is most often the case: there is a VPN server that takes care of all issues regarding settings, security, and other technical aspects. What is a vpn connection? When a client connects to such a server, a special connection is established between them, all data is encrypted.
A VPN app client can be used any device: a phone, a computer, or a smart microwave. The main thing is that this device can access the VPN server and say: “And let’s establish a connection with you!”.
1. Your device; 2. Encrypted VPN tunnel; 3. The Internet
When a VPN connection (also called a VPN tunnel) is established, then everyone who is connected to the same server can safely exchange data with each other. Safe – this means that the data is encrypted and only the server knows what is actually happening on the network.
Without a secure connection, your provider knows which sites you visit, which messengers you use and what you are looking for in a search engine. When you connect a VPN, the provider sees only the fact of the VPN connection itself, and what is happening inside it is unknown to him.
VPN Does Not Mean Security and Anonymity
Many people think that if someone connected via VPN, now he is an invulnerable hacker, completely anonymous and the one who cannot be traced. This is actually not the case.
WebRTC
This technology was initially included in almost every browser, and with it everyone can find out your real IP address, even if you use a VPN. It will not work to find out your home address directly, but you can find out who your provider is. If the special services suspect that you are doing something illegal, then they can come to the provider and demand from him your real address and passport details.
If you do not want everyone to know your IP, then you need to look for such VPN servers that themselves monitor this and are able to make sure that WebRTC does not work.
VPN Server
It sounds strange, but most often it is he who poses the greatest threat to anonymity and security. It is the server that knows everything about those who use its VPN services: who goes to which sites, what it does and with whom it writes.
Free VPN servers make money by selling your digital profile to advertisers. They are aware of your interests and want to know as much as possible about you, therefore they give free access to their services.
Paid servers theoretically live off user contributions, but we don’t know how things really are. Real paranoids come from the fact that even paid servers transmit data to everyone who is willing to pay for them.
The safest way is to create your own VPN server that only you control. The difficulty is that a lot of technical knowledge is needed for a proper and complete setup. But this is real, although it is not completely clear why.