VPNs have long become a very effective system for protecting
two-party communications and preventing potential "gossip" from
accessing these data transfers, thanks to the added layer of privacy and
encryption they add. The idea was widely used in business and professional
environments, but its benefits became much more frequent after adapting a VPN
for a much more attractive task: being able to use Netflix, Hulu or Pandora in
our country, when in theory we could only do it. from United States.
In this case, the trick is to play with the IP addresses
that are used to try to show that our equipment is working in the United States
or in any other country. These VPNs usually come with a price tag, but there
are free alternatives (Genbeta told us about seven of them a long time ago)
that attract a lot of users for that reason. The problem, of course, is that
nothing is really free.
Hallway case
In May 2015, a scandal emerged with Hola, a free VPN service
that, as in other cases, allows access to geographically restricted Internet
services. Hola's proposal was very attractive and its performance was
excellent, but the problem was that this free post was in small print.
In this case, that fine print meant that when we connected
to that VPN, we gave up bandwidth so that users of another related service,
Luminati, which is a paid VPN, could use it in a variety of scenarios. They can
be nice, of course, but as has been shown, they can also be very controversial.
It happened that one of the users (or user groups) using
Luminati used this service to launch a denial of service attack on the 8chan
website. This was confirmed by Fredrik Brennan (text and images were lost due
to the 8chan hack in April 2017), head of 8chan, who explained how the accident
happened.
Hello, you were greedy. At the end of 2014, they realized
that their service had a botnet with more than 9 million IP addresses in their
hands and they began to sell access to this botnet (for now only for HTTP
requests)
Brennan described Hola as "the least ethical VPN
service I have ever seen" and explained that the free service makes it
possible for users to be indirectly responsible for these attacks through a
giant botnet that a person unknowingly enters. Although the CEOs of both
companies have already clarified the matter, and it seems that at this point
there will be no "more problems" between both parties, the damage is
done, and this is a demonstration that a free VPN, like everything else, is
free , this cost is usually charged differently. ... As of August 2016, this
service was still not recommended based on dedicated VPN reviews.
Nobody gives four pesetas
VPNs are an interesting another to protect our Internet use.
Confidentiality is a growing concern, especially after information about Edward
Snowden has been leaked, and services of this type promise to guarantee this
confidentiality and often claim to offer this option without charging us any
fees.
The tricky is that for the proxy servers that provide this provision
to work, they need a connection, especially one capable of handling the huge
amount of data that these services generate when used by many users, which can
affect connection speed. ... And it costs money. A lot of money . If we add to
this the costs of maintenance, operation and security, these costs increase.
Why would someone offer these services for free? Easy: because they are not
really free. Some of these services are compensated for free by the appearance
of advertisements in our browsing sessions, and these service providers expect
us to click on those advertisements while we wait for the connection to
complete or while they are running.
The problem is that the channel through which advertising is
managed is always a priority: our links to the information we need are slower
than those that are intended to present this ad to us. Many free VPN services
offer extremely slow and / or extremely unstable connection speeds. If you have
taken advantage of these services to access streaming services in the United
States, such as Netflix, you may have suffered continued emission reductions
due to these questionable VPNs.
