Saturday, June 16, 2007

Free VPN Access to the Internet

It has been just over a month since I last posted here; sorry about that. One of the more useful things on my backlog of things to mention is a relatively new company offering free access to the Internet over a VPN (among other things)

I'm not sure how the economics of this work, but the idea is that you use their service as a way to use the Internet in a more private fashion (not just the WWW). Granted, there is a lot of talk in the news about ISPs keeping track of what people do with the Internet, but it seems like such a service has a lot more uses that just remaining semi-anonymous while stealing music or movies (which is the first use hinted at by the website). The most obvious use being tunneling through firewalls. If you are behind a router and would rather not have to concern yourself with port forwarding, this may be a way to have things work. The downside is that since you have to connect to whatever service you are using through another server the connection isn't going to be particularly fast.

Anyway, SecureIX offers such a service as well as a 1G email account with both POP3 and IMAP and Usenet access. They also have a paid version if you need more bandwidth. The VPN uses the PPTP protocol which is fairly widely supported (they have mediocre setup instructions for Windows).

Give it a try if you have a use for an extra public IP (gaming and server testing come to mind)

You can read a little about my previous experiments with VPNs here

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