WireGuard® is a VPN protocol that is rapidly becoming very popular and for good reason. It aims to be much faster as well as simpler, leaner, and more useful than OpenVPN and other protocols used by any number of VPN providers. Some VPN experts refer to WireGuard as “revolutionary.”

VPNs will shield you from hackers, foreign and domestic government spies, ISPs, and everyone else who has no business recording what you haven’t chosen to share. In fact, many governments allow or even require ISPs to record your online activities and make the resultant log files available to the government. Indeed, Big Brother is watching all of us. However, a good VPN will greatly reduce the amount of personal data collected.

VPNs traditionally have added a lot of security and privacy but suffer from one significant downside: most VPNs slow down the network connection(s) because of all the processing overhead created by the VPN software. In contrast, WireGuard is believed to be the fastest of all the popular VPN protocols and is as secure or even more secure as any of the other VPN products. With fewer than 4,000 lines of publicly-visible code, WireGuard is small and simple to audit. It also employs modern cryptography and formally verified constructions.

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Alphabet (the parent company of Google, YouTube, JigSaw, and a bunch of other corporate divisions) is proudly promoting its new, FREE VPN called “Outline” and for good reasons.

Unscrupulous VPN providers can steal your identity, peek in on your data, inject their own ads on non-secure pages, or analyze your browsing habits and sell that information to advertisers, says one Jigsaw official. And you can’t know for sure whether you can trust them, no matter what they say in the app store. “Journalists should be aware that their online activities might be subject to surveillance either by government agencies, their internet service providers, or a hacker with malicious intent,” said Laura Tich, technical evangelist for Code for Africa, a resource for African journalists. “As surveillance becomes ubiquitous in today’s world, journalists face an increasing challenge in establishing secure communication in the digital space.”

Outline is being offered as free open source software. Jigsaw (the producing company) invites anyone and everyone with programming skills to examine the source code, looking for security problems or other bugs. If any problems are found, please let the Jigsaw software developers know so they can fix the problem(s) for the next release.

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According to a report by Stephen Shankland in the C|Net web site, “Mozilla is experimenting with a VPN (virtual private network) service to get a little financial wiggle room from people willing to spend some money to have their internet traffic encrypted better to thwart internet service providers and others from snooping on their online activity. Mozilla will test the offering with a portion of Firefox users in the US starting Wednesday.”

Also, “Mozilla’s VPN service relies on a partnership with Switzerland-based ProtonVPN, which gets some of the revenue. Those who sign up can use the VPN software on Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS and Android.”

Details may be found at: https://cnet.co/2Phz28K.

A great article about VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) may be found in the Business Opportunities web site at: http://bit.ly/2Ly4xp5. Yes, VPNs can help protect your online privacy in many ways.

Keezel is a great combination of hardware and VPN software. It can protect your online communications at home, at school, in a hotel room, in a coffee shop, and most anywhere else you might use a wi-fi connection to the Internet. Unfortunately, it is also quite expensive.

If you want or need the best, Keezel might be your answer.

The Keezel device isn’t a typical wi-fi hotspot although it does perform many of the same functions. It creates a local encrypted wi-fi network that can be used simultaneously by multiple computers, tablets, smartphones running VoIP telephone apps, GameBoys, Xbox game consoles, Roku boxes, and anything else that uses a wi-fi Internet connection. You can even encrypt your Nest thermostat’s wi-fi communications although I doubt if many people feel they have a need for that. In short, it can connect anything and everything to the Internet through its own VPN. The owner of the Keezel remains in full control; no other person or device can connect to the device without the owner’s permission.

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The creators of the encrypted email service, ProtonMail, have released a free version of their ProtonVPN software for macOS. Even though the free version does not contain the full features that you would come to expect from a paid VPN service, it is more than capable of obfuscating IP addresses and your location.

It is interesting (at least, to me) that I recently warned at https://privacyblog.com/2018/05/28/be-cautious-free-vpns-are-selling-your-data-to-3rd-parties/ that most free providers of free VPN services log their users’ user data and many openly and brazenly share/sell user data. However, ProtonMail claims their free VPN does nothing of that sort. According to the company’s web site at https://protonvpn.com/:

“ProtonVPN is a no logs VPN service. We do not track or record your internet activity, and therefore, we are unable to disclose this information to third parties.”

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