Connor Knabe Connor-Knabe

Most VPN Services are Terrible

Short version: I strongly do not recommend using any of these providers. You are, of course, free to use whatever you like. My TL;DR advice: Roll your own and use Algo or Streisand. For messaging & voice, use Signal. For increased anonymity, use Tor for desktop (though recognize that doing so may actually put you at greater risk), and Onion Browser for mobile.

This mini-rant came on the heels of an interesting twitter discussion: https://twitter.com/kennwhite/status/591074055018582016

Don't use VPN services.

No, seriously, don't. You're probably reading this because you've asked what VPN service to use, and this is the answer.

Note: The content in this post does not apply to using VPN for their intended purpose; that is, as a virtual private (internal) network. It only applies to using it as a glorified proxy, which is what every third-party "VPN provider" does.

A Russian translation of this article can be found here, contributed by Timur Demin.
A Turkish translation can be found here, contributed by agyild.
There's also this article about VPN services, which is honestly better written (and has more cat pictures!) than my article.

	var fs = require('fs');
	var lame = require('lame');
	var Speaker = require('speaker');

	fs.createReadStream(process.argv[2])
	.pipe(new lame.Decoder())
	.on('format', function (format) {
	this.pipe(new Speaker(format));
	});

	# pulled from http://xecdesign.com/qemu-emulating-raspberry-pi-the-easy-way/
	# expanded via http://superuser.com/questions/690060/how-to-enable-network-with-a-raspberry-pi-emulated-on-qemu
	# tested with 2015-02-16-raspbian-wheezy.zip on OSX Mavericks

	# OSX terminal
	brew install qemu
	# kernel-qemu is a linux kernel compiled with ARM1176 support.
	# learn more here: http://xecdesign.com/compiling-a-kernel/
	curl -OL http://xecdesign.com/downloads/linux-qemu/kernel-qemu
	curl -o raspbian_latest.zip -L http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_latest

	#!/bin/sh


	if [ `nvram get https_enable` -gt 0 ] ; then

	# get the absolute directory of the executable
	SELF_PATH=$(cd -P "$(dirname "$0")" && pwd -P)
	echo SELF_PATH: ${SELF_PATH}

	# extract the mount path