We have 1 Mac and 1 PC and need a VPN provider-any suggestions?
Being out in the country, we have a very slow .5mps internet which causes the buffering on the iPlayer but strangely, only during the ads on ITV Player!
thanks for your very clear reply Peter. I fully agree with your sentiments re intelectual theft - but as I don't watch tv, all i want is the ability to watch sometimes quite obscure films and old documentaries. These are often difficult or impossible to get from people like netfliks and whilst that service is perhaps a legal route (although is that any more legal than subscribing to a cheap clone provider?) I am not convinced that a sufficient percentage of the subscription is reaching the content providers.
we are all constantly being screwed by the big boys in every sphere of our lifes and I must admit to getting a little pleasure from the fact that this may be one little victory for the small guy.
thanks again for your reply
geoff
Geoff - Genuine VPN services encrypt the traffic between your machine & their device at the remote end. This encryption is not all that easy to break, though the PPTP version is rather easier than that used by OpenVPN. All that is readily visible to your ISP is that you have set up an encrypted link to a remote location. The traffic that passes to & from that location, including details of the sites to which you subsequently connect, is hidden. This is why these services are very popular in places like the Gulf countries, China, & others, where the government wishes to impose some kind of censorship on its citizens.
What this doesn't do is to encrypt traffic between the VPN provider's device and the final destination, unless that is already encrypted, such as by HTTPS. It also doesn't prevent law enforcement officials, or others such as Performing Rights outfits given rights by local laws, from demanding traffic logs and similar details from the VPN providers. Of course, in practice, the volume of traffic, and the multiple jurisdictions involved mean that only the most blatant instances are ever investigated.
Personally, I still view copyright infringement as a form of theft, albeit a minor one, and the fact that there are technical ways to make it difficult to investigate doesn't change that. Ever since the days of Napster, however, it's been clear that peer-to-peer file sharing has changed the rules of the copyright game. What is needed is some overall solution that makes limited peer-to-peer copying legal (or, perhaps, not illegal) whilst protecting the intellectual property rights of the studios & other creators. That will take many years to come to fruition, but the current situation seems to be a de facto implementation of such a solution, albeit with quite a lot of imperfections.
I have not used a vpn before although i have used Stealthy which worked ok but i feel I need something more powerful now.
I don't want TV, what i do want is 1) some anonymity 2) download from pirate bay without having to worry about being prosecuted and 3) I like to choose my aparent location - this is good for my marketing so I can trick google inot thinking I am in various other countries.
Do you think Strong vpn will give me all three of these?
regards
g
I use boxpn. Not based in the USA so maybe just maybe NSA aren't reading all my emails. You can often set it up to run in your router which might be convenient.
It is true that some providers take more precautions than others. iPlayer is the easiest to fool, Sky GO wouldn't work initially and neither would Netflix. Expattelly fixed Sky for me and I didn't want to use Netflix anyway so never chased a fix for that. In our case, having Sky dish and Sky+ box means we only need an alternative if we are already recording two other things on Sky and can't juggle the +1 channels, so it's not crucial (there are rarely that many decent progs on!!)
I think that I will take the Strong vpn route (on the strength (no pun) of these discussions);
what i am not clear about however is the fact that the incoming signals are still coming from my isp to my home and this isp is not hidden by Strong so am I correct in thinking that even though the origin of the content is obscured, any organisation looking to find people downloading pirated content can still see this content entering their home ?
Am I missing something?
Hola is still working well for me. I get BBC I player & ITV player with no buffering. :-)
So many services available it's a bit confusing. iPlayer has quite q bit of buffering but with ITV player only during the ads. The best solution is to download with iPlayer but this takes quite q bit of time even without HD. ITV player doesn't seem to have this facility.
http://www.unotelly.com/unodns/ just put the DNS numbers into your router and all the devices on your network will work ...better than any VPN ...been using it for 5 years no problems ever !
Have signed up to My Expat Net on a monthly basis for the moment which gives access to iPlayer,etc. until decide which satellite provider to go for.
The big problem with VPN's and Satellite traffic is the latency, I know this was a problem for VOIP type traffic as well.
Have you looked at something like Foxyproxy? I know they use pptp as the underlying VPN protocol, and this will work as long as you are using a compliant browser.
My wife has stated using a proxy service for UK TV called Hola which is not a VPN, but fools the UK TV providers into think the traffic comes from the UK - that might offer what you want.
Neil,
If you're getting a satellite package, why would you want to use a VPN? Just get a UK-based satellite provider (i.e. one with the earth station in the UK) & you should get a UK-based IP address for everything. Clearly, you would have to check with your supplier, or existing clients, that this is the case, but it's totally normal.
When I was installing satellite links around the world,the users found it strange that Google initially came up in Norwegian. That was because the earth station (& Internet connection) were physically in Norway.
Thanks- there are so many of these services. I was thinking of something like ExpressVPN which channels all your links on the internet via a VPN and costs around the same encrypting information such as on line payments. We watch UK TV via Filmon but we have a slow internet connection and after the recent satellite change we get hardly any connection at all so we are getting a satellite package for high speed broadband.
I use Expattelly on each computer. Reliable and stable, and when I did have connection problem I emailed them and got a prompt reply with a fix. Does reduce broadband a bit, but so does using wifi rather than wired network as most households do. Works on Android and PC, can't comment on Mac. Costs 60€ per year,though, but it's worth it to us for the ability to watch iPlayer.
To use a VPN on both computers at the same time, you might prefer to use a router solution. You can buy one pre-configured for use over StrongVPN's OpenVPN mechanism. The Strong website has details. I decided to buy a "Buffalo" router & configure it myself, partially in order to get more bang per buck & partially in case there were any problems with shipping from the US. (In the end, the best deal was to buy it on Ebay from the US with an all-inclusive, customs & tax included, shipping price.)
The system has been as solid as a rock since I installed it, going for days at a time without any apparent dropping of the connection. In fact, it has only stopped when I didn't have any need for the VPN & so switched off.
I would happily post the relevant details here, or by PM if you prefer.
Anybody successfully using SkyGo with a VPN? I have Surfshark but its a no go, OK with Netflix but not SkyGo.
I’m using NordVPN for SkyGo, seems to work OK but sometimes it’s necessary to disconnect and then reconnect (different server). For some reason, Chromecast (with netflix) doesn’t like it though
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