Virtual Private Network – many of you know the term, and what they do, roughly, but how many of you know how they work?
We’ve come a long way since many years ago, haven’t we? Before Assange, Snowden, and all the data leaks and hack attacks that have been plaguing us for a while, we basically took the Internet for granted.
We could do what we wanted, when we wanted, without fear of being tracked or monitored – and we were wrong. Fast forward some years later, and now we look for ways to protect ourselves online, without having anyone being able to know what websites we visit, and with no risk of having content censored.
Virtual private networks are one of the leading tools at our disposal, in our fight to maintain our freedom on the web. As such, it’s important that you know what it is that they are, how they work, and what they will mean for your future.
Lets get started, shall we?
1 – They turn your public network into a private one
Lets expand your knowledge of networks a little.
There are 2 types of networks – public networks, and private networks. To put it simply, public networks can be accessed by everyone – and private ones can’t. They can only be accessed by certain people with the right permissions.
Here is where VPNs come into play – they bring you from the public network that you’re using into the one used by the servers providing you the VPN. Basically, it’s like they opened a tunnel from your network to theirs – and this has a lot of advantages associated.
2 – They hide your web traffic – by encrypting it
You’re now headed through a tunnel, from your network to the new one – and like with any other tunnel, you are completely
hidden from site. The cause for this is encryption.
Someday, I’ll speak more of common hacking techniques if you want, but for now, know this – one of the most common ways hackers gain info on you is by grabbing the packets that your PC puts out and reading them, in a process known as sniffing.
Now, what VPNs do is take those packets, and turn them into something completely different, by doing some mathematical operations related to some keys. This is encryption, ladies and gentleman.
What this means basically, is that even if someone somehow infiltrates the network and tries to see what you’re doing – they get useless info, that they can’t possibly use for anything.
3 – They can let you access content not available in your network
This one, sadly, is the most prevalent use of this technology nowadays.
As I said, this tech bring you from a network of your own into another server’s private network. Now, private networks can have some different quirks. For instance, if you’re from China, and use a VPN provided by an American server, you’d get to access the Internet like an American would… which is becoming more and more important nowadays.
As you might be aware, Internet censorship is growing more and more around the world. My example was pertinent for that very reason – China has the greatest Internet censorship in the entire world, knows as “the Great Firewall of China”. They ban every single site that does not please them somehow – even Chinese Wikipedia has been banned, ironically.
By using VPNs, citizens in these countries can access the Internet as if they were halfway across the globe. This makes a tremendous difference in their lives.
And depending on where you are, it may soon make a difference in yours.
That wraps this up!
This article was a bit shorter than most of the ones I usually do. Honetly though, I feel that it didn’t lose too much on account of that. I’m working too much on my vacation, so please understand if I cut back a bit on my articles from now on.
Tomorrow, I may either analyze how the Tor browser works, or teach you how to setup a VPN, as well as analyze the best ones on the market right now. Feel free to tell me whichever you want!
Also, if you have some questions to make, or would like to criticize something in my article, please let me know. I love listening from you guys :)
Steem on!
Good article, easy to follow and contains good content. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks krista! That means a lot :)
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Bom conteúdo pá
Obrigado pa!
I see you still create a lot of good articles.
If you dont mind I want to nominate this one for @ocd again