I’m not sure what the full argument against an antivirus company being paired with a VPN service, but when VPN company Tunnelbear was acquired by McAfee, there was a big uproar and exodus in the tech community, including Linus Tech Tips.
Moderating:
As was noted early in this thread there are illegal uses for VPNs. There are also valid reasons. We have kept a watchful eye on threads about VPNs and will continue to do so.
“Do I need a VPN” is a valid question. This thread will be allowed to continue on that basis. The links in the above post that I edited led to specific providers who expressly set their products up for illegal use. That will not be allowed.
This thread will be allowed to continue as a general discussion of VPNs and their legitimate uses. Links to sites, reviews of specific companies or products, and discussions about illegal uses will not be allowed.
I’m in the “OP doesn’t need a VPN” camp.
When I visited China for work last year I did sign up for a VPN service, expecting to need it. But I was surprised to discover my Verizon roaming phone worked just fine, and I could access everything I normally do in the US (Gmail, Google, etc.). My laptop worked fine too if I was on my company’s corporate network.
I was surprised by the phone, and curious how it works. I would have thought the data would have been routed through the local telecom companies and therefore subject to the same firewall.
The VPN actually didn’t work very well. The connection was spotty, and services like Netflix detected the VPN and disallowed access anyway.
Thank you everyone.
I decided I don’t need VPN.
But I would have never known this without your input.
Why do you need a plug-in? Doesn’t Windows support VPN’s natively? On macOS, I just setup a VPN configuration. The VPN isn’t very useful if it only works on a browser, because lots of other things need to run through the tunnel, too.
Not so much natively supports, but allows the creation of virtual network adapters.
In a simplified nutshell…
The VPN software creates a virtual network adapter on your computer which becomes the primary connection for internet services.
That virtual adapter then uses your physical adapter as a router to talk to the outside world to create an encrypted tunnel connection to the VPN server wherever in the world it may reside.
That VPN server becomes your physical presence to the world. Any site you go to sees the server as you.
Your browsing then goes from the server to wherever you wanted to go just as if you weren’t using a VPN. You don’t get any more protection talking to your destination than you would just browsing normally. At that point you are just as susceptible to having your communications intercepted and analyzed as if you weren’t using VPN at all. The only difference is that your side of the conversation is effectively anonymous.
I presume that the same virtual adapter setup applies to Mac and Linux products but I don’t have specific knowledge of those platforms.
It’s also worth mentioning that public VPNs aren’t 100% secure and have known weaknesses and exploits available (DNS leakage), but that’s outside the scope of this thread.
It was really nothing to do with one company being “antivirus”. The objection was to one company being (a) Big Business, (b) Closed Source, and (c) technically unimpressive. If you’re wearing an foil helmet so that Big Brother can’t read your thoughts, you don’t want to to use the tin hat made by Big Brother. And you don’t want to be on Big Brother’s mailing list. And if Big Brother has the reputation of making tin hats out of concrete, that’s another reason.
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