IN-DEPTH Behind the VPN veil

If you take your privacy seriously you need to take VPNs seriously. David Rutland goes off the record, on the QT and very hush-hush.

Image credit: thinkstockphotos

L inux users are a paranoid bunch and they don’t welcome surveillance in any form – whether it’s Google’s trackers that are strewn across the web, or individual webmasters checking their access logs for IP addresses and then nuking your router with a Low Orbit Ion Cannon when you leave a nasty comment on their wine-tasting blog.

A virtual private network disguises your IP address by routing your traffic through a remote network. You can spoof your location and pretend to be in Russia, the US, Jamaica, or wherever your VPN provider keeps its servers – meaning that your dismissal of the Taittinger ‘43 as a drink for geriatric poseurs will go unpunished.

If you’re serious about privacy, and you don’t want other people knowing what you’re watching and downloading, a consumer VPN might be exactly what you’re looking for to help you cover your tracks. They’re not perfect by any means, but can prove valuable as part of a package of measures to keep your online activities under the radar.

You’re probably reading this while seated near to your PC at home. Don’t worry if you’re not – just pretend. Your PC is connected to your router, and through your router, it is connected to the internet.

But your PC isn’t the only device in your house and it probably isn’t even the only device within eyeshot of where you’re sitting right now. There’s your phone sitting next to you on the couch; there’s your Roku TV stick; there’s the glossy black games console; there’s an array of printers and scanners. If you’re anything like us, there’s probably a stack of low-cost Raspberry Pis running a farrago of bizarre and specialised tasks.

In other rooms there are likely to be other computers, other laptops, other phones belonging to other members of your household, and yet more longforgotten Pis up to their own arcane shenanigans under a coating of warm dust in the attic .

They all talk to each other through the router that’s sitting unobtrusively in the corner. Even if the internet dropped out today, they would still be able to talk to each other. You could send files to Jon, up in his bedroom, listen to Kendra’s MP3 collection, stream movies from the NAS in the den. You would be able to do this because all of the devices are on the same network. And because they’re all on the same network they all have the same IP address when connecting to the outside world through your router.

It’s a private network, which means that only the machines on it have direct access to it. This author can use the network to view a document on their laptop, and then conjure it into the physical world via the laser printer in the lounge. From your back bedroom in Basingstoke, you can’t use this printer because you’re not on the private network.