What is a VPN? - Gary explains

Hello, my name is Gary Sims from Anger Authority. Now VPN stands for virtual private network and you may have heard that term in association with privacy and geolocation, but

what

exactly is it, how does it work and

what

can it do for you? Let me. Explain Now Before we dive into VPNs, let me tell you a little about how the Internet works now at home. You probably have some kind of route or modem from your phone company from your Internet service provider and then it's connected to your desktop, maybe by an Ethernet cable to your smartphone over Wi-Fi, maybe to your laptop via Wi-Fi, etc. now inside your house, when your laptop talks to your PC or your phone talks to your PC, which is part of your private network and that doesn't If you don't access the internet, you stay inside your house, but at the time you You open a web page somewhere on the Internet, the data flows through your modem to your local telephone company and then it goes out through the Internet and will travel through the Internet until it reaches the server, the server will then respond with some information that will return over the internet to your local telecom provider to your modem and then back to your PC or your Android smartphone now while all that data is running over the internet you need to know where you're going and four things to know where you're going and you need an address it's the same with the postal service it's the same when you want to go visit someone and it's the same with data on the internet now there are different layers of addressing or different types of addressing, but at the highest level each of these packets of information has what is called an IP address.

Now the IP address is, you've probably seen them there, those four digits from 0 to 255 with dots between them, so maybe 1 7 8.30 4.67 dot 120 something like that. Now to your modem, your router has probably been assigned an IP address from your ISP and what happens is when your data goes over the Internet, every piece of equipment touches every router, every server it touches knows that IP address, especially when it arrives to the web server on the other end, that web server will probably log that IP and log what you've requested there. It's done, not because I'm trying to spy on you, but because I'm actually trying to connect, I collect data on the number of people I clicked to get to the website when it's the peak periods and for data analysis, basically, for the traffic analysis, but of course there is another thing we need to know about IP. address and that is, they are assigned in blocks, so if you have an IP address, all your neighbors and all the people in your area will have the same IP addresses within the same block and there is a database that tells you where these are Blocks of addresses are assigned, which means that when the data arrives at this web server that you're connecting to, you have a pretty good idea of ​​where it is, certainly at the country level, more definitely at the city level, and maybe even within a couple of blocks. from where your real house is, if you don't believe me, go to what is my IP address and you will see what information can be found about you by simply going to that web page from your IP address now.

Of course, normally that's not a problem, the fact that I go to Twitter won't cause anyone any problems, however, if I start accessing things that are maybe a little more sensitive, maybe I'll have a physical problem. I want to read about all the needs. I might have an emotional problem, I might want to look at an important topic that is taboo in my culture in the country I live in and suddenly it's different that these servers know where I come from and they know my IP address. More worrying than that, most governments around the world have a system where they can demand from an ISP the actual person who was assigned a particular IP address on a particular date, so if they then come in and say well, we want to know who was reading about this particular topic, they can come to my ISP and tell us to give us that data, depending on which country the laws are enacted in, which may be a quicker or longer protest, it may be more difficult, It may be with more supervision, with less supervision, but Basically, all states in the world have access to that information;

It's not just governments we have to worry about, for example, if you're in a coffee shop, you're sitting at Starbucks and you're like, "Okay, I've got coffee." Now that we have free Internet, these open public Wi-Fi hotspots are quite dangerous. It is not difficult for anyone with a little technical knowledge to take a laptop and sit in a coffee shop and capture all the data packets flowing on the Airways and because the Wi-Fi hotspot is open, they actually know that the data They are encrypted, it is very easy to obtain passwords to obtain elevators or lists of websites accessed, it is even possible to obtain contents of emails.

Now of course there are levels of software encryption, for example WhatsApp just implemented end-to-end encryption so it was captured. It would be more difficult for the hacker to obtain the content of the messages from him; However, a free, open Wi-Fi hotspot is basically open for access for both good and bad, so don't do online banking or access websites like PayPal when connected to Wi-Fi. Fi from your coffee shop, just don't do it, now another interesting thing about IP addresses and about geolocation is that if I try to access content that is video content, particularly if it's for a particular country, if I'm outside of that country, I don't have access to it and let's take a simple example, let's say I'm traveling and I want to have access to my video streaming service.

I can't if I'm out of the country. That's because the IP addresses that reached the video streaming server say that my IP address is not in this country. I'm going to block access to some types of content that are blocked depending on which country you're in and another interesting thing actually is that the price is different depending on which country you're in. Now you can try to buy something, maybe some cloud. storage or maybe an online service and if you try to buy it maybe in the United States there will be a different set of prices if you try to buy it in Europe and in fact also expressvpn recently did a study where they found that actually if you buy tickets from plane, the price of exactly the same flight or exactly the same number of people from exactly the same airport is different depending on which country you are actually connecting from when you try to buy those tickets, so geofencing geolocation really changes things about how to access the internet how we buy services and how we buy goods depending on where we are now what a VPN does is it allows you to create a tunnel, a connection from your home computer to a server somewhere else in the world and that connection is encrypted and then when I access something on the Internet, it goes through that tunnel and then it gets to that other server and then it continues to the Internet and finally it will get to the web server or the service that I'm trying to use, but the IP.

The address will no longer be my IP address that is in that data packet, it will actually be the IP address of the VPN server and what happens is that when it responds, it responds to the VPN server. VPN services are. I know who he really is. I need to re-establish this encrypted connection with this client who has connected with me now, which allows for a lot of possibilities, for example, first of all, your local telecom provider and your local government have no idea what sites you go to. access when you go through the VPN, everything is encrypted now, once it goes beyond the VPN, once it leaves the VPN server of course, then it's open again, it goes back through all the different routers and things that need to access the website and the website itself will record the fact that a certain address has arrived, but the address will now be that of the VPN server, it also means that it actually thinks I'm in a different country, so if I'm trying access streaming media videos content if I'm trying to buy things then you could actually set the prices or give me access or block access now depending on where the VPN server is not depending on where I am and thirdly if I'm using open Wi-Fi, so actually Now that initial connection from my laptop to the Internet is completely encrypted, so if there was someone sitting in the coffee shop connecting with a tablet trying to connect to a laptop, it captures all the packets, in You won't actually be able to get them.

A lot because now everything will be encrypted, how does this work? What should you do? The first thing you need to do is get a VPN service and there are a variety of different VPN services available on the internet. The person recommends Express VPN. Now they are very good guys, when they connect when they subscribe, what happens is they give them a username, a password and a list of servers, servers in Europe, servers in America, servers in South America, servers and servers in Asia all over the world, and they basically say, "Me." i want to connect now create a virtual private network a tunnel from my laptop from my pc from my smartphone Royd to this particular server in this particular country now on android that's really easy to do in fact expressvpn has an app , just download the app you put a package in the username and then you just tap on the server that you want to connect to and it will create that tunnel that will connect that encrypted connection to that server.

You can also do it manually through the settings page. You can create VPN connections and that's it. Same thing on Windows, you can do it on Windows and you can do it on OS 10, you can do it on Linux, you can do it on Chrome OS, you can even do it on certain types of Reuters, so there's actually a VPN available on many types of devices. and then once the connection is established, all the data traffic, all the things that you're doing, we'll go through that VPN to the Internet in a different country and then overseas, where it needs to go.

This all sounds great, but there are some disadvantages now there are some disadvantages, the first and of course is that you are deliberately sending your traffic, perhaps in the opposite direction to where the services you need are located, so if I am in Europe and maybe I make a connection to a VPN that is in Asia and then I try to access a website that in the United States what is happening now is that I have to send the data to the other side of the world and then to the other side of the world again to reach that server, so of course it will be slower.

Well, you are routing traffic all over the place and it will be slower than if you connected directly to that service now, it could also be slower because the VPN provider has a limited number of servers and has a limited amount or bandwidth, for so. If there are a lot of customers or it's a particularly busy time of day then the connection will be slower because I'm actually busy with all the other people now, whereas it's an expensive VPN service provider and a cheap one is the amount of bandwidth . and the number of servers they have, that's something to keep in mind when you're choosing a VP service provider and of course the other thing is that some countries consider VPNs to be illegal.

I won't mention them now, but it won't take you much to do a little research to find out if you are in certain countries, try to connect through a VPN, actually, that is a founding productivity and, in fact, that activity itself could cause you more problems than maybe. access certain types or websites and the other thing is that some services actually block access when they see that a VPN is being used by the user Netflix, but in the news recently because it is moving forward to try to block VPN access and when you see an address but it is recognized. above, as a VPN server it will simply block access and say you can't get in here, so as a summary, every time you connect to the internet an IP address is used to route traffic to the server and vice versa, the server will probably will register that address. and your phone company will also know that the government has access to that data if you use the appropriate legal framework to request that information from the phone company, but also the mere fact that you used an IP address that it can actually provide. removes a lot of information about where you are when you use public Wi-Fi hotspots, when you buy things online, or these things are open and controlled depending on where you are in the world, meaning you may not have access.

For certain things, you may have to pay higher prices for certain things. Now a VPN allows you to connect to another server in another country and then connect further to the Internet. It has the advantage of a different geolocation, which means you can avoid certain things. access restrictions and is encrypted, meaning if you were using your local coffee shop that day, that data is now encrypted. My name is Gary Sims from an authority.If you did, give it a thumbs up, don't forget to subscribe. On Andrew aura T's YouTube channel, you should really download the Danger Authority apps, you get access to all our content on your mobile phone and last but not least, don't forget to visit Andrew Authority Tranquil because we are your source for everything related to Android.