Der Krawattentraeger

This guest post is written by Niels Peen, who is a versatilist and techie currently residing somewhere on the wonderful island of Hong Kong. Having put his expertise to work for a number of industries and NGO’s, he’s currently focused on bringing useful corporate technologies to small businesses and consumers.

If you would Google for VPN’s (virtual private networks) a 10-15 years ago, you would run into products and discussions focusing on replacing expensive leased-lines and dial-up connections with low-cost Internet based alternatives. VPN’s being a corporate application, a lot of effort went into the security and platform support of different VPN technologies. Cisco, Microsoft and many others made sure their products supported VPN’s out of the box.

Fast-forward to current day Google results and things look very different. While still faithfully performing its original purpose, VPN’s have turned out to be the swiss-knife of computer networking and are applied in countless of new applications. Interestingly, not all of these applications are focused on the enterprise. In fact, various types of consumer VPN services are booming business.

Todays Google results will include anything from privacy-aware people looking to hide their IP address, to groups trying to install VPN’s on their Apple TV so they can enjoy Hulu and other US-centric services outside the US. When it comes to consumer VPN’s I roughly identify 3 different groups:
Continue reading “China and the “No-Internet-Thing”? Watch out for this – VPN’s: reinvented”