[Technology] VPN is it beneficial

[Tom Hark Preston Park]

the deals are for 2 or 3 years and being 74 I wonder about the long term. Any advice or guidance would be appreciated

Could you maybe just lie about your age on the application form? 

 

[btnbelle]

Yes. Virgin are blocking the majority of my streams, so I run Opera VPN and all good, including Mobdro. The reason for this is because they think you are connecting to a vpn site and know nothing about the streaming.

Thanks, I'm on Virgin too. Thats really good to know. Can't wait for the game tomorrow to try it out.

 

[swindonseagull]

I did a google search and it told how to turn it on. I have clicked in the box for VPN so assume that it is switched on.

click the VPN box ( next to the padlock by the address bar)
Then again click to on.
If VPN is now in BLUE then its on.

 

[Captain Sensible]

The premier league now block uk access to all Iptv servers for the duration of any premier league matches, so a vpn is essential. Even Mobdro sports channels are inaccessible during matches without a vpn.

They don’t block mine

 

[Mtoto]

There are numerous benefits of a VPN. A paid VPN will give you far greater speeds and allow you to watch higher quality content than a free VPN.

Benefits of a VPN:

- Allows you to watch all Brighton games that are not on Sky/BT if you sign up to NBC Sports Gold ($50 for a season pass). Useful if you don't want to be pissing about with a dodgy stream every week.
- Allows you to use P2P services for movies, TV shows and sports streaming (these generally provide the highest quality content, and a VPN is essential for these services to prevent copyright holders/your ISP tracking you).
- Allows you to find streams and torrents that are blocked by UK ISPs, providing you a greater choice of content to choose from.
- If you have subscription services like Netflix, a VPN will allow you to watch shows and series that have not yet been released in the UK.

For football streaming, all the best free streams are posted on Reddit Soccer Streams. The best streams (full HD) on Reddit are AceSteams, which is a P2P service which you will have to install. Because it's P2P, a VPN is absolutely essential.

I'm not too bothered about streaming away games, but I do like to watch Albion games that are on Sky/BT when I'm out of the country, since I'm shelling out a great deal of money for my Virgin subscription every month and that's one of the main reasons why.

Until a few months ago, Tunnelbear worked like a dream but recently it's stopped completely, both on Virgin Go and Sky Sports, and I get a message saying that content is "not available in you location", which suggests they know I'm not in the country. If you can recommend a replacement for my once-trusty bear, I'd be very grateful.

 

[fleet]

IpVanish seems to have just stopped working for me - can’t get BBC when out of the UK!

 

[marlowe]

VPN is not a streaming service, it reroutes your traffic via a Virtual Private Network.

When you connect to a website it goes:
[your house]===[website]===[your house]
Traffic is clear for all to see (the actual data might be encrypted but the traffic, IP addresses etc are clear)


If you use a VPN it goes
[your house]***[VPN provider]===[website]===[VPN provider]***[your house]
Traffic is sent on an encrypted tunnel to/from your computer and so everything between you and the provider is secret (the *** bit).
The VPN provider will have servers in a number of countries so if you want to watch iplayer and set your VPN location as France traffic will go from BBC to France and back. This slows it down a bit but can be useful.

Most VPN providers do not keep logs so no-one knows where the traffic originates.

Isn't that what TOR does or is that something different. I know TOR is supposed to hide your ip address so would TOR serve the same purpose?

 

[maffew]

Isn't that what TOR does or is that something different. I know TOR is supposed to hide your ip address so would TOR serve the same purpose?

TOR does a heck of a lot mre than hide you IP, it will encrypt your data to several thousand layers, plus I think it is pretty impossible to break and intercept any traffic, if you google the onion route/ring it can explain stuff a lot better than I could entertain

 

[French Seagull]

What is Google VPL please

 

[Is it PotG?]

What is Google VPL please

 

[happypig]

Isn't that what TOR does or is that something different. I know TOR is supposed to hide your ip address so would TOR serve the same purpose?

TOR would be no good for streaming.
TOR is called an Onion Router. Think of an onion having many layers. You "enter" at a fixed point on the outermost layer and exit at a random point. You can set it to go down further layer(s), each time entering/exiting the network at a random point.

An example, you want to get a page from abcde.co.uk which is hosted in London. Without TOR you simply go to the page and the content is sent to your browser. The server knows where you are becuase it has your IP address as part of the HTTP GET request that it replies to.
Activate TOR and you send the same GET but it pops out randomly in Argentina and the web page content is sent back there and forwarded to you. Activate another layer and you send the request, it goes to Argentina then goes another level down and pops out in Singapore. The London server sends the page to Singapore, which sends it back to Argentina, which sends it to you.
So abcde.co.uk thinks you are in Singapore. The servers in Argentina knows you are in the UK but doesn't know what is in the packets it has forwarded because they were encrypted before it got them.
In theory it's very secure but has very high latency as traffic can literally circle the globe just to travel 50 miles.

 

[seagulls4ever]

I'm not too bothered about streaming away games, but I do like to watch Albion games that are on Sky/BT when I'm out of the country, since I'm shelling out a great deal of money for my Virgin subscription every month and that's one of the main reasons why.

Until a few months ago, Tunnelbear worked like a dream but recently it's stopped completely, both on Virgin Go and Sky Sports, and I get a message saying that content is "not available in you location", which suggests they know I'm not in the country. If you can recommend a replacement for my once-trusty bear, I'd be very grateful.

I can't personally recommend one as that's not what I use a VPN for, so I don't know which ones work for that purpose. Maybe someone else can help.

 

[hitony]

click the VPN box ( next to the padlock by the address bar)
Then again click to on.
If VPN is now in BLUE then its on.

What if its orange like mine is? but it says its turned on?

 

[happypig]

What if its orange like mine is? but it says its turned on?

Have you got the latest version of Opera ? I think there were issues with the VPN about a year back (I have it installed but dont use it myself)

 

[hitony]

Have you got the latest version of Opera ? I think there were issues with the VPN about a year back (I have it installed but dont use it myself)

Think so i only downloaded it a few hours ago it seems to work fine as a browser but i havnt a clue how to use it to stream etc

 

[happypig]

Think so i only downloaded it a few hours ago it seems to work fine as a browser but i havnt a clue how to use it to stream etc

Could be your AV blocking it, try turning it off (temporarily) and google "what's my IP?" (don't go to the link, just see what google says). Then turn AV back on and do it again.

 

[BensGrandad]

Mine is showing blue and on so assume it is working. Thanks for the advice.

 

[marlowe]

TOR would be no good for streaming.
TOR is called an Onion Router. Think of an onion having many layers. You "enter" at a fixed point on the outermost layer and exit at a random point. You can set it to go down further layer(s), each time entering/exiting the network at a random point.

An example, you want to get a page from abcde.co.uk which is hosted in London. Without TOR you simply go to the page and the content is sent to your browser. The server knows where you are becuase it has your IP address as part of the HTTP GET request that it replies to.
Activate TOR and you send the same GET but it pops out randomly in Argentina and the web page content is sent back there and forwarded to you. Activate another layer and you send the request, it goes to Argentina then goes another level down and pops out in Singapore. The London server sends the page to Singapore, which sends it back to Argentina, which sends it to you.
So abcde.co.uk thinks you are in Singapore. The servers in Argentina knows you are in the UK but doesn't know what is in the packets it has forwarded because they were encrypted before it got them.
In theory it's very secure but has very high latency as traffic can literally circle the globe just to travel 50 miles.

So essentially it would be far too slow for streaming?

 

[happypig]

So essentially it would be far too slow for streaming?

Yes and no. It would be slow but if it established a stream then it *could* work ok in theory but it would be unreliable.
With a file download if a packet goes missing the receiver requests it be retransmitted. This is more likely over a TOR network as you cannot be sure how resilient the link is between servers but, due to the nature of TCP/IP it doesn't matter. With a stream, though, you cannot request a packet be resent as the server sends them in a stream. a VPN is a fixed path (in as much as an IP network can have fixed paths) and so is more reliable.

 

[gullty]

IpVanish seems to have just stopped working for me - can’t get BBC when out of the UK!

you now need a private ipn as bbc detects more than one connection per address. Extra $5 a month from Astrill.com.