A worried Nude Security reader called Greg lately requested us to say several words about Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs.

Generally, you use a VPN as a way to “resource” your network traffic from some unpredictable distant place – one that you do not and can not control – onto your home network.

To do so, all the network packets are encrypted by you in your notebook or mobile apparatus, and tunnel them back to your house or office utilizing the web only as a conduit.

There, you send them out as routine web traffic as though you were sitting at home or at work and decrypt them.

Your traffic is seen by the other ending as though it responds to you there, and came from the office network.

As well as they are decrypted by your device as though the last, untrustworthy from office to, say, coffee shop never occurred.

Advantages and disadvantages of VPNs

The disadvantages are apparent, though much less spectacular as you may believe.

Second, particularly when you’re abroad, browser packets between, say, a closeby server in Mountain View and your mobile in Santa Clara may wind up travelling via, say, France and back. (One intercontinental detour for the requests, as well as another one for the answers.)

But the negatives are usually outweighed by the edges: you’re no less safe than you’d be at work, and the threat is mostly neutralised by you also to your information introduced by unknown, sniffable, perhaps-hacked Wifi access points.

This means you are able to take advantage of free Wifi at coffee shops rather than utilizing your mobile connection at high-priced roaming rates when you are on the road.

However there are several other reasons people seek out VPNs, specifically the capacity to come on the net from someplace else.

Primarily, you are covering your courses, or at least it feels like you’re.

Second, by feigning to be in another nation, you can avoid those pesky geoblockers that stop you seeing for seeing in your part of the world content that’s not licensed.

And that, in a different nutshell, is a VPN-for-obscurity.

What concerned our reader Greg is that it looks as though both types of VPN mistake.

More particularly, a lot of folks appear wrong to be assuming that VPNs constructed mainly for place- functions that are shifting are also, ipso facto, great for privacy, security and anonymity.