VPN and other internet anonymity tools have become a norm after witnessing the activists and social benefactors, highlighting the government/private organisations responsible for breaching the user privacy. Edward Snowden and Wikileaks Top Secret documents made it clear that privacy is just a hoax as it was brought to the spotlight that our own government is monitoring online user activity and phone calls. Using VPN or similar tools to encrypt our important data while accessing the internet on the public network has become a necessity. Well, this article is not about how we ended up like this, but to discuss one such anonymity tool called RocketVPN.
Rocket VPN is a free app (in-app purchase required for unlimited data) for Android that encrypts your data, unblocks geographically restricted content and keeps you anonymous for a safer, better browsing experience. RocketVPN is particularly designed to encrypt Android and iOS smartphone’s network, which is a good thing and a tradeoff for some. It is nice to have an app specially designed for major smartphone platform as it will integrate with it flawlessly, however, for power users who prefer “One plan for all” would be disappointed.
RocketVPN is an application developed by renowned developer liquidum, dedicated to designing, developing and marketing innovative utility apps for the mobile market, including The Cleaner, Rocket VPN, Hemlock and Battery Time for Android and Presto! and Fast for iOS. Liquidum’s apps are distributed through the Google Play Store and Apple App Store and have been downloaded over 30 million times.
RocketVPN like any other VPN is capable of securing the network from intruders and data snooping while lifting the restriction imposed by the ISP (Internet Service Provider) or websites. The popularity of the app can be determined by the fact that it has already been downloaded up to 5 Million times on Google Play Store.
The two main features of a VPN that make it a powerful tool of privacy: Firstly, Your data is encrypted, meaning that you can browse the Internet over unsecured Wi-Fi networks (like at Starbucks) without worrying, or you can rest assured that your ISP isn’t spying on your Web activities.
Secondly, you can bypass geo-restrictions. Americans can access the UK-only BBC iPlayer, Indians can access US-only services like Netflix, and so on. Not only can your location not be tracked, but the contents of your data can’t be either. This will really help you browse the Web anonymously.
During our test, we noticed some drop in overall speed but it is evitable for any VPN network depending on the location of the server you choose.
The minimalistic material UI and interactive environment do the trick while still holding some pleasant animations. However, it does not offer unlimited free data usage. You’ll have to buy the subscription starting at $2.99/month or $29.99/year if you are expecting to exceed 500MB monthly data limit.
I have reviewed many VPN and web proxy services in the past, but you’d find a very few of them offering a free service that can be used conventionally anywhere, on demand. Recently, while I was in Jaipur, India, I encountered an internet service provider which was very restrictive about the websites I visit using their connection; blocking many P2P and media streaming websites. Typically, I would use one of the many VPN services that I am subscribed to, but unfortunately, I didn’t have access to my computer, which means none of the VPN credentials were available at my disposal. I tried using some web proxy services such as Kproxy, Hidemyass and proxy site among many others but sadly, none of them could properly render all the website I visited. Most of the web proxy servers do no process the complex queries required for some section of websites to work in a manner that it would have with our regular internet connection.
This is where I felt the need to use public/premium Proxy IP addresses, which once was my favourite anonymity tool to hide personal data while accessing some websites back in high school. Public/premium Proxy IPs works very differently than VPNs as it is limited to your web browser, while traditional VPNs encrypt all your incoming/outgoing traffic to or from your computer.
What happens when you visit a website without Proxy or VPN services:
In order to access the website, you are connecting directly to the server where the resources of the website are stored. The website and your ISP can log following information that can be used to uniquely identify every user who uses these resources.
It knows your external IP – that’s a piece of information about you, probably not enough to identify you with certainty, but enough to find out your approximate geographical location.
It knows the cookies you have on your computer – you may delete them later, but you definitely don’t delete them each time you load a website.
It knows what browser you’re using and what plugins you have installed. Every time you visit a website, your browser sends the User-Agent string which can be used to identify a browser, its version, OS version, and sometimes installed browser extensions.
It knows where you’re coming from. An HTTP referrer (sic!) is sent each time you click a link. Basically, when you navigate from one site to another, the target site will know the URL or previous site.
Additionally, there are more advanced tracking algorithms that just won’t be easy to shrug off when you require a total anonymity or bypass your ISPs restrictions. Yes, there are tools that can help you block cookies, UAs, and referrers in your browser, but there are more programs that use HTTP. Most of these programs won’t let you hamper the inbuilt settings and mechanism of their service protocol.
Using VPN and Web Proxy services to lift ISP restrictions and hide personal identity
Online VPN services, VPN providers, Web proxy, Socks Proxy and Proxy sites are some of the most effective tools that can help you get rid of the restrictions imposed by your ISP and help keep your identity safe on the internet.
We have reviewed plenty of VPN services on our website, which can be trusted to handle our precious personal details. At the end, we really have to be careful that the company we choose must be capable of handling the individual information anonymously without any data leak.
If anonymity is not your concern then you can use some of the best free Online VPN extensions for available for your browser, which is ranked according to their reputation and efficiency on digitfreak. These browser extensions work very similarly to the proxy IPs that we are going to use, as they only encrypt the traffic of your browser it is installed on.
How proxy IP helps hide your true identity?
A proxy (technically an open proxy) server is a computer that acts as an intermediary between your computer and the internet. Any traffic routed through a proxy server will appear to come from its IP address, not your computer’s.
Unlike VPN, proxy servers don’t usually encrypt your internet traffic which allows them to handle large user pool with insignificant resource requirements.
If you use Proxy server on your browser, it can alter your internet connection to hide your true identity or remove any ban imposed by the ISP:
It can replace the User-Agent string with some meaningless string or strip out the referrers.
It can accept all cookies, but not pass them to you, or it can block them altogether.
It’s the proxy that’s connecting to the server, not you, so your IP isn’t disclosed.
A proxy can be set up to work system-wide, so programs won’t be able to bypass it.
There are also some extra features that a proxy can provide:
It can compress your traffic to save some bandwidth.
It can cache files to give a little boost to page load times.
It can strip ads from websites before they reach your computer.
It can block malicious websites.
And finally, it can be used not only against filters but also as a filter!
HTTP and SOCKS proxy
Web Proxy services utilise one of the two different protocols to connect with the internet. The HTTP and SOCKS work very differently as they are capable of handling a different level of internet protocols.
The HTTP protocol is designed to interpret traffic at the HTTP level, which means that it can only handle traffic that starts with http:// or https://, i.e. web pages*. Whereas the SOCKS servers do not interpret network traffic at all, which makes them much more flexible, but because they are usually handling more traffic, usually slower. The big advantage of the SOCKS protocol is that it supports any kind of internet traffic, such as POP3 and SMTP for emails, IRC chat, FTP for uploading files to websites, and torrent files.
Best Free & Premium Proxy IP list
On my quest to find the best free proxy IP list, I stumbled upon the website called Hidester – “Free Public Premium Proxy List (https SSL, socks 4/5)” among many others which offer useful free tools. Hidester has a section on their website that lists all the active proxy IPs documented according to various categories and efficiency.
The powerful search option and elegant website design make it easier to find the suitable IP address according to our preference. It feels much better and refreshing when compared to other popular proxy lists available on the internet. However, I don’t want you to get confused or mislead by the fact that this website has a fluid user interface and likeable interactive environment with the ability to choose any IP from the list blindly and think that it will work. It is true that Hidester does check all the IP addresses for their availability and performance (especially the premium ones), but not all of them will work. In my test, I had to test out few of them before I found the working Proxy IP that was in the list of filtered IPs matching my search criteria.
One you find that perfect public IP address, you’re good to go. After that, you basically have to put it in your browser and forget about it. Unless you want to browse the internet with your real IP address for some reason.
Surprisingly, I didn’t notice any significant drop in my speed. Maybe, I was lucky to pick the Public Proxy IP that had perfect infrastructure to back it up, or the Hidester does actually make a list that includes only fast Proxy Servers.
You can test it out and let us know in comments whether you had a similar experience. I would love to hear if others get as lucky as I was; If you do, I would love to recommend it on a larger scale and approach them for partnership.
Netizens have a handful of options to protect their Privacy over the internet, and security experts also recommend practicing the standard protocols to prevent identity theft and security breach. Many of us are ready to implement these security layers to our system, but the main issue is that they are not always free or affordable.
A secure router like ‘bitdefender box‘ can provide highly secured communication line to all the wireless devices that are connected to it, but currently it is only available in US and costs $199. There are premium VPN services that can provide similar protection over multiple devices, such as hideipVPN, CactusVPN, VPN4ALL, VyprVPN etc. Then there are DNS services like Unotelly, which are capable of lifting the restriction from geo-blocked websites. We also covered the basics of wireless security earlier, which gives you a good idea how to protect yourself from the interception of wireless traffic.
All of these options are highly recommended and secure way to access the internet, but if you’re like me who just wants to access the geo-blocked websites while keeping the identity private, these “Free” Google Chrome extensions will get you going.
The recent melodramatic event in India, where the government took a major decision to block more than 800 porn websites in the country sparked outrage. Free porn websites, including Pornhub.com, xvideos.com, playboy.com and xxx.com are blocked by ISPs in India and many other countries. These restriction imposed by the Indian government was ordered to be lifted, ruling out the previous decision, but ISPs choose not to unblock these websites to this date.
One should always keep a handy note of these free Chrome VPN tools to bypass the restriction on content accessibility.
Here are some Free Google Chrome VPN extensions to unblock almost any website:
ZenMate
This is probably the best free VPN service, that provides unlimited usage without any logical limitations. Of course you are limited to the number of server locations you can use, which includes US, Romania, Germany and HongKong. We tested Zenmate to unblock some website which are currently being blocked by my ISP, and it perfectly lifted restrictions. We were actually amazed because we could stream videos and other heavy contents over this secure network, like there was nothing in between, throttling the speed.
When we tested Zenmate for DNS leak, it returned the owner as “Hurricane Electric,” which apparently is a global internet service provider. So we can vouch that it does pretty good work at hiding your information unless zenmate or Hurricane is keeping your activity records.
Zenmate is available for cross-platforms, which includes Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Android, and iOS. If you like their free chrome extension, you can even try premium plans which can protect all your devices over the network.
The only reason we are not listing this service at the top, it is a comparitively new company. The service is open source, and completely free. It is the only free VPN service we know that doesn’t sell you ads or offers alternate premium plans to bump up the speed or data usage. It is FREE 100%, with the only drawback being available 1 US server location which cannot be changed.
We love how they disclose their monthly earning from the apps they recommend under the partnership with third party networks. Betternet is available for all the platforms – Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Windows, Android, and iOS.
CyberGhost is a reputed VPN company, which proved to be a good tool to unblock banned websites by their free Google Chrome extension. It is a company recognized by many reputed tech blogs — wired, TechCrunch, the guardian and chip to name a few. It is a big name and very trusted.
We liked the simple UI, and limited options to play with. It offers 3 server locations – United States, Germany and Netherlands which cannot be extended by a premium service unless you happen to vouch for a paid VPN account that protects entire network on your computer.
There is a dedicated free Android app, but it didn’t perform quite well during our test. Maybe it was some glitch at their end during that session.
We also tested ultrasurf, Gom VPN, dotVPN, Unlimited Free VPN – Hola and TunnelBear — they were offering either limited bandwidth and required registration or leaked DNS information and forced advertisements, which isn’t good if you wanted to hide your online identity.
These tools are highly effective and we tested them for DNS and information leaks, but keep in mind that they are not as secure as a reputed premium VPN services and are not recommended for those who are seeking top-notch security.
Most of these services might be keeping activity logs. The owners of the services above have the ability to associate your personal IP address with the names of all the sites you connect to and store this data indefinitely, which can identify you if authorized personnel to contact them for investigation of your involvement in a suspicious activity. This does not mean that they do log or store it indefinitely but they may and you need to trust whatever their policy says.
Everything you do over the internet is being monitored, believe it or not, your VPN provider can only do so much to keep your identity private. Many of us think that using a VPN will make you an anonymous ghost on the internet, and untraceable with the click of a button — you’ll be surprised by the fact that everything you’re being told by popular VPN companies is a lie. Yes, it is true that VPNs can hide you from direct tracking/tracing by analytic codes on websites, and it hardens the network security, but it has its limitation. When a VPN company claims that they can give a degree of anonymity and privacy that any VPN service is virtually incapable of, you’re better off without it.
I was able to trace one such example few days ago, where I warned my VPN readers to immediately disable WebRTC on the web browser they’re using on the computer. Google Chrome is your privacy nightmare, because it doesn’t officially allow you to disable WebRTC feature on the browser, and third-party extensions/scripts are not trustworthy. If you are a privacy freak and a guy with ‘tin foil,’ I would immediately suggest you to start using Firefox and remove anything that says “Google” on your computer. Their products and user privacy are shady, and they became data hungry lately – so much for “Don’t be evil.” While there are no evidence or data to back up my opinions, but if you’re privacy freak, I would recommend to stay clear of Google.
Let’s not make this article all about why you shouldn’t rely on VPN, rather we should focus on why we chose VyprVPN and recommending it to our readers. One of the most obvious reason would be the transparency in their terms of service, and trust me there are very few of them who do provide what’s been advertised. Almost all VPN providers would claim at some point that they are capable of providing 100% anonymous internet presence while keeping 0% user data on their server. When they have no control how a simple browser exploit can reveal original IP address, how come they claim to make anyone using their service 100% anonymous? – VyprVPN makes no such claim.
While VPN service providers are competing each others with massive outreach with “anonymous service” they can provide, but the fine print in their privacy policy suggests they log a significant amount of customer data. VyprVPN stands out as a purple cow by informing users what actually a VPN service can truly do for you.
We tested several other VPNs before, and none of them actually proved to be as robust, reliable and transparent as VyprVPN. During 1 months extensive test, we found some uniquely engineered features one can rely on.
The features and state of reliability offered by VyprVPN might change over a period of time, and we can only vouch for the service offered during DigitFreak’s testing phase*. VyprVPN and its parent company GoldenFrog is not associated with DigitFreak and its services. This review is independent, and DigitFreak cannot be held responsible for any personal loss or influence of user decision to purchase their service.
Registration & Price
VyprVPN has incorporated an interesting business model, which allows you to start a free trial of any existing plans they offer. You’ll not find “buy now” button anywhere on their pricing model, rather there is a “Start Free Trial” option that allows you to test the service before making the purchase. However, due to spams and invalid attempts to use their service for free, they need you to attach a payment information during the signup, which includes credit card or Paypal account. It is little limited to the payment options, as you cannot pay by bitcoin, Alipay or any other third party payment gateway, which is little weird considering they have been targeting Chinese market with their proprietary Chameleon encryption technology.
The company is offering a wide range of plans to choose, which includes – VyprVPN Free($0), Basic($6.67 to $9.99), Pro ($8.33 to $14.99) and Premier ($10 to $19.99) — which bends slightly toward the heavy budget for the premium service. We were surprised to see that Free plan is way better than their ‘VyprVPN Basic’ Plan, which only has an advantage of the unlimited bandwidth. If you don’t need high bandwidth, Free option is something that can help you stay anonymous, but again there are plenty of other Free VPNs available for casual users with minimum restrictions, and unlimited bandwidth. One reason you’d probably want to use “VyprVPN Free” plan is to test their service without revealing your credit card information.
We wanted to test their service with full capability, hence, we registered a “VyprVPN Premier” test account. The only difference with their pro and premier plans is the number of concurrent devices you can simultaneously use on a single account. We filled the registration form with required information and credit card details, and before hitting the “start Free Trial” button we were informed that we’ll be charged US$119.99 if we fail to cancel our subscription within the trial period of 3 days. That’s fair, and it is a good thing that they are making it clear that we might get charged automatically if we don’t cancel the subscription.
Dashboard
Once we received the login information and account details, we jumped directly into the ‘Control Panel’ or, the Dashboard. The moment you log into the ‘Client Area,’ you’d know they’re very serious about positive customer experience, everything is so neat and well oriented that it feels like you’re special to them. While most of the VPN providers use similar backend design,
Infrastructure
Golden Frog’s founders are Internet veterans who have owned and operated Internet businesses since the dawn of the public Internet in 1994. Although incorporated in Switzerland, Golden Frog, GmbH, is a global service provider committed to preserving an open and secure Internet experience while respecting user privacy throughout the world.
VyprVPN is one of the few options available right now which has total control over their network; you can literally count the number of services that owns their own tier-1 network — Only other service that I personally know would be IPVanish. This means that no part of the service is outsourced to 3rd parties. Other VPN providers use 3rd parties to host their servers. Golden Frog even owns and operate their own DNS service, VyprDNS, to add further privacy and security for their users. Golden Frog offers a 100% private, no-logging DNS service to complement VyprVPN. VyprDNS is Golden Frog’s 100% owned and operated DNS service available exclusively for VyprVPN users.
server locations and IP acquisition
VyprVPN doesn’t only boast their Tier-1 network and fully private DNS service, but they also excel in server location availability and IP acquisition. This is something you won’t find by services provided by some of the best VPN service providers.
Some VPN services limit user bandwidth, speed, and server switching. VyprVPN does not. Switching between server clusters is easy and effective with over 200,000 IP addresses for its users. It even has a Fastest Server setting so you can automatically be connected to the fastest server available for your location. At the time of Writing this review, VyprVPN offers servers in North America, Europe, Oceania, Central America, South America, Asia and Middle East.
Logging and user data retention can be an issue for those who are involved in illegal activities, and VyprVPN does strictly follow DMCA notices. They claim not to disclose user information to the third party requests, how they do take actions to mitigate the crimes on their network by suspending or terminating the user account under the 3 strike rule.
Software
The software client of VyprVPN is easy to use, and mostly flawless on all platforms. We used it on 2 smartphones and a computer, running Android and Windows 10 respectively. We had few hiccups on Windows 10 powered device, which was quickly mitigated by the support team, more on in later.
The software and mobile apps are streamlined, and you’d find similar options and UI experience on any platform you use it on. It is nice to see that they worked with the developer closely to make sure we get the same features and UI design on all platforms, which makes you feel at home anywhere you go.
We had a little hiccup on both mobile and desktop software, as the connection was automatically dropped without any interference, but it was occasional and didn’t bother us much. Everything else worked as it should, and we couldn’t stress much to point out how much we loved their consistent cross-platform software and apps.
Feature Highlights:
Autologin/Autoconnect
Choose Autoconnect server
Sort servers by ping time, city or country
Choose server from map view
Check IP address to verify the VPN connection
Visual system tray indicator (Blue when disconnected/Red when connected)
Smart Server Selection by desired use: (Speed, Video Streaming, Gaming, etc)
DNS Leak Protection
VPN Kill Switch/ Auto-disconnect on dropped VPN connection
While all of these features are amazing and really effective to ensure a good user experience, I would like to discuss some of them.
Kill Switch
Usually, our internet connection works pretty solid and stable. However, you cannot deny the times when you loose the internet connection simply because your router would restart automatically, or someone turns it off unknowingly. It happens to best connections. Sometimes, we forget to turn on the VPN before surfing the internet and regret doing so when we finally realise that we have been sharing sensitive data without the protection.
The ‘Kill Switch’ is a switch that automatically kills or blocks your internet connection whenever VyprVPN is disconnected. Except for network communications related to running VyprVPN services, Kill Switch will block all other Internet and network communications. The kill switch can be enabled in VyprVPN for Windows and Mac.
Encryption Protocol
VyprVPN offers multiple encryption protocols so one can choose their preferred level of encryption. Each of them varies according to their strength of security and interference with original internet speed. It includes OpenVPN, L2TP, PPTP and Chameleon (proprietary technology).
VyprDNS
Golden Frog doesn’t only boast their Tier-1 Network, but they also offer a private secure DNS server to protect from any DNS leaks and third party reliability. When you’re trusting them for your online security, then it only makes sense that you’d want a single company to handle all your traffic. If you don’t know what is DNS, simply head over to this wiki. In short, DNS (Domain Name System) is a service that translates hostnames (such as http://digitfreak.com) into computer-readable IP address (178.220.123.121), so your computer can communicate with the desired host. It is actually very effective since it protects you from DNS leak over the network. We had a positive test result, which showed VyprVPN is pretty solid service.
VyprDNS is Golden Frog’s 100% owned and operated DNS service available exclusively for VyprVPN users. They developed a zero-knowledge VyprDNS service to increase user privacy and defeat censorship across the world. VyprDNS is built into VyprVPN and when you connect, you will automatically use VyprDNS. Please note, VyprDNS cannot be used separately from VyprVPN.
Speed
GoldenFrog (The company that owns VyprVPN) maintains all their own server infrastructure and utilizes high-speed server clusters. The benefit of all this? Faster speeds and fewer dropped connections.
Vypr is one of the fastest VPN’s we’ve tested. In fact, nearly all the servers we tested maxed out our ISP connection or revoked the throttles put by our ISP. It’s no wonder that VyprVPN made our list of the fastest VPN providers. If you have a faster internet connection than we do, you will actually experience faster speeds than our test shows.
However, When connected to our local nearest server (India), we experience greater latency or ping time that we did with the USA or other server locations we tested, which is little weird as servers in India should’ve had better latency. Other than that, we could easily stream youtube videos and unblock geo-blocked websites without any hiccups.
Without VPN
USA server
UK Server
We were surprised too. UK server test returned false speed test result, reporting higher download speed that our ISP’s restriction. We did experience faster connections while connected to UK & Australia location.
and it was same when connected to Perth, Australia
India Server
Support & Customer Care
usually, we don’t actually contact the support team, unless there are some serious issues that we couldn’t fix on our own. All our systems at the office and my personal computer have been upgraded to Windows 10, that leaves us with some software refusing to cope with the new environment — VyprVPN is no exception. We didn’t face the specific issue right away, but it was only triggered when we used “Connect on Start” features — “Connect VyprVPN when Windows starts up” and “Connect VyprVPN on application launch.”
When these options were turned on, it would throw the error which reads “The VyprVPN Service could not be contacted. Would you like to attempt to start the service?” Even when we choose “Yes,” it didn’t work for several attempts before it would trigger the VyprVPN client. It interfered with our computer default functions, and it wouldn’t let our computer to shutdown.
However, we were able to solve this issue by starting the VyprVpn service manually from “service manager,” but it wasn’t a proper solution. So we pinged the support team without letting them know that it can be easily fixed manually. It could be a great help for them as it would minimize the time required to pinpoint the cause of this error.
We were expecting the delay in response, so the review team shifted the focus on different tasks. When we checked back after few hours, we were surprised to see a response from their side within 3 minutes of our query submission.
They finally pinpoint the error, ensured us that they informed the developers and told us that we should expect the update within few days. We received the update after 2 days, and it solved the issue. 10/10 for support.
What do we think?
VyprVPN is pretty reliable and professional service that will provide top-notch online security and premium quality if you can afford its above-average prices. Their Teir-1 network acquisition and a large number of shared IP address pool are going to capture a huge percentage of the VPN market because it ensures better internet speed than most of the competitor providers. We heard poor reviews about their support team, but we were satisfied with their pleasant customer support. Their limited payment method, keeping logs for a questionable period of time (30 days), DMCA compliance and geo-IP workaround keeps us from recommending it to everyone. However, they do certain things the way that no other competitor really does. The fact that VYPRVPN was recently elected the best VPN for France by VPNmag, just makes it superior to most of its competitors.
The secure protocols, encryption levels, and additional service will keep your data safe and with a widespread server location, your identity will remain secure and private. If you need a VPN service provider that can keep you safe and secure while still delivering the actual Internet speed, you should definitely go for this service.
VPN (Virtual Private Network) is one of the most popular security measure practised by netizens to secure their online identity and privacy. VPNs are great for security, but one of the big reasons many people use one is to mask or change their IP address. It is also a great service to access the geo-blocked contents, and check whether your ISP is throttling your connection. What most of the VPN service providers doesn’t reveal when you subscribe to their services is that you’re not protected from “webRTC IP leak,” unless you manually take actions against it.
A very concerning security flaw revealed earlier this year that it’s easy to see the real IP-addresses of many VPN users through a WebRTC feature. With a few lines of code, websites can make requests to STUN servers and log users’ VPN IP-address and the “hidden” home IP-address, as well as local network addresses. Advertisers, data brokers, and governments can use it to peek through your VPN to find out where your connection is really coming from.
What is this? Is my privacy at risk?
If you’re using Mozilla Firefox version 22+, Google Chrome version 23+ or any other web browser which are based on these are vulnerable to WebRTC by default. And No, your VPN service providers cannot do anything to fix it.
Actually, WebRTC is an API definition draughted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that supports browser-to-browser applications for voice calling, video chat, and P2P file sharing without the need for either internal or external plugins. It is enabled on all modern web browsers by default, although it is a really useful piece of programme which enables you to utilise video calling and multimedia transmission right through your browser but due to the nature of this extension, your real IP address and privacy is in danger.
If you’re a VPN user and you didn’t block webRTC on your web browser manually, you’re at great risk. Unfortunately, Most of the VPN providers doesn’t warn you about this vulnerability that poses a higher risk to your privacy.
As far as we know, sites aren’t taking advantage of the flaw yet, but considering services like Hulu, Spotify, Netflix, and others are taking steps to identify and lock out VPN users, it’s not a stretch to assume they’ll start. If you use services like BitTorrent, have a set-top box like a Roku, or just stream music or movies on your computer through a site that’s not available in your country (or you’re an expat and live abroad), the apps and services you use could suddenly stop working.
How to check if your VPN is affected?
If you’re not using any privacy tools, then this vulnerability won’t affect you. However, if you’re using a VPN service or similar tools to hide your identity than make sure your tool doesn’t leak IP address.
Now, login to VPN and go to this page – IpLeak test by Hidester, and check if it reveals your real IP address you got from the previous step. You should look at “Your IP address – WebRTC detection.“
Currently, I am personally using VyprVPN for my next article, reviewing the service they provide. I am glad they warned the users about this security flaw right after it was first reported. The fix is much easier to implement on Firefox because you can disable it without using any third party extension while Chrome users require instaling an extension to disable webRTC in their browser.
Instructions:
Mozilla Firefox:
WebRTC in Mozilla Firefox is partially supported by Firefox 22, and it’s enabled by default. To disable WebRTC in Firefox, go to about:config and toggle media.peerconnection.enabled to false.
Google Chrome:
WebRTC in Google Chrome is supported and enabled by default since Chrome version 23 (and based on it, ex. Opera, Vivaldi). You cannot disable the webRTC on Google Chrome browsers by default and it can only be achieved using a third party Official Google extension.
This vulnerability is serious, but on the bright side, it’s easily mitigated. If anything, it’s a reminder to never take your privacy for granted, even if you use all the right tools to protect it.
Today every tech savvy and DigitFreak reader are well aware of the fact that pretty much everything that we do on the internet is being logged or monitored. However, we are not frightened of these basic privacy threats because we Freak’s are good at cloaking our movements over the virtual world.
To prevent the online snooping and hide our identity on the internet, millions of people have signed up to a VPN service. Unfortunately, not all VPN services are as anonymous as they claim.
There are multiple methods to hide your identity over the internet, but using a VPN server is the cheapest service that can effectively make your presence almost untraceable on the internet. It should be noted that efficiency of a given method varies according to the service provider and the way you implement them.
I did explained it on the previous VPN review, but I will quote it again.
For example, if you are using a VPN service from Provider X and Provider Y – you may end up with different service quality and most importantly, the security of your identity over the internet. As mentioned earlier, not all service providers are honest and give you the total value for money.
Most of them do provide facilities from cheap data centers and often overload their servers. We also mentioned earlier that newer VPN service provider has faster servers and better services compared to some old and established companies. New companies have less crowded servers and latest technology to balance the traffic over their data centers.
How I found HideIPVPN:
I found an emerging VPN service provider (CactusVPN) few weeks ago, and had to keep looking for other services out their for DigitFreak readers.
You don’t need to be worried about any fraudulent websites, because we constantly test these websites and review their services so that you don’t end up being one of their victims.
While searching over the internet, one name that popped over and over again was — HideIPVPN. Since, we already spent some money to subscribe an annual plan on CactusVPN for my previous review, we couldn’t go for another subscription.
We went to their website and asked for a trial account to review their services on our website. This article not sponsored or requested by HideIPVPN, however they were happy to lend out 1 month free trial account for this review.
Plans and Pricing:
The company offers many exciting packages to choose from, which ranges from $5.99 to $11.95, if opted for monthly package. The subscription package can be little cheaper if you go for the annual subscription. They offer 1 Unlimited VPN Plan (which includes it all) with your choice of three term periods; 1, 6 or 12 months.
What does it include?
Unlimited Bandwidth, Uncapped Speed
Advance Easy-to-Use Software
Compatible w/ Phones & Tablets
New IP every time you connect
Provides a layer of security and anonymity
Protects you by hiding your real IP address
Secure connection between your PC and the Internet (128-2048bit)
Access sites restricted to US and UK residents
Anonymous Internet Surfing
Security for Hotspot Wireless Access Users
Unblock all VOIP Applications include Skype
Tip: Try HideIPVPN for 3 Days to see if it’s right for you. If you like it, upgrade to a longer term and save! If you find it’s not for you, you’re covered by their 3-Day Money-Back Guarantee.
You can go for any of the packages, based on your personal preference and why you want to get a VPN service in the first place. If you want to unblock websites based in US, you would go for “US VPN.” There are multiple countries you can choose from – Germany, UK, US and Canada can be subscribed individually, but NL or DE server subscription requires you to subscribe to one of the multi server package. Keep in mind, Most VPN providers support P2P on NL or DE servers only because it is illegal in both UK and US.
HideIPVPN has special package just for p2p transfers which allows P2P transfers over their network. This is the good thing, because most of the companies don’t specifies P2P support on their website. We at DigitFreak always support P2P community, so its quite obvious that we tend to bend towards this feature.
If you want to browse internet anonymously, but want to unblock websites as well — you don’t have to lookout for two different service providers for VPN and smart DNS service. You can simply opt for their combined package, which is designed for users like us.
Client Area:
Once you buy any of their VPN package, you’ll receive your account details by email. Login to your account with the email and password to access client area. The client area dashboard is neat and elegant, you can access useful contents and necessary links in one place.Please Note that Login details for client area and VPN service are different. To access VPN/Smart DNS service you must have a unique key to login. You can find these details in the client area.
Testing HideIPVPN software:
The easiest way to access their service is by their official software, which can be downloaded from their website for free. It is only available for Windows and Mac atm, for Linux you will have to configure the VPN service manually. When I installed the application on my computer, it felt very similar to CactusVPN (that we reviewed earlier) software. You can manage your Smart DNS and VPN service in one window.
There are two tabs for VPN and Smart DNS, which is used to manage or connect to the service you need to use. If you subscribed for VPN+Smart DNS package, you can use either of the service at a time. The account details are provided in the emails sent by the company, when you first registered on the website. You can also find these details in client area when you sign in to their official website.
Using HideIPVPN software is as simple as 1,2,3.
As is the case with other VPN service providers, HideIPVPN offers PPTP, SSTP, L2Tp/IPSec and OpenVPN security protocols. No surprises here, but what is outstanding to note is that it has gone ahead and implemented a new VPN protocol. However, they lack the latest military grade encryption – SoftEther, that is practically untraceable — which HideIPVPN promised to implement in near future.
There are also a handful of settings, which comes really handy while using the software to connect to the VPN servers. You can manage the startup behavior and connection settings on this tab, which governs the behavior of the software under these conditions.
The truly useful feature of the software is the new revolutionary App Killeroption, which is built into the application. You can add the software on this tab, which makes sure that the software included here are terminated when connection to VPN server drops due to some reason. The HideIPVPN application will terminate the software included in this list and restart them once reconnected to the server. This is really useful feature for those who take security very seriously.
Instead of the standard 40-80% customary drop in available ISP speed with other VPN companies, HideIPVPN was able to tap into almost 80-90% of the available ISP speed. Even we were surprised to find this was possible. This ensured that all streaming media could be viewed without trouble.
Smart DNS is relatively new technology which directs your requests to the proxy server, that is capable of unblocking any website regardless of your Geo-graphical position. Any user who is not currently located within a specific area which has been approved for viewing content available on these Geo-restricted websites will be automatically blocked from using the site freely and prevented from streaming/downloading the content available to permitted users.
This is a very nice feature, because there is negligible speed drop while using the SmartDNS feature provided by the company and you can still access all the region-restricted or blocked media/websites.
Speed Test:
People often ask, how fast is HideIPVPN? The simple answer is it’s fast enough for downloading, streaming videos, and playing online games. HideIPVPN customers give an average rating of 4 out of 5 on speed, which is a very acceptable score. While the speed may vary depending on many factors.
Your connection speed depends on several factors: which protocol you use, which data transport method you select, and your choice of DNS server.
We noticed below average speed drops while connected to the US servers, but UK, NL and DE servers performed quiet well.
Here are the speed test result from our location:
No VPN:
UK Server:
US Server:
NL Server:
DE Server:
uTorrent Speed Test:
Keep it in mind that VPN servers works very differently, as they have to encrypt your data before sending it back to you, which ends up to be a network congestion and throttle the connection speed a little.
In general, the closer you are to VPN server, the better bandwidth you get. As you know VPN connection only in theory is a direct connection between two computers. In reality data (encrypted) is send via many intermediary servers. For some connections less, for some more.
Customer Support:
We rarely had to contact HideIPVPN’s Support, but whenever we did, we always received quick and thorough responses to your questions or issues. A very satisfying experience.
However, HideIPVPN falls slightly behind the top VPN services in so much as it does not provide skype or telephone support for customers. Instead, customers can log in to the client area on the website and use the support ticketing system, live chat or email the company for support.
HideIPVPN currently offers Three Types of Support:
Email Support (Recommended) – We found email to best method to contact either their sales or technical team for support, because it’s much more organized, you can keep everything on record and their response time is usually within an hour or two. They can also address more complicated issues or questions in detail through email.
Live Chat – This is great if you have a quick question or concern about their service. However, their Live Chat is only available 12 hours a day.
1. Do you keep ANY logs which would allow you or a 3rd party to match an IP-address and a time stamp to a user of your service? If so, exactly what information do you hold and for how long?
No do not keep any logs of users activity online. Our customers use shared IP so there is no way to assign specific activity to a single customer.
2. Under what jurisdictions does your company operate and under what exact circumstances will you share the information you hold with a 3rd party?
We operate under US jurisdiction and we would cooperate under US court order.
3. In the event you receive a DMCA take down notice or European equivalent, how are these handled?
I can not imagine why we would get DCMA in the first place as we do not host any content. Simply, there is nothing to take down.
4. Which payment systems do you operate and how are these linked to individual user accounts?
PayPal, credit card, PayPro, Google Wallet and Bitcoin
5. Do you support p2p protocol transfer? If no, why? If yes, how it can be accessed and what security mechanism you have in place to protect your customers?
Yes we do offer P2P and torrent support on NL and DE VPN servers. Depending on the server customers can use one of four different VPN protocols – PPTP, L2TP, OpenVPN and SSTP
It is also worth to mention that our VPN application has a very nice feature – “application killer”. It will shot down app if VPN connection is lost and once it is automatically re-established it will start it back on.
6. What steps are taken when a valid court order requires your company to identify an active user of your service?
If a court order would com in and if we would have sufficient data as to identify user (that is not possible if payment is mad via Bitcoin system) we would have no choice but to comply. But, as we said in point 1 and 2. As we operate under US jurisdiction we do not store any logs as we do not have to. So all we could say (in the worst case) is – Yes, Mr Smith is our customer – and nothing else.
7. What tools are used to monitor and mitigate abuse of your service?
We do not comment on such measures, reasons for this are obvious :-). However if service is abused we will know and account will be closed immediately.
If you want to use our service to stay private and anonymous online – feel free to come to us and we will do all we can to make it happen. Other than that we can not help you. And so that it is clear for everyone – paedophiles don’t even try!
8. What is the most secure VPN connection and encryption algorithm you would recommend to your users?
At this point SSTP, but OpenVPN and L2TP are not bad for a general but secure browsing as well.
9. Do you offer SoftEther protocol. Can you explain how a normal user can be benefited by this protocol and what it really means for end users when security and anonymity is concerned.
It is a military grade security protocol with AES 256-bit and RSA 4096-bit encryption. It is much harder to be detectable by ISP. It will be coming to HideIPVPN at some point in future.
Verdict:
So far we’ve discussed what makes HideIPVPN a great VPN service. However, like any product, HideIPVPN isn’t perfect. Though we found the support (by email, support ticket or live chat) helpful and reasonably efficient, adding live telephone support would make life a lot easier, and result in faster turnover of inquiries.
HideIPVPN offers a 3 days money back guarantee so you can test their full service, and ask for cancellation if not satisfied within the given time frame. They also offer 24 hours trial on VPN services and 7 days trial for SmartDNS. If you are in the market for an affordable, reliable personal VPN with timely support, you should definitely consider HideIPVPN.
HideIPVPN is easy to install and use. The speed is excellent. The pricing concerns us a little, as other VPN providers usually offers their service at standard price of $6.99 or less, but HideIPVPN’s premium service comes at $11.95/month. However, good service always comes at a price – HideIPVPN is p2p friendly and keeps user data secure, they even got a dedicated package just for p2p transfers. Many other VPN providers in this day and age have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to that type of filesharing.
The main negatives to the service are that it is difficult to get a refund for anything other than defective software, while there are currently no servers outside of Europe and North America, and even in those areas, only five countries in total have servers.
We recommend HideIPVPN if your sole purpose is to protect yourself from snoopers, surf blocked websites and stream videos anonymously over your network.
We wanted to test their service with full capability, hence, we registered a “VyprVPN Premier” test account. The only difference with their pro and premier plans is the number of concurrent devices you can simultaneously use on a single account. We filled the registration form with required information and credit card details, and before hitting the “start Free Trial” button we were informed that we’ll be charged US$119.99 if we fail to cancel our subscription within the trial period of 3 days. That’s fair, and it is a good thing that they are making it clear that we might get charged automatically if we don’t cancel the subscription.
VyprVPN is pretty reliable and professional service that will provide top-notch online security and premium quality if you can afford its above-average prices. Their Teir-1 network acquisition and a large number of shared IP address pool are going to capture a huge percentage of the VPN market because it ensures better internet speed than most of the competitor providers. We heard poor reviews about their support team, but we were satisfied with their pleasant customer support. Their limited payment method, keeping logs for a questionable period of time (30 days), DMCA compliance and geo-IP workaround keeps us from recommending it to everyone. However, they do certain things the way that no other competitor really does. The fact that VYPRVPN was recently elected the best VPN for France by 
If you’re not using any privacy tools, then this vulnerability won’t affect you. However, if you’re using a VPN service or similar tools to hide your identity than make sure your tool doesn’t leak IP address.
![HideIPVPN provides free US and UK vpn, but how good are their paid services? [In-depth Review]](https://digitfreak.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/z_00049.jpg)
If you want to browse internet anonymously, but want to unblock websites as well — you don’t have to lookout for two different service providers for 
Please Note that Login details for client area and VPN service are different. To access VPN/Smart DNS service you must have a unique key to login. You can find these details in the client area.
