Region Free secure internet (Encrypted VPN)

I read an interesting article in Popular Mechanics ("Removing Yourself From the Internet", Page 77  Jan 2012) which discussed leaving a minimal Internet footprint.

Your data is bought sold with your permission  If you had bothered to read the license agreements you clicked "I agree", you would have noticed that the companies indicate that they collect data for marketing purposes or sum such statements.

I'd like to concentrate on another of the points it made in the article, and why VPN's are important.

A virtual private network (VPN) typically provides you with a private connection to your end destination. They typically provide you with a secure tunnel to the VPN Servers. To do this an encrypted secure connection is created through an untrusted network ie. the Free WiFi connection at your local takeaway.

Everything in the secure connection is encrypted on the way in and decrypted on the way out of the network connection making your communication secure. It no longer matters that a data thief can sniff your packets,  all they will see is a readable but uncypherable stream of packets.

Additionally, anyone snooping around on your connection will not be able to discern the final destination or the type (web, email, chat, streaming video) of service you are connected to. The VPN Service will conceal your real IP and replace it with one of their whereever they are. So now your online activity is anonymous and prevents harassment caused by people tracking you by your IP address. 

Furthermore, some ISP (Internet Service Provider) don't know you are using it. It is masked as a regular connection. You no longer need to use a proxy site. You can bypass skype blocked in your region, bypass all blocked web sites, watch TV from any country and more.

Recently Apple, Microsoft and Adobe had to front government pricing inquiry. The following ads I recovered from the US website and the Australian Website, note the price of the identical product.

Australian and US Microsoft website prices for the same product at the same time

The product if bought in the US with Australian dollars should have been about $480 Au but its price was $724 Au on the Australian website, almost exactly a 50% markup.

If you go to the Microsoft store (http://www.microsoftstore.com) your directed to the US or Australian online store depending on your IP address.

I used https://www.boxpn.com as my VPN service and setting up was easy and straight forward.

Using boxpn I set up the following VPN destinations

Benchmarking the VPN servers I was however disappointed by the slowdown in speed of the network. I used  http://speedtest.net/ and recorded below is the metrics from the benchmark.

Location	Ping (ms)	Download  (Mbps)	Upload (Mbps)
No VPN	12	19.32	0.24
Sydney	37	4.15	0.4
London	868	2.36	0.09
San Jose	204	1.74	0.68
Toronto	694	1.55	0.17
Panama (T)	354	1.51	0.17
Montreal	713	1.36	0.13
Milan	353	1.28	0.11
Debica	379	1.22	0.12
Hampshire	868	1.11	0.13
Zurich	922	1.00	0.09
Singapore	942	0.82	0.08
Frankfurt	338	0.8	0.13
Stockholm (T)	901	0.77	0.11
Paris	347	0.66	0.13
Istanbul (T)	53	0.62	0.07
Madrid	350	0.59	0.10
Maidenhead	451	0.52	0.11
Amsterdam (T)	800	0.3	0.19

Boxpn suggests to  download boxpn connection client for windows and install :  boxpn_installer.exe.

When you start the software select L2TP (or SSTP on Windows 7 or Vista SP1) from ENCRYPTION level and connect any boxpn network you like. They suggest that you select COMPRESSION from the Options, so you can get much faster speeds.