What is VPN?
VPN: A brief overview
Does being in a developing third world country stop you from pursuing varied interests that you might have on the internet? Do you want to stream music online on Spotify but cannot because you live in Nepal and they do not provide this service here? Is the latest Rakuten TV documentary not available in your country but free to watch in Spain? All these problems could be solved if you could access the internet from a different location than your own, say, The United States or Spain for that matter. Well, fret not because you can actually indulge in the online recreation of your choice while you’re staying at your home in Nepal! Yes, you read it right! A rather useful technological tweak, namely VPN (Virtual Private Network) will do the trick.
In simple terms, with the help of VPN, you can alter the location: your IP address to be more precise so that you can disguise yourself as an internet user from that location and easily access content that would not be possible to access from your actual location. For the more technical people, A virtual private network (VPN) extends a private network across a public network, and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network. So this is how it works: you request to get into a private network of your choice and eventually you are hauled into one by establishing a virtual point-to-point connection through the use of dedicated circuits or with tunneling protocols over existing networks. Then, you are good to go!
IS THIS LEGAL?
Yes, technically using a VPN is legal. But if you try and do illegal things by using it, it will obviously be against the law. The concept of VPN was originally developed to allow remote users and branch offices to access corporate applications and resources. For better understanding, we can take an example of a bank. Let us assume that a bank allows only a set of IPs from the head office in Kathmandu to access very confidential resources. Now if you are a branch in Mahendranagar and have to access these resources, how can it be made possible? The answer to this was VPN. This made things a lot easier. Contrary to this, nowadays VPN is being used in order to access content that the government or your Internet Service Provider(ISP) have banned. It is not legal, but is it worth it to use and have harmless fun delving into the wide range of services that the internet has to offer? DEFINITELY YES!
IS IT SAFE?
As long as you are not doing anything criminal and using the perks of VPN to enjoy the internet, it is safe. But if you try and indulge in criminal activities and want to use VPN as a cover, beware my friend because you will be found! It is advisable to not disclose your personal information while using VPN because it could be risky! Other than that, enjoy VPN until it lasts because companies are coming up with technologies to block VPN which would effectively and completely stop our foraying into the vast wilderness of internet beyond country boarders!
