Zombies, public wifi and the importance of a VPN
Moving from a house to a boat has many challenges not least wifi needs for a boat full of teens. We sorted out the wifi dongle on the back of the boat and have a wifi access point which feeds all our laptops, phones and tablets. Coruna Marina has good wifi so we are making the most of it uploading photos to the blog, catching up on emails and admin.
But using public wifi comes with risks and we were reminded about an essential service we’d forgotten to use since moving onboard. A VPN service which creates a Virtual Private Network which pretends you are in the UK (or US or other Eurpoean country of your choosing) and also has the added benefit of keeping your emails, passwords and internet traffic safe from anyone sniffing around the public wifi as it it encrypts all your data.
It was zombies that reminded us….and no I don’t mean the teens. We tried last night to catch up with Channel 4’s The Returned which we became addicted to before we left the UK only to be given the message ‘we cannot show you content in your area’.
Ah, of course not we’re in Spain. We need to look as though we are connecting to the internet from the UK. There are many services available to do just this. Over the last few years I had tried many of them when back in the UK to watch US shows on Hulu and I’d also used it to download an album which was only available on the US Amazon. I had finally settled on VPN Authority – www.vpnauthority.com – which just worked. Reasonable cost, fast and seamless.
I just hadn’t thought to use it on Aditi. We fired up VPN Authority and The Returned was visible! Fantastic, we now have 3 episodes to catch up on.
It’s not just for cruisers or travellers. If you use any kind of public wifi such as hotels or coffee shops you should think about using a VPN service especially if you email, shop or do your banking online whilst out and about.
I will be setting up the laptop to automatically use VPN Authority as the default connection. I’ll also setup the tablet for when we’re ashore and using free wifi. Just as soon as I catch up with the zombie action in France…
Funny – we have the same problem – I had used IP Shield but that does not work with Windows 8. Annabel is in major withdrawal for I Player. Thanks for the tip Paul – Great Sailing!
Yes iplayer is a neccesity for us too! We also like the fact that it allows us to do an England based search on google which is what we need when soucing parts