With all the SOPA and PIPA talk today, we feel that a little internet techno talk is appropriate. A few months back, Jeff from Active Captain efforts and newsletter brought to our attention the privacy issues and risks post by accessing the internet via unsecure connection. By now, you know that we are well equipped with a long range WIFI antenna, and although we don’t plan on hooking up on the broadband of others, it is always nice to know we have this resource available.
This past summer, we had an issue with our computer and some of our e-mail accounts during our coastal cruising season. This re-enforces the message and brings this matter back on the agenda. With that said a couple of weeks ago we received the first year’s report from Jeff about VPN, immediately we acted on it. Anyway, do you think there is anything better to do when it is freezing and snowing outside! Indeed, I will not climb up the mast anytime soon….
The service we chose is Witopia, they had a “special” with Active Captain and made it an easy investment, with a fairly simple and painless setup. In fact we now can access to IP addresses from 33 different countries. Which also makes it easier to :
- download some files from the internet,
- read the various Yamaha webpages unavailable to some countries
- And last but not least we can now read the news from France!
The added bonus is that we are now also a little safer out there, and will not share with a smart teenager our personal infos on the net. Undoubtedly his big brother the Hacker king will find a way to get them anyway!!
Unfortunately once we signed up, the system went down and all attempts to connect were fruitless. Damned it! I pay for a service over the internet and minutes after it’s all set up, it vanishes… Well it only turned out to be a scheduled weekly maintenance, and this one was a big one! They had advised their entire customer database for weeks… but us as we had just signed up a few hours before! The next day all was back to normal, and as I am typing this blog post is from Vienna…
