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Very appealing
Your “Unpeeling the Onion Browser” article (LXF264, June issue) was an excellent chance find, having decided to select a Linux magazine from the bottom shelf at Sainsbury (other supermarkets are available
– Ed) for a change from National Geographic – which is usually on the top shelf. In it you say: “How do you know your VPN isn’t run by some guy sitting in a basement somewhere, dressed in a dolphin onesie”?
Well I say… how do you know your VPN isn’t run by a group of people who also work for the Chinese government, NSA, GCHQ or the mob (take your pick) as their main job and VPN as a side-line for evening and weekends?
So, what about Nord VPN? I’m trying that for 30 days because when I tried Btwifi-with-fon from my mother’s house some weeks ago, I discovered that within 25 minutes there had been an attempt to access my Yahoo email account from an IP in India. When I called the BT fraud/security department, they couldn’t literally have cared less. So, we know from this that even the most well-known ISP in the UK is totally open to attack.
So far I’ve been using Sandboxie with Firefox – its like a condom for your browser (wait, what? – Ed)– preventing malware and hijacking of your PC with ransomware. It’s effectively running Firefox in a virtual space, and you can close it even if it gets jammed, via a neat icon on the taskbar (there’s a pizza icon.)
What I’m really interested in is Tor plus a VPN, but which VPN do you recommend? Nick Bremner
Neil says…
Thanks for the kind words Nick, we’re blushing. I never know if people are joking or for real these days, but yes a good chunk of VPNS (especially free ones) are run out of China and so are very likely under watch of Chinese security services. There’s a decent infographic that highlights the problem and also offers some safe recommendations here: https://bit.ly/lxf266vpns 1.
You can find the write up that goes along with this here:
https://bit.ly/lxf266vpnsbad 2.
NORDVPN is one that seems to come up regularly Check out our sister site for more information:
www.techradar.com/uk/vpn/best-vpn.
I honestly don’t have enough knowledge to recommend anything in this area. One issue is that there’s a huge amount of commercialisation based around the industry that can skew lists like the one I’ve just suggested. Helping/not Helping.
VPN coverage is something that myself and Jonni keep chatting about doing, but to cover VPN properly is tricky. If you want to get suggestions from those better in the know then I’d suggest nipping to:
www.privacytools.io/providers/vpn.
Locked Box
I have been experimenting with virtual machines (VMS) for years with varying degrees of success. Most recently I’ve been using Virtualbox and Vmware
Player on my new Dell Inspiron 15 3583. The first “bricked” the laptop four times, requiring recovery.
The second works fine and was easy to use, but then by chance I discovered Onworks which simply runs in a browser and is the easiest and simplest of all. I realise that it’s an emulator, yet as a means of giving the user a taste of another OS it’s superb. Why has it never been mentioned?
By the way my thanks to Mr Bothwick for a tip which first enabled me to print directly from Linux. Previously I had to set up a FAT partition to use Windows XP to print. The answer was Solydxk. John Goldspink
Neil says…
Bothwick working his wonders again! We’re glad to say Neil will be back with us next issue running Answers again, giving Jonni a break and letting him get stuck back into more features and tutorials and even having a few days’ holiday on his boat HMS Boaty Mcboat Face!
I’m intrigued as to why Virtualbox would brick your host system? That certainly isn’t standard behaviour, especially if Vmware Player was fine. We’re stumped on that one! Your laptop is pretty recent so the processor has all the relevant hardware requirements.
Onworks (www.onworks.net) sounds an interesting way of testing distros. It’s possible that it works along the lines of https://distrotest.net, which offers a phenomenal number of distros for you to try, although you often have to wait for a testing slot.
Game on!
I’ve just received the latest issue – great to see it still being produced at this time. Hope you don’t mind a suggestion for an article. I’m very interested in Proton from Steam, the compatibility layer that enables Windows software to run on Linux. It looks fantastic, but I would love to find out more about it. Just a suggestion, of course. I look forward to more great Linux Format issues in the coming months. Tom Morgan Neil says…
Thanks for your email, Tom. As it happens, this particular subject has been bobbling around at the back of my mind–there’s plenty of space for it in there.
It’s something I’ve used casually (it just works well), but I guess you’re after something that perhaps goes into more depth on how you can tweak Proton’s settings? As you’ll find in this very issue we’ve got madgamer (and part-time Australian spider victim) John Knight covering Proton and Lutris. Hope it helps, and keep the suggestions coming!