̶V̶ BS
Oh, dear Lord!
*sigh*
I’mma have to be boringly technical.
Again!
Already!
*sigh*
Many, many, many, many … lots, in fact, of years ago, before people could write, they married their sisters and everybody lived happily ever after.
Oh, yes, they did.
In the 1980s, I knew a place that consisted of twelve houses.
I knew a man from there.
He had married a woman from outside his ‘village.’
Well, I say ‘village’ because that’s what everyone around about called it … but whether the correct technical term for what it was is ‘village’, ‘hamlet’, ‘thorpe’ or ‘plague-ridden pit of incest and psychological/physiological deformity,’ I couldn’t say.
Whatever it was called though, he found himself ostracised for marrying an outsider instead of his sister twelve times removed … (or twelfth sister, or whatever it would be; I don’t know, I feel sick thinking about it, so I’m not gonna any more, you can investigate it for yourselves, if that’s what turns you on) … and had to move to a village a mile-and-a-half away, where he
- need never again face passive-aggressive hostility from the denizens of the plague-ridden hole in the ground he had left behind, because it was a mile-and-a-half away and people didn’t travel that far in those days
- was an outsider himself, so, okay, he was still treated poorly by the inhabitants, because he was an outsider … and his wife was still treated poorly, because she was an outsider … but, somehow, for some reason, it seemed better to him/them to be treated poorly by 2,000 people than by thirty-odd people … I don’t really understand it, but, I’m not inbred myself, so I’ve no hope of ever understanding the mentality ¹:
In the 1980s!
When we already had spacecraft, let alone passenger aircraft capable of flight at supersonic speeds, never mind trains or automobiles!
There was a community that consisted of twelve houses!
In a part of the World in which, if your family had lived there for 700 years, one of your neighbours would look down on you as an outsider, because their family had lived in the area for 800 years.
And one-and-a-half miles was enough to be considered to have ‘moved away, out of the area.’
To somewhere else where, if your family had lived there for 700 years, one of your neighbours would look down on you as an outsider, because their family had lived in the area for 800 years …. and one-and-a-half miles was enough to be considered to have ‘moved away, out of the area.’
So, trust me, given that most of Humanity’s existence, most communities have consisted of around thirty people (if even that many), for pretty much all of History, pretty much all of you have been marrying people who … even in a community of 2,000 … are, after 800 (or more) years, all genetically related to you one way and/or another — your twenty-fourth brother/sister six times removed maybe, but your brother/sister nevertheless.
Seriously … drain the oceans and pave the Earth!
Before it’s too late!
Anyway …
Be all that as it may … and I’m not even gonna argue the point about you all living happily ever after, because we know you didn’t then and still don’t now, it’s just an idiom (or turn of phrase) that I was using ‘ironically’ (if you’re a millennial ³ and don’t know what the word means) … sarcastically, if you aren’t (and got an education as a result) …
*sigh*
I’ve completely lost my thread …
That’s where thinking about you lot and your filthy degeneracy gets me, you see … it puts me right off my stride …
*sigh*
Where was I?
Oh, yes … that’s right … the three Rs.
So, after a few millennia (about the same time William Caxton discovered India) Christopher Columbus famously invented the printing press and, only a few centuries later, a lot more people could read and write … without even having to become incels … (which is ironic, really) … and, before you knew it, people were sending their neighbours Wish You Weren’t Here postcards, because (in and of itself) the ability to read and write is pretty useless unless you’ve got someone with whom to correspond who lives more than hailing distance away, so, you don’t really have a lot of need for it, because there’s nothing you can tell people on a postcard that you can’t say to their face (or shout across the road) …
… so, all there is to say in writing is “The World would be a far, far better place, if you’d never been born but, as it’s too late for that, I wish you were dead”
… and it wasn’t until the invention of the horse that people started meeting anyone they weren’t related to they could dislike instead, thus making literacy a valuable skill at last — because, if the object of your ire is too far away to make a punch in the mouth feasible before harvesttime, sending them hatemail is better than nothing (even if precisely how you came to meet them in the first place is, and shall remain, a mystery unless you swapped addresses with one of your foes last time you went to battle them, because there was next to no way for you to meet anyone more than a mile from your home).
Anyhow … one thing led to another and here we all are penning literary gems on Farcebook/Snatchchat/Twatter/whatever …
The problem is, however, that … having done the calculations … it transpires that (out of a population of 7,800.000.000) 7,779,999,023 of you are not so much less intelligent than even I, but outright retarded …
… and have no clue how modern technology works.
Look here …
This is pure BS … no more and certainly no less.
You will not be working more securely from home because you use a commercial VPN service.
In fact … unless your employer’s/client’s head of IT is a know-nothing millennial (Worst. Generation. Ever) …. you won’t be using a commercial VPN service to work from home.
Because … oh, God.
Right … look … postcards … remember them?
Well, along with letters. they require the address of the recipient to be written on them (or on the envelope in the case of letters ⁵), if you want them to be delivered to the right person (or the right place at least) because … contrary to what most Americans believe … “Mrs Smith, England” isn’t sufficient to ensure their delivery.
And, believe it or not, it’s not an altogether different principle when it comes to electronic communications: if you want your computer/phone/tablet/fridge/lightbulb/whatever to connect with another one, you need to give it the electronic address of the computer/phone/tablet/artificial heart/door lock/car brakes/whatever-it-is-you-want-to-hack.
I know!
Who knew, right!?
But, there it is: electronic devices you want to communicate with have addresses and you have to tell the device you’re using what they are, if you want it to communicate with them.
I don’t want to overload you with the detail, so, I’m not going to explore the intricacies of IP addresses (let alone MAC addresses ⁶), just the general principles.
So, irrespective of how it works, just understand that the principle by which it works is basically the same as how Kevin Costner delivers letters in the US: you tell your ISP (Internet Service Provider) that you want to speak to someone, they telephone them for you and …
*sigh*
You don’t know how telephones work, do you?
*sigh*
Once upon a time … a long time ago, after people like you learned to write, but before William Gibson invented the computer … Steve Jobs invented the telephone.
It wasn’t very good though: you couldn’t send dickpix or stickers or emojis or lolcatz or anything useful like that.
You couldn’t sext people
All you could do was talk to them!
And the first iPhones weren’t even portable!
They were installed in fixed locations, like public toilets:
You had to find one that hadn’t been vandalised:
… wait for the OAP (Old Age Pensioner) who’d got there at 06:00 in the morning to finish telling their long-suffering relatives about their bowel movements
… and then, after fifteen other people ahead of you in the queue had used the telephone first and spread their filthy germs over it … around about 17:05 … you’d be able to call in sick to Work.
To start with, how this worked was that you’d pick up the phone and call an operator, who would ask you for the telephone number you wanted to be connected to and then, when you’d told her, stick a cable in a hole in a switchboard full of holes:
… speak to another telephone operator in the nearest town between her and the person you wanted to speak to and tell her the number you wanted
… who’d stick a cable in a hole in her dashboard full of holes and speak to yet another telephone operator in the nearest town between her and the person you wanted to speak to and tell her the number you wanted
… and so it would go on down the line until your call reached an operator who could connect directly to the telephone you wanted to speak to and, after five minutes, tell everyone up the line that there was no answer.
Once in a while though, there’d be an answer and you’d speak to someone, whilst all the operators listened to your conversation and then talked amongst themselves about you both, went home, told their friends, family and neighbours about it and, before very long, the entire nation knew that the woman five doors down across the street was left-handed and her family had to have her sent to a convent or mental asylum in Coventry and told everyone she’d died of Consumption.
After a while, however, the convent was full and there was nowhere to send fallen women who were a disgrace to their families, so the automatic telephone exchange was invented.
How this worked was that instead of young women calling each other with the details of your private affairs, artificial intelligences did it. It was the same principle: if they didn’t know where your desired phone number was located, they’d call and ask another machine that might, which either knew the address of the telephone you wanted to speak to or else asked another machine it knew the telephone number of and, eventually, some machine, somewhere knew what cable to send your call down to make the phone ring at the other end.
The filthy harlots across the road and up the street still gazed longingly at the milkman/postman/coalman/dustman/rag-and-bone-man/baker’s boy/butcher’s dog/whoever from the attic window, but fewer people got to hear about it from the gossips at the telephone exchange, so it gave the nation time to build more convents and mental asylums … so it was all good and families could, once again, get rid of troublesome female relatives before they caused a scandal
This worked well for many years.
Until the bleeding-heart liberals got in on the act and started complaining that deaf people couldn’t make use of the telephone.
So, Tim Berners-Lee invented SMS (text) and AOL-Compuserve was born — which shut the hippies up because deaf people could communicate at long last by sending each other emoticons.
Actually, people had been able to connect their computers to each other before this, by using telephones …
… but they found it wasn’t very convenient having to take their computers to public toilets and, as a result, only spotty thirteen-year-olds who were into computer porn bothered to do that and there wasn’t much call for it.
So, as far as you are concerned, Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet.
Anyway … the principle is the same only now, instead of putting in phone numbers, we enter web addresses and computers send those to each other until one of them knows where the webpage you’re looking for is found.
But … the problem is that the computers aren’t really any different to the telephone operators who used to listen to your conversation and they can/do keep a copy of your message and a list of the people and websites you communicate with and anyone who asks them can read your messages and see whom you sent an aubergine/eggplant emoji to and tell everyone who you fancy (which is embarrassing for both of you ⁷ ).
So, Phil Zimmerman invented encryption so you can exchange your messages using a secret decoder ring, so no-one else can read them — like putting them in an envelope instead of on a postcard for all the World to read.
So, really, that’s it … nothing’s changed since Columbus invented writing except we all use computers to do it instead of quills and parchment and deaf people speak Egyptian instead of English.
It’s faster as a result, but the basic principle is the same as it ever was: you give your sealed message to a Kevin Costner AI and it hands it to another one traveling in the same direction as your message, as it were, and that one hands it to another one going somewhere else … and eventually, it gets delivered to the person you sent it to.
I’d illustrate this point by pasting a link to the scene in series 2 of Green Wing at this point, where Alan and Joanna are on the run in the motorhome and discussing how to send a message to people without giving away where they are by following exactly this procedure ... but I can’t find it on YouTube, sadly.
So, instead … you can watch some of the finest choreography you’ll ever see:
… (you’re welcome).
So, what’s all the fuss about VPNs (Virtual Private Network)s?
Well, the thing is that, before encryption, your electronic postcards could be read by anyone and everyone along the way and, because computers can keep copies of them, they could potentially do so any time from when you sent them to centuries (or even millennia) after your death.
Encrypting them is good because it prevents that — without the secret code, nobody can decrypt and read them. And, thanks to https (encrypted http) your communications with sites are encrypted, so, it’s all good and we can stop worrying.
But, before encrypted communication protocols (of which https is an example) were invented, our communications were sent openly (like postcards), so, if you wanted to communicate privately, you needed a way of talking to someone, like your employer, one-to-one instead of giving messages to Kevin Costner and hoping neither he nor anyone else along the way read them.
One way of doing this is to run a private network connection … a physically separate cable … between you and the people you want to communicate privately with.
Yeah … like that’s gonna happen.
So, instead, VPNs were invented: instead of owning all the cables in the network, you (or, more likely, your employer) would lease the cables between you and them for the time they were needed and nobody else would be able to listen in or read your communications — effectively, you had a private network connection.
In fact, what really happened was that the communications were encrypted between you and your conversation partner, but this was back in the days when encrypted communications were something governments, banks or BIG businesses used and, day to day, ordinary web sites were all delivered by http, email was sent in plain text format, instant messaging was unencrypted … so encrypted communications were something of a deal (a bit like owning, or at least leasing, your own private network connection). Also, however, it meant that you could do more than simply send messages; you could interact directly with the network to which you connected as though you were connected to it locally (inside the office building, for example) instead of somewhere else … which really was a big deal back then.
These days, thanks to whistleblowers like Edward Snowden giving some people cause to worry about government prying into their private lives … other people’s desire to access material that their governing regime or their employer would normally block … yet others wanting to access material that, for various (commercial licencing) reasons isn’t available within their national jurisdiction … and so forth, it isn’t simply businesses that want private communications but (potentially) everyone, so commercial ‘VPN service providers’ have arisen to cater to the needs/desires of everyday users.
They are, basically, Tor without the so-called ‘dark web’ …. a way of keeping your communications pseudo-anonymous, so that anyone (government, criminals, abusive partner, employer, whoever) watching won’t be able to see that it is you connecting to a specific site/service and requesting specific data (webpage, porn video, whatever) or even where the person requesting the data is physically located in the World — all they know is that someone using the VPN service connected to the site/service and requested the data, not who or where they did it from, because the site/service only has the address of the VPN service, not the user.
But, remember, behind it all, the methods haven’t changed: your messages are encrypted and unreadable, but they can still be traced back to you. They have to be … otherwise the data you requested could never be sent to you and it would be like making a purchase on Amazon without supplying a delivery address (a waste of time and money).
So, if you have a reason to not want others to know that it was you who sent/requested the data, a commercial VPN service can be useful, so long as it is trustworthy and actually does encrypt the data and actually doesn’t keep logs of who sent/requested what and when beyond the time required for the data to be sent from the sender to the recipient (anyone can say they do encrypt/don’t keep logs, but do/n’t they?)
But your employer isn’t going to make use of one ... nor is a client for whom you might be working.
Quite apart from their not wanting to bring a third party into the equation, running the risk that the VPN service isn’t above board and doesn’t provide a truly private service (if not copies all the data sent back and forth) … or that the service provider is simply incompetent and misconfigures things, so that they’re not secure … neither your employer nor your client needs you to use one to connect to their network: they’ll supply you with a VPN client to make the connection (or tell you where to get one they’re happy for you to use) … preconfigure it (or tell you how to do it yourself) … and let you connect to their network directly.
Not PureVPN, not NordVPN, not ExpressVPN … no commercial VPN … is going to enable you to work from home in a way you can’t do without their service — not unless part of your work entails your accessing sites/services/data outside your employer’s/client’s private network and you don’t want anyone knowing that you did so ⁹.
That advert is pure hype … playing on people’s ignorance to induce FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) … and persuade them they need it now more than ever because the pandemic means they need to work from home.
If you want private communications for whatever personal reasons you may have then you might ¹⁰ want to consider making use of a commercial VPN service … but, unless you have very specific needs and a very specific work context (and, therefore, almost certainly know all this already), you will not only not benefit workwise from using one but your employer/client will not even let you use one — and all you will have done is waste time and money.
It’s BS … plain and simple — don’t fall for it … and don’t let someone talk you around (it will still be BS after they’ve given you a million-and-one reasons why you shouldn’t listen to me).
—
¹ I’m a Londoner born and bred … I’ve just lived in many, different parts of the World in my time.
² And not, like Stephen M. Tomic, because I was adopted and nobody loved me … and, so, had to keep fleeing pitchfork wielding mobs … either (even if I did live in France for while), but by choice — because it only takes so long for me to learn the language and then all the novelty of not understanding the utter drivel gushing from the locals’ mealy, slavering lips, like a Niagara Falls of verbal diarrhea, is gone and all hope that they might actually be speaking sense is lost (leaving me choice but to move on in pursuit of my quest to locate intelligent life somewhere on this godforsaken planet).
⁴ You should read my posts some time — they’re very educational.
⁵ See … educational!
⁶ Which would only confuse Apple fanbois/fangrrrlz — and they’re confused enough as it is!
⁷ It’s embarrassing for you because it just is ⁸ … and it’s embarrassing for him/her because it’s you.
⁸ Which is weird, because, if they were to respond favourably, you’d be be proud to tell everyone you were seeing each other … so, wtf is wrong with you — what the hell goes on inside that head of yours, you freak?
⁹ Maybe you work for an organisation (a refuge for political dissidents, women fleeing prostitution rings, children fleeing abusive homes, etc.) that needs to research things for clients and the nature of that research could be revealing … and you need to work from remote locations.
¹⁰ That’s a whole different discussion.
