In 1998, Laporte created and co-hosted The Screen Savers and the original version of Call for Help on the cable and satellite network ZDTV(later TechTV).
Laporte was the host of the daily television show The Lab with Leo Laporte, recorded in Vancouver, Canada. The program had formerly been known as Call for Help when it was recorded in the U.S. and Toronto. The series aired on G4 Canada, on the HOW TO Channel in Australia, on several of Canada's Citytv affiliates, and on Google Video. On March 5, 2008, Laporte confirmed on net@nite that The Lab with Leo Laporte had been canceled by Rogers Communications. The HOW TO Channel refused to air the remaining episodes after it was announced the show had been canceled.
He hosts a weekend technology-oriented talk radio program show titled Leo Laporte: The Tech Guy. The show, started on KFI AM 640 (Los Angeles), is now syndicated through Premiere Radio Networks. Laporte also appears semi-regularly on Showbiz Tonight, Live with Kelly, World News Now, and previously with Bill Handel on Friday mornings on KFI. He has also been a guest technology speaker on local talk radio programs in the U.S. and Canada.
I had my first encounters with Leo being a pretty big fan of The Screen Savers back in high school when I was in my computer gaming rig building days. Recently I was listening to his podcast The Tech Guy and he was answering a question from a caller about using a VPN for secure browsing, which is going to bring me to the meat and potatoes of this post, should you be using one? As with most tech questions, the answers is, as it most always is, that depends.
Ok, so, briefly (with links a plenty to wikipedia) a VPN is a virtual private network that extends a private network across a public network, such as the Internet. It enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network, and thus are benefiting from the functionality, security and management policies of the private network. A VPN is created by establishing a virtual point-to-point connection through the use of dedicated connections, virtual tunneling protocols, or traffic encryption.
VPN technology is also used by individual Internet users to secure their wireless transactions, to circumvent geo-restrictions and censorship, and to connect to proxy servers for the purpose of protecting personal identity and location.
So this brings me back to my earlier statement of that depends. What are you doing with your internet connection? I myself tend to be a pretty big fan of VPNs for personal browsing. I don't like the idea of my ISP sniffing my traffic and figuring out what I am doing, and then adjusting my bandwidth accordingly. So what do you use your internet connection for? If you are a big streamer (hulu, netflix, etc.) and/or you play a lot of video games that use high amounts of bandwidth (eg. call of duty, battlefield, destiny, or any MMORPG) chances are your bandwidth is already being throttled without your knowledge. check out this article that shows companies like Comcast and other ISPs that have been intentionally slowing down your speeds, and this one from PC World about ISPs that are known to throttle your bandwidth. Now if you are doing other activities that could potentially violate copyrights of other companies (eg. downloading tv, music, or movies) your ISP can see that as well. As a matter of fact Charter Communications sends you a nastygram if you use bittorrent to share any type of file, be it legal or otherwise.
It is for these reasons, my friends, that I can say yes, in this day in age where the privacy vs. security battle is raging hotter than ever, I would most definitely lease a VPN, which by the way, can be leased for as little as $4.95/ month. It is a fairly cheap service that will allow you to browse and stream your favorite services at full speeds, and keep your ISP from being able to see what exactly it is that you are doing, and no sniffers out there on the public internet can identify your traffic either.
Feel free to comment your thoughts and if there is any interest on this I can do some follow up articles on how to connect a VPN to a wireless router to enable all devices in your home to browse the internet securely!
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