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However, there are commercial public VPN services that encourage this. One that was used heavily during the Olympics to circumvent geographic filters on video during the Olympics, also advertises being able to circumvent workplace filtering as one of its selling points.
One of their selling points is "Your employer or IT admin won't know you are using it". This is a company in Cyprus operating servers at server farms in Germany, England, and Ukraine. For about USD$26.40 (at current exchange rates) per month, you have access to a VPN server that encrypts at double the normal VPN encryption strength, strong enough where there is no possible way that IT admins could crack it with current technology. I would LOVE to see some IT admin here try and crack and sniff a 256 bit encryption scheme.
I did see a lot of connections coming through this company's servers in Germany and England, during the broadcast of the vice presidential deabate, probably a lot of people tuning on on the debate from work in a manner where the boss will NEVER know they are tuning into the debates from work. That information will ONLY be known to the company in Cyprus that operates the servers.
If you had traffic going to strange machiens in Germany and England on
2nd October, that was probably someone tuning into the VP debate.They also market heavily to people living or travelling in countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, or Iran, which heavily censor the Net. If you use this company' service, the authorities in those countries will NEVER know what you are up to. This company in Cyprus makes that a selling point for its services.
When I use my own VPN server from censorious countries, I know that what I do won't be detected. Since I like to go to Syria once or twice a year to gamble at one of only a handful of casinos on the Middle East, I can use my VPN connection to bypass government firewalls and check my Email on Hotmail (blocked in Syria), and the Syrian authorites NEVER know what I am up to. I also use VPN to access Skype (also blocked in Syria) to check for any voicemail messages related to my radio station, and, once again, the Syrian authorities cannot POSSIBLY know what I am up to. While I am only using 168 bit encryption, that is enough to keep my use of Skype from being detected.