VPN companies are notorious for scaring customers into paying for their services. They make all sorts of false claims for how browsing the internet from a coffee shop or airport will get you hacked. It’s a big load of bullshit.
Almost every website runs on HTTPS these days so whatever data you send and receive is end-to-end encrypted. Your coffee shop can only see which websites you are visiting, they won’t be able to see what data you are sending and receiving to/from those websites. Unless you are worried about your neighbourhood barista snooping into your browsing habits, there’s absolutely no need to use a VPN.
There is, however, some very good reasons why everyone should use one.
Lots of websites, especially banks, track what IPs you usually access them from. When you try to log in from a random public network, they sometimes think you are an intruder and lock your account as a precaution. This is especially common when you try to access them from another country. Some companies don’t even let their websites load when you try to access them from certain countries.
Another common scenario is that your favourite streaming service doesn’t let you access content that is available in your home country while you are travelling. Commercial VPN providers tout how they can help you bypass this restriction, but streaming services know this and constantly block their IPs.
The easiest way to get around these issues is by using your own VPN. It takes 5 minutes to set it up and is completely free.
Install Tailscale on your phone/iPad/laptop and also on your Apple TV at home. Make sure you enable “Exit Node” on your Apple TV.
Now, whenever you are using public Wifi, just enable Tailscale on that device and select your Apple TV as the exit node. From that point on, all your traffic gets routed through your home regardless of where you are. Any website you visit thinks you are accessing it from home even if you are actually on the other side of the planet.
There is nothing special about the Apple TV in this case. It is just the most common device that is usually plugged in and connected to the internet at all times for most people. You can set up any other device as an exit node and can even set up multiple exit nodes in different physical locations.
Tailscale is a peer-to-peer VPN powered by Wireguard. It takes all your devices, regardless of where they are in the world and puts them on a single, flat network without having to set up servers or forward any ports. It is the most elegant piece of software I’ve come across in a long time.
Tailscale is free for 100 devices and lets you do all sorts of cool things that I’ll cover in a future post, so subscribe if you haven’t already.
That’s it for this time. If you found this post useful, can you forward it to a friend? Thanks!