I will be traveling to Thailand in July and staying in the country for over a month. During my stay I will need to have a secure connection back to the USA in order to conduct personal banking transactions, pay bills, etc. I am thinking of signing up for a VPN service during my travels, and thought it is a good idea anyway as I often use open access points, including libraries and café hotspots.

I was thinking that a VPN would be a affordable solution to allow for SSL tunneling through the open hotspots back to more friendly territory. I have been considering the HotSpotVPN2 service (http://www.hotspotvpn.com) or a competitor personalVPN (http://www.witopia.net/). Has anyone on this board had experience with VPN in Thailand? How about using either of these services; has there been any issues with one or the other? If there is a VPN service that is better for personal use I would appreciate any suggestions folks could offer.

Thanks so much

- Jeff

[email protected]

I guess VPN is not the right thing for you.

VPN is mostly used to connect to an intranet from outside. There are some VPN versions which do an encypted transfer, but for sensitive data transfer the encryption should be between applications, not just part of the transfer: i.e. https.

VPN may provide a little more privacy while surfing via a WLAN, but I never heard of any provider in Thailand. You better look at your home. I myself use VPN in Thailand to access servers of my university in Switzerland which are accessible only from the intranet.

If security is a concern, do not use any public computers (like internet cafes or airports) because of possible spy ware.

Regards

Thedi

I guess VPN is not the right thing for you.

I wholeheartedly disagree.

A VPN is EXACTLY what the OP requires and, in my opinion, makes perfect sense for what he wants to accomplish. In this specific case, protecting the data across a network via an encrypted tunnel.

It is now just a matter of deciding which VPN provider the OP wants to use.

Check out Anonymizer Total Net Shield for total privacy

in all your Internet transactions.

During my stay I will need to have a secure connection back to the USA in order to conduct personal banking transactions, pay bills, etc.

one would hope that banking and billing services were using secure https connections anyway so a public vpn is redundant and potentially a risk - see for example OperaMini's way of handling https traffic

I was thinking that a VPN would be a affordable solution to allow for SSL tunneling through the open hotspots back to more friendly territory.

assuming you trust the public vpn company more then the local wi-fi operator or isp then yes it is indeed a good way to protect email, forum login passwords and other un-encrypted traffic from local eyes but still leaves them exposed once they enter the US networks which are not necessarily that much more trustworthy than the local networks!

the obvious downside is it circumvents local controls and allows access to sites blocked by the government here - something one would not want to do of course ;-)

bkkguy

I will be traveling to Thailand in July and staying in the country for over a month. During my stay I will need to have a secure connection back to the USA in order to conduct personal banking transactions, pay bills, etc. I am thinking of signing up for a VPN service during my travels, and thought it is a good idea anyway as I often use open access points, including libraries and café hotspots.

I was thinking that a VPN would be a affordable solution to allow for SSL tunneling through the open hotspots back to more friendly territory. I have been considering the HotSpotVPN2 service (http://www.hotspotvpn.com) or a competitor personalVPN (http://www.witopia.net/). Has anyone on this board had experience with VPN in Thailand? How about using either of these services; has there been any issues with one or the other? If there is a VPN service that is better for personal use I would appreciate any suggestions folks could offer.

Thanks so much

- Jeff

[email protected]

If you have a PC at you home that runs on Windows XP Pro and you are travelling with a laptop that also runs on XP pro, you may be able to do what you describe above for free. What I found was that even though I don't have a static IP address at home I was able to configure XP on my home PC to accept incomming connections and that then when travelling connect to it from my laptop using the VPN client that Microsoft includes in XP. I'm not sure how hacker-proof that setup is, but when I run Ethereal whilst connnected by the VPN client I see that the traffic to & from my laptop is definitely encrypted and when I surf the web the sites that I visit are definitely seeing the IP address of my home computer and not the IP adress of my home PC instead if the IP address of the hotspot or cybercafe that I'm connecting from. BTW, to workaround not having a static IP address on my home is that using DynDNS.com, and of course this scheme does require that you leave your home PC on the whole time that you are away and that it never hangs during that time.

Thanks for all the info so far.

I stumbled accross the following discussions that others might find interesting:

Discussion NetCasts posted here: http://www.grc.com/SecurityNow.htm

* http://media.grc.com/sn/SN-010-lq.mp3 : Open Wireless Access Points

* http://media.grc.com/sn/SN-014-lq.mp3 : Virtual Private Networks (VPN): Theory

* http://media.grc.com/sn/SN-015-lq.mp3 : VPN Secure Tunneling Solutions

* http://media.grc.com/sn/SN-017-lq.mp3 : PPTP and IPSec VPN Technology

* http://media.grc.com/sn/SN-018-lq.mp3 : "Hamachi" Rocks!

* http://media.grc.com/sn/SN-019-lq.mp3 : VPNs Three: Hamachi, iPig, and OpenVPN

Thanks Again,

- Jeff