Fixing Apple iOS 8 VPN Issues

Since Apple released iOS 8 a couple days ago we’ve heard from users who are having trouble connecting to their VPN provider.  More specifically they are being asked for their VPN password even though it was saved as part of the previous app install.  You may also notice some advanced features like TunnelBear’s auto-reconnect is no longer working.  Problems like these can happen.  Especially when a new version of iOS is first released.

VPN for iOS 8

For those being prompted to enter a password while using an iOS app provided by your VPN service I would suggest you reinstall the profile.  That’s how all the popular VPN apps we’ve reviewed work for iOS.  They let you choose a server location and the app in turn installs a profile on your device for the VPN connection.  The problem is that iOS 7 profiles don’t appear to be compatible with iOS 8.  Until or unless Apple puts out a fix the best workaround we’ve found so far is to go back into your VPN app and let it create the profile again.  You may want to delete the old profile first.  To do so simply tap on General, then Profiles, and then Delete Profile.

That should take care of your VPN log in issues with iOS 8.  Other advanced features like TunnelBear’s auto-connect will take some time to work out I’m sure.  It happens every time a vendor like Apple or Microsoft pushes a major release.  If you have questions then I’d suggest you contact tech support for your provider.  Please be patient with with them as the problems will likely be widespread across all the VPN providers until Apple releases an update or the VPN apps are updated for the new iOS 8.

You can visit vpnsp.com to learn more about VPN services.  Follow us @VPNSP for the latest news and deals.

Hide My Ass Mac Client Review

As a part-time MacBook and iMac user it’s great to see VPN companies starting to focus more effort on Mac clients.  Hide My Ass offers one of our favorite Windows clients.  Like most VPN companies they’ve primarily focused on Windows software in the past.  That’s changed as the new HMA client for Mac has the same look and feel as it’s Windows counterpart.  You’ll find several advanced features in the Mac version as well.  You can use the Mac client to connect to any of HMA’s 189 server locations in 91 countries from just $6.55 a month.

Hide My Ass Mac client

If you’ve ever used HMA’s Windows client then you’ll immediately notice the similarities to the new Mac client version 2.1 release.  The screen above shows the map overview of their VPN network.  You can also choose a server location from a list.  The dashboard will give you the option to connect to a server close to your current location for the best performance.  The client also has a speed guide.  Here’s a shot of the speed guide.

HMA Mac speed guide

As you can see the speed guide will help you find the servers that will perform the best from your current location.  Since I’m located in the Southeastern United States some of the best performing servers are located in Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina.  The speed guide will ping each server you select and score them based on performance.  As a general guide I would go with the highest scoring server for maximum speed.

When it comes to Mac I’m far from a power user.  After working on Windows for years I’m comfortable on a Mac but far from an expert.  I know we have several readers that are all about the Mac.  Please let us know what you think of the new client.  We’ll be more than happy to pass along any comments or suggestions to the HMA team.  From the little bit of time I’ve spent on the client it seems like a vast improvement for Mac users.

You can read our review of Hide My Ass to learn more about the service or sign up for unlimited VPN from just $6.55 a month during their promotion.  Follow us @VPNSP for the latest VPN news and special offers.

HideIPVPN Anniversary Sale

HideIPVPN is celebrating their birthday by offering 55% off the first three billing cycles of any VPN or Smart DNS plan.  You can sign up for a month or a full year.  The discount stacks on top of their term savings on their 3 month, 6 month and annual plans.  Enjoy VPN and SmartDNS from just $3.41 a month.  Visit HideIPVPN.com and enter promo code happyVPN during checkout to take advantage of the HideIPVPN birthday offer.

HideIPVPN Anniversary Sale

Let’s take a look at what HideIPVPN has to offer in terms of VPN accounts:

HideIPVPN VPN Plans

As you can see the HideIPVPN team manages VPN servers in the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands and Germany.  Server access is based on which plan you choose.  I would only go with their top plan if you need access to both Germany and the Netherlands.  Otherwise you can access three countries for $9.99 a month.  That’s before the 55% off anniversary sale.  Let’s take a look at the discounted pricing on their top plans.

  • US/UK/NL/DE costs $5.38 a month or $51.72 a year
  • US/UK/NL costs $4.50 a month or $40.95 a year
  • US/UK/DE costs $4.50 a month or $40.95 a year
  • P2P/BitTorrent costs $3.56 a month or $33.75 a year
  • Remember to use promo code happyVPN to save 55% off the first 3 billing cycles.

If you’re goal is to unblock content from sites in other countries like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Instant then a Smart DNS service might be the right choice.  HideIPVPN offers unlimited Smart DNS access for $4.95 a month before the anniversary discount.  With the code you can get it from just $1.46 a month with their annual term.

HideIPVPN Smart DNS pricing

  • Smart DNS costs $2.23 a month or $17.53 a year.
  • Remember to use promo code happyVPN to save 55% off the first 3 billing cycles.

You can read our HideIPVPN review to learn more about the service or sign up and save 55% off using promo code happyVPN during their anniversary promotion.  Follow us @vpnsp for most great VPN deals.

Did Comcast Ban TOR?

This morning a friend shared a link to this article on Deep Dot Web.  The article talked about Comcast customers who were contacted by support personnel and told to stop using TOR browser or risk their service being terminated.  That’s pretty extreme, even for Comcast.  The implications could be far reaching even beyond TOR to other online privacy services.  Since then the story hit the social media and was picked up by several large technology and business sites.  The news got enough coverage for Comcast to formally respond.

Comcast TOR usage

Here’s the response from Comcast:

On Monday morning, a report surfaced claiming that Comcast has been discouraging customers from using the Tor Browser, a browsing program designed to allow users to surf the Internet with greater anonymity than most browsers. Monday’s report was repackaged on a number of other sites, stating that Comcast has “declared war on the Tor Browser.” The report goes on to suggest that Comcast has contacted some users telling them that they risk disconnection if they continue using Tor. The report may have generated a lot of clicks but is totally inaccurate.

Comcast is not asking customers to stop using Tor, or any other browser for that matter. We have no policy against Tor, or any other browser or software. Customers are free to use their Xfinity Internet service to visit any website, use any app, and so forth.

Here are the facts:

  • Comcast doesn’t monitor our customer’s browser software, web surfing or online history.
  • The anecdotal chat room evidence described in these reports is not accurate.
  • We respect customer privacy and security and only investigate and disclose certain information about a customer’s account with a valid court order or other appropriate legal process, just like other ISPs. More information about these policies can be found in our Transparency Report here.
  • We do not terminate customers for violating the Copyright Alert System (aka “six strikes”), which is a non-punitive, educational and voluntary copyright program. Read more here.

Our customers can use Tor at any time, as I have myself.  I’m sure many of them are using it right now.

It appears this might be a misunderstanding.  In reading the customer complaints and Comcast’s terms of service my guess is that the customers were running TOR relays.  If not and they were contacted for just using the TOR browser then Comcast decided to do a fast about face.  Their statement also says that Comcast has “no policy against Tor, or any other browser”. Their terms of service are against using Comcast to provide a proxy service or server for users outside your home network.  That would make running a TOR relay a violation.

You can visit vpnsp.com to learn more about VPN services.  Follow us @VPNSP for the latest news and deals.

VyprVPN Adds VPN Kill Switch

The team at Golden Frog continues to innovate their popular VyprVPN client software.  The latest feature will help protect user privacy anytime the VPN connection drops.  It can happen for a number of reasons and when it does the new VyprVPN kill switch will make sure you stop communicating with the outside world until the VPN connection is reestablished.  The new VPN kill switch feature is live in both the Windows and Mac clients.

VyprVPN VPN kill switch

Anytime I hear the words kill switch it makes me think of governments that use Internet kill switches in times of political unrest.  It’s normally a terrible scene when this happens.  The opposite is true for a VPN kill switch.  It’s there to protect the user.  There are a few ways to set up the VyprVPN kill switch.  They outline them well in the “Customize your Kill Switch Settings” section of this page.  Here are the three levels:

  • Application Level  – Kill Switch will only function when you are logged in to VyprVPN. If VyprVPN is disconnected, Kill Switch will automatically block your Internet connection.
  • System Level – Kill Switch will block Internet traffic even after you exit VyprVPN. You will not be able to access the Internet until you connect to VyprVPN.
  • LAN – Configure Kill Switch to allow or block LAN traffic.

The connection settings page for configuring the VPN kill switch is well organized.  I don’t think you’ll have any trouble configuring the kill switch for specific applications.  If you do the VyprVPN support team is always there to help.  This is a very important feature so setting it up right is worth asking questions if necessary.

You can visit vpnsp.com to learn more about VPN services.  Follow us @VPNSP for the latest news and deals.

Join the Battle for Net Neutrality

Today is a very important day in the ongoing battle against large ISP’s in the United States over net neutrality.  Companies like Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and Time Warner Cable would like to charge large fees to sites in order to provide fast speeds.  Rather than provide them for the fees that customers are already paying.  Those sites who don’t agree to the strong arm tactics will be left behind.  The real losers are all of us who will experience major slow downs.  You can help by acting today during the Battle for the Net campaign.

Battle for the Net

There are well over 10,000 sites participating in today’s Battle for the Net.  Some of the most high profile companies in the world are participating with sites like Netflix, Mozilla, Reddit and WordPress running a special message on their sites today.  So far well over 10,000 sites are joining in the campaign and that number is growing by the minute.  We noticed a number of VPN providers either running the message or promotion Battle for the Net on their blog.  Cheers to IPVanish, PureVPN, TunnelBear and anyone else I may have missed.

Please visit the Battle for the Net site to learn more and help in today’s campaign.  The future of the Internet is very much in jeopardy.  The large ISP’s are spending millions but we can all make our voices count more.

CyberGhost NoSpyProxy Campaign

Last week the team at CyberGhost launched a campaign on the popular crowdfunding site Indiegogo.  The campaign is to raise funds for CyberGhost to build their first in-house VPN node.  They are calling it the NoSpyProxy campaign and will be using the funds to build a VPN node housed outside of a normal datacenter for better privacy.  The Indiegogo campaign is well on it’s way to meeting their goal of $70,000.  You can learn more about it here.  Contributors receive perks including VPN access based on the donation level.

The best way to learn about CyberGhost’s NoSpyVPN project is to watch the video on their Indiegogo page.  Robert Knapp, the company’s co-founder and CEO, explains their goals in the video.  Once I read over the campaign info and watched the video the project came more into light.  The term datacenter makes me think of a very large building or campus housing row after row of servers and networking equipment.  The cost of which can be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.  This isn’t meant as a datacenter in that sense of the word.

CyberGhost’s goal is to build their first VPN node outside of a typical datacenter.  The common practice for VPN providers is to place servers in large datacenters around the world.  That takes some of the control away from the VPN company.  CyberGhost would like to build their own VPN node and host it themselves.  Cutting out the middle man and offering another layer of privacy.  Also the datacenters that CyberGhost and most the VPN industry rely on are primarily used to host web servers.  Those needs can differ from VPN customers.

We’d like to wish the CyberGhost team the best in reaching 100% of their goal to build the new in-house VPN node.  Take a minute to visit their NoSpyProxy page and consider donating to the project.  In doing so you can benefit from the finished product and enjoy a year of CyberGhost VPN from just $77 for new users and $47 for existing users.  The CyberGhost Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign will close on November 3rd.

IPVanish Windows Client 2.0 Beta

September 5, 2014 update: IPVanish just announced the release of their new client 2.0 for Windows.  You can visit IPVanish.com to download the new client.  Use our coupon and enjoy VPN access from just $4.87 a month.

We’re excited to share the new IPVanish Windows client 2.0 release.  The new Windows client is now in the public beta testing phase.  The IPVanish team has opened the beta up to all current and new VPN subscribers so you can take it for a test drive.  I did and was impressed with the new user interface.  If you’re not already a member IPVanish is offering our guests a 25% discount.  Enjoy unlimited VPN from just $4.87 a month.  Once you sign up for service and receive your welcome email you can download the new beta client here.

IPVanish Windows 2.0 client

There are a number of ways to select a server location in the new IPVanish 2.0 Windows client.  My favorite is the Map tab of the Server Selection area.  You can easily move the map around and find all the server locations in your area or anywhere else in the world.  My favorite feature of the map is the zoom in and out feature.  When you zoom out the client will show the total number of servers in a large area like it is for the UK in the map above.  Then when you zoom in on that area of the map it will break down the server locations as shown below:

IPVanish windows Client Map

I’m really just starting to scratch the surface of the new features and functionality of the IPVanish 2.0 software.  Rather than wait a few days I wanted to share the news of the beta so you can test it out as well.  Please remember it’s a beta so if you run into any issues you always have the option of running the older version.  If you have the IPVanish client already installed the new 2.0 beta won’t overwrite it which is nice.  You can choose between either version of the client.  I plan to stick with the 2.0 version and will share more in a few days.

Read our IPVanish review to learn more about the service..  Follow us @VPNSP for the latest news and deals.

PureVPN Adds Free SmartDNS

PureVPN has been one of our favorite VPN services for years now.  They’ve always been known for the value they pack into an account along with excellent user interface design for the PureVPN software.  That continues with the addition of Smart DNS to their line up of features.  As a member I was excited to see that Smart DNS is included without any add-on cost.  You can enjoy unlimited VPN and free SmartDNS from just $4.16 a month.

PureVPN Free Smart DNS

For those of you who already have a PureVPN account the process to add Smart DNS is as follows:

  • Log into the PureVPN site
  • Click on Smart DNS in the Quick Navigation Menu
  • Click activate
  • Select a term
  • The term doesn’t matter since the service is free
  • This will create an invoice for $0.
  • Since you can’t pay a $0 invoice I hopped on live support and Dimitry marked the invoice paid.
  • Dimitry is a support rock start btw.  He had me taken care of in no time.  The support chat took less than two minutes.
  • Now go to the Smart DNS tab again and enter your public IP address.
  • If you’re not sure what your public IP is then visit a site like whatismyipaddress.com
  • Once you add your IP address to the list of allowed IP’s you’ll want to copy the code that’s listed above it.  That will be used to active the Smart DNS feature in the PureVPN Windows client.
  • Launch the PureVPN client as an admin and click on the Smart DNS tab.  Paste your activation code.
  • Now you should see a screen like mine below:

PureVPN Smart DNS

In the screenshot above I chose UK as the region in which I’d like to unblock content.  PureVPN’s Smart DNS supports several regions including US, UK, Spain, Germany, Italy, Egypt and France.  You can see a full line up of channels the service supports in their client.  Smart DNS will help you unblock content in other countries.  It can also help you stream content faster.  For example if you live in the United States and experience a lot of buffering when using Netflix then a good Smart DNS like PureVPN can help speed things up.

I’ll follow up in a few days with a full review of PureVPN’s new Smart DNS service.  If you’re already a member you can refer to the steps above to activate the Smart DNS feature for free.  Those who don’t have an account can sign up for unlimited VPN with free Smart DNS from just $4.16 a month.  You can connect from up to five devices at once with a single account.  You can also configure your router to protect your entire home network with a single VPN account.  You’ll find PureVPN to be one of the best values around.

You can read our PureVPN review to learn more about the service.  Follow us @VPNSP for the latest VPN deals.

DNS Eraser Beta Review

Last week we wrote about a new SmartDNS service called DNS Eraser.  Since then we’ve had a chance to put DNS Eraser through the paces and wanted to share our impression of the service.  Anytime we test a VPN or Smart DNS while it’s in beta the bar isn’t set too high.  With that said DNS Eraser did a fine job of unblocking content in other regioins.  We were able to use the service to unblock and watch media in other countries.

DNS Eraser

When it comes to Smart DNS I’ve been using OverPlay for a long time.  It works well so I haven’t spent much time using other services outside of testing them for our site.  Trying out Smart DNS services isn’t like testing a new VPN.  There just isn’t that much to test.  With most services including DNS Eraser you simply authorize your IP address and change your DNS settings.  From there the service will unblock sites in other regions.

Since we normally write about VPN I want to explain some of the differences between VPN and Smart DNS.  With a VPN your data is encrypted.  You can still access sites in other countries by connecting to a VPN server in that country.  For example you would connect to a server in the UK to watch BBC iPlayer.  VPN adds a layer of privacy protection but the encryption can impact your speed.  A Smart DNS service on the other hand isn’t meant for privacy protection.  It’s sole purpose is to unblock content in other countries.  It will do so without the speed loss of encrypting your data. So it really comes down to which type of service better meets your needs.

Let’s give a quick example of how a Smart DNS can help you unblock channels in other regions.  In this case take a look at what BBC iPlayer looks like when you connect from outside the UK:

BBC iPlayer blocked

Now take a look at BBC iPlayer while connected through a Smart DNS service.  While you’re still physically located outside the UK the Smart DNS service will take care of unblocking the geographic restriction.

BBC iPlayer unblocked

As you can see we now have access to watch Dr. Who through BBC iPlayer.  The same is true for a number of channels in different regions.  DNS Eraser has a supported channels page with an extensive list of channels that their service supports.  The DNS Eraser service is currently in private beta.  We have a few invites to share if you would like to test the service for free.  If you’d like an invite please follow us on Twitter @VPNSP and send us a tweet.  We’ll follow up with a direct message that includes the invite code.