Windscribe VPN
It is quite common to hear that you need to use a VPN any time you are on a wireless network. Your typical free wireless network at the mall or your favorite coffee shop is not encrypted in any way. If you travel, you can rest assure that hotel wireless internet is terribly insecure, just because you never know if there is someone in the next room sniffing all your packets. Lastly, the internet service provider for the hotel is not to be trusted at all. However, VPN companies themselves can be shady and there is not a good way to verify who can be trusted with your internet communications. It is possible for technically minded people to spin up a virtual machine and provide their own VPN service, but this requires some effort and virtual machines costs can add up. In the end, I decided to go ahead and pay for a dedicated VPN service.
iPhone with Windscribe VPN
My VPN usage is primarily for my iPhone and so I am not going to go into any detail about using Windscribe on a Mac or Windows machine. Needless to say, Windscribe provides multiple clients and setups for all your devices. I chose Windscribe VPN because of their reputation and my initial experience with their free trial. I pay for a yearly plan, so that I can keep my costs down. Anything beyond a year for a service seems to be a gamble. No one wants to sign a 5 year lease, so don’t do it for software as a service either!
The iOS app allows you to connect to a variety of locations. I specifically choose the Chicago locations and select Wireguard as the protocol. My experience with iOS and VPN apps is that once you plug in your phone to charge, iOS will close out your VPN after a period of inactivity. This means I have to open the Windscribe app and establish the VPN connection. You can create rules that exempt your home wireless network or other wireless networks you trust so that the VPN is bypassed. For the most part I keep Windscribe on for all connections, wireless and Verizon cellular. I know for a fact that if you do not use a VPN and are on your cellular network, that a telecommunications engineer can actually see all your data in real time, (if they connect to the cellular tower device). If you have a VPN, you might as well use it all the time.
No VPN Allowed
Now there are some exceptions, when you cannot use a VPN connection and you might want to turn it off. These are annoying to say the least, but there is not much choice.
Some eCommerce sites do not allow VPN connections. The website will most likely give you an HTTP error such as 404 with a message that proxy connections are not allowed. I have had this issue with Lowes.
Warehouse stores and my Verizon cell service do not work well. Often when I am at Menards, Lowes, or The Home Depot, I will get zero bars and if I try to use the in store WiFi, they do not allow VPNs and so my choices are to walk out to the outside yard of the store and use my cell service or choose an insecure store wifi network.
I do have to say that Target and Walmart have great WiFi and their mobile apps make it very easy to scan for in-store prices.
The other exception is at home when I have apps that need to connect to the WiFi network to see local devices. My Sonos speaker is a good example of this. I want to stream Spotify to my Sonos, and so I can either make an exception rule for my home WiFi or just turn off the VPN.
Block Stuff
Windscribe offers a variety of blocking options. Turning some of these on will save on bandwidth and also keep you safe from malware. Windscribe describes this feature: R.O.B.E.R.T. as a customizable server-side domain and IP blocking tool.
Turning on any of these options is account specific and will apply to your other devices as well. Note there is a link at the bottom of the screen that takes you to your account, where you can specify your own custom rules.
Final Notes
I recommend Windscribe as a VPN option for your iPhone. Overall it has worked well for me and my kids.
Sometimes the combination of technology results in a more complex difficulty than one would think. Recently I came across on annoying error message that displayed on my Sony TV from time to time when I was watching a movie. At first I thought it must be my AppleTV that is displaying this. The message was “There is no network connection right now” and after searching Apple’s forums there were people complaining of this same issue, but there did not appear to be a resolution. I then looked at Sony to see if the Google Android 8 software on the TV was to blame. For some reason unknown, Android 8 does not allow you to turn off IPV6 and I thought perhaps that was the issue. I spent some time troubleshooting my firewall and router settings and yet I could still not watch Eternals without this issue coming up.
Last month I walked into my home office and heard the buzzing of a UPS. After switching it out with another smaller UPS, I wiped off the dust and found the model number on the bottom to be: BE550G. These older UPS models are no longer even supported by APC anymore. After doing a search online, I found 
Working remotely is pretty common these days, and even if you take your iPad with you, you always end up needing to access something on your local computer. For this, I have a Windows Server to which I connect to via Microsoft Remote Desktop. This works out great and allows me to access files, or use applications on my Windows box, that are not installed on say my iPad or my MacBook. However in order to get to my home machine, I need to have an external address on the internet. For this I have my own domain name which I have had for a few years now. The other issue I have is that my home internet connection does not have a static external IP address and so the IP address changes from time to time. Even though I have a domain name, I need a way for the domain name records to update every time the IP address changes on my DSL modem. This is what Dynamic DNS was invented for: updating DNS records as needed with new IP addresses. If you have your own domain name, you usually have to pay a provider to host your DNS and they will provide some sort of software or script that will update your DNS. This posting details how I setup pfSense to update my DNS provider ChangeIP.
Apple has a long history with computer networking, from AppleTalk to today’s Internet connected world. However, it is Windows networking that still causes all kinds of headaches for Mac OS X users. It seems that with every release of Mac OS X, Apple seems to have recurring issues with Windows shares. Some of Apple’s defenders will state that Apple adopts industry standards as is, and it is Microsoft and others who publish specs, but don’t actually follow them, so when Apple does follow the specs, it seems to just end up breaking things. SMB is the networking protocol that Microsoft uses for Windows networking. It is what allows Windows network file shares to work across the network. With the latest versions of Mac OS X, Apple abandoned the open source SAMBA package that most Linux distros use to connect to Windows, and wrote their own SMB2 software. This makes Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks connect faster and better to Windows servers. Well that is when it works!