Connecting to the Web via VPN is one of the best way to surf the web anonymously and access to content that are not available (such as Hulu, Pandora) in your country. Hotspot Shield is one of the popular VPN around. It is free and is compatible with Windows and Mac, but it can be slow at times and is filled with advertisements that spoil your browsing experience.

What other choices do you have?

ibVPN offers both free and premium VPN for public use. They give out 30 free VPN accounts every month to their subscribers, and for those who want a faster and less congested connection, can opt to pay a monthly fee for the extra boost.

Unlike Hotspot shield that requires you to install a desktop client, no installation is required to use ibVPN. This makes it compatible with all platforms, even your iDevices and Android phone.

We will be giving out free VPN accounts for our giveaway of the week. Read on…

To connect to ibVPN, you will have to configure your network setting for your OS.

Here’s the instructions to configure a Windows 7 machine, Mac machine and iPad/iPhone.

How does ibVPN fare compared to the rest?

Personally, I have not tried all other VPN services, so there is no way for me to compare ibVPN with the rest. Over the few days that I have used ibVPN, it loads pretty quickly. In some instances, some sites are not loaded properly (or can’t be loaded at all), probably because its IP was blocked. When such incidents occurred, switching the VPN server usually help. Other than that, I have no issue in watching videos in Youtube, Hulu or browsing Facebook, Twitter etc.

Here’s a quick comparison of the ping speed between my native connection, ibVPN and HotSpot Shield

The test was done with a premium VPN account. You can see that the speed is comparable to the native connection and is much faster than Hotspot Shield.

Free Giveaway

You have seen enough, it’s time for our weekly free giveaway. This time, ibVPN has generously sponsored 10 free accounts valid for 3 months. These accounts will have access to US, UK, CA, DE, NL and IE servers.

Here’s how you can participate in the free giveaway:

Step 1

Be our Facebook fan or follow us in Twitter:

STEP 2

Fill up the form below. This is to make sure that we can contact you when you win the license. We promise that we won’t spam you.

Update: The contest is now closed

STEP 3
Share this post either in Facebook or Twitter, AND leave a comment below.

This giveaway begins now and ends Wednesday, 13th October at 2359hrs Eastern Time. The winners will be selected at random and announced via email.

Share and enjoy!

For those who are not aware of the incident, if you are not located in United States, and you click the “Upgrade your account” in the Google Voice dashboard, you will get the error message ”Google Voice is not available in your country”.

From then on, you won’t be able to get to the Google voice dashboard or add credit to your Gmail CallPhone. Effectively, you are locked out from using the call services.

Luckily there is an easy way to fix this. All we need to do is to change our machine to an USA IP address and login to Google voice to cancel the upgrade. Here’s the steps:

In Windows/Mac:

1. Download and install Hotspot shield.

2. Run Hotspot shield

3. Open your browser and login to your Gmail account

4. Open another tab and go to https://www.google.com/voice/. Instead of the “Google Voice Unavailable” error message, you will now be prompted to setup Google voice.

We are not going to setup Google Voice since it is not available outside of USA yet, so what you need to do now is to click on the link “Cancel Your Upgrade”.

That’s it. Your account is unlocked. You can access your Google voice dashboard and add credit to your account.

In Linux

Since Hotspot Shield is not available for Linux, we have to use alternative method to connect to USA IP address.

One of the alternative is to connect to a remote IP using SSH. Once you are connected to the remote address, you can follow the same steps above to cancel your upgrade.

Does this method works for you? Let us know if you know of other ways to connect to a US IP address.

For those not familiar, Hulu is a popular video playback site from NBC that streams many mainstream television shows right to your browser.  The biggest problem with the site is that it blocks access for users outside the continental United States.  Hulu isn’t the only site in the world that does this either.  Many sites restrict access based on the IP Address that you are currently connected with.

This is where Hotspot Shield comes to the rescue.  Hotspot Shield is a free software download that allows you to use the internet anonymously – for both Windows and Mac computers.  It works by providing you with a different IP address than you would normally get, allowing you to bypass country-type restrictions. 

Here’s a look at just how easy it is to use.

Start by downloading the installer from the Hotspot Shield web site.  The installation uses the standard wizard-type interface and I only identified two noteworthy items during the install.  The first is that you should uncheck the box that says “Include the Hotspot Shield Community Toolbar”.  Unless you are one of those people that loves adding more toolbars to your browser, this will provide you with very little additional value. 

The second item I noted was that during the install you will see one or more Windows Security prompts that let you know that Windows can’t verify the publisher of the driver software it is installing.  To complete the installation, click “Install this driver software anyway”.

Once the wizard completes, a browser window will open up taking you to the “Invite a Friend!” page.  You are in no way obligated to do this.  In fact, you can probably just close that browser window and continue.

You should now see a little green shield in your system tray that looks like: 

It’s possible that it will be red depending on the current connection state (green is connected, red is disconnected).  If the shield is red, you can right-click on the icon and the pop-up menu will give you the option to connect.  The menu also allows you to look at the configuration properties and disconnect the Hotspot Shield.

Clicking on Properties in the menu will open a browser window and load the status page.  This page shows the current state of the shield and the current IP Address being assigned.  From here you can also disconnect the shield, or click on Show Config for more options and information.  The extended config screen shows you how much data has moved in and out since Hotspot Shield last connected and the date and time of the last connection.

So you are now good to go.  Reloading the Hulu.com site produces more favorable results than last time.  The message about “our video library can only be streamed within the United States” will be replaced by a message that tells you that advertising can’t be loaded.  Amusingly enough, they offer a link to get support if you can’t see the ads.

After 30 seconds, the ad message is removed and the video playback begins.  The only downside to Hotspot Shield is that it forces an advertisement across the top of the web pages you load while connected.  I can deal with that though, simply scroll the page down.  :)

Well, there you have it.  Hotspot Shield does a good job at helping you avoid country discrimination, but it has some other great benefits as well.  If you are prone to using public networks (e.g. hotels, coffee shops both wired and wireless) then you can use this utility to help keep your data safe and secure.

The software essentially creates a VPN (virtual private network) between your computer and the AnchorFree Internet gateway.  The tunnel created prevents hackers and would-be snoops from viewing your emails, instant messages, credit card information and anything else you happen to transmit. 

What other tools do you use to make your Internet use more secure and anonymous?