The main issue is that they all seem to advertise themselves as these privacy and cybersecurity services first, while ignoring all the other added benefits.
(Also: I don't think anyone has mentioned this yet, as maybe it is somehow "gauche" to do so, but one of the top reasons people use VPNs around the world is because they want to browse porn and they don't want people around them to know. At some point, the people in the apartment next door to me figured out my wi-fi password and seemingly felt the correct solution to this issue was to use me for their porn browsing, but it was then all the more awkward when I figured out why my network was slow and knew all of the porn sites they were browsing. Most people seem more OK with the idea of paying a company like ExpressVPN--even if they are legitimately run by "spies"--to be their dedicated porn access point than hoping that someone else more locally won't find out what sites they are browsing.)
Or your ISP may be one of the big ones - Comcast, Time Warner, etc or whatever they are in other countries, and you may legitimately not trust them either.
That seems implausible.
WEP can be broken with: https://www.aircrack-ng.org/
WPS can be defeated with: https://tools.kali.org/wireless-attacks/reaver
*Disclosure: ExpressVPN has sponsored my podcast in the past (tho I don’t handle ad sales fwiw) and I’ve always chosen to do the “this is how I watch X service in X country” use case in ad reads, b/c that’s the value in it for me vs rolling my own Wireguard/Tailscale setup (I actually have Tailscale setup for my home network).
False advertising I’d say
We have no illusion that a third party VPN adds any security; we use it for this reason. I vpn to my personal colo machines when away from home.
I'm not saying VPNs are worthless - I'm on one right now for work. Commercial VPNs, for most people who purchase them, are completely worthless.
And I very much doubt that tunneling your connection through a VPN can improve ping.
A world where every second funny video you might have found on Reddit leaves you with a cryptic message that some "rights holder" doesn't permit you to see it (and denies you from joining the fun everyone else seems to be having in the thread).
A world where you cannot buy half of the cool stuff you want (and everyone else seems to be having) because you cannot even see the online store where it is sold.
A world where you're even denied access to old and seemingly public domain e-books.
Open your eyes. This is the world most of us live in.
We're not on commercial VPNs because we love to, but because often there is no other way. They are in a sense invaluable when it comes to geo-restrictions, even though I agree with you that they are worthless for many of the reasons they claim to exist.
You get a hash value that's roughly unique to the browser-device configuration. You don't know from that hash where the user is located. You have to pair the hash up with geolocation services to get that info. Once you do that though, you get a decent idea of if the person is changing their IP, but there's still no way to tell what the 'real' IP is. You just end up with a unique ID that's associated with a handful of different IP addresses.
Yea... as someone who used to play a lot of online games, this was always a surefire way to increase ping time lol. "Crap, my VPN is still on... brb"
Surprisingly this can be the case as long as the combined link to VPN + target is better than the direct link to target. Keep in mind that the target might be geo distributed.
Like driving, going over 2 highways might be fasted than going over a direct dirt road, or a longer road might be faster because the direct road is congested.
Was this a bug in Overwatch? Almost certainly, but the VPN was an effective workaround.
Is that surprising? I think that's what you would expect, and it's what the above commenter is suggesting (quite reasonably IMO) is very unlikely.
I think the issue is that you're implying the road to the target is a dirt road, but the road to the VPN is a highway, which seems a bit questionable.
[1] https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/lower-ping-whe...
"Turn on VPN, network performance improves" is a regular occurrence these days.