OkayFreedom from German company Steganos is an easy-to-use VPN service that ?hides your online activity from eavesdroppers, secures data being transmitted, and allows you to spoof your IP address to view content that is restricted to a certain geographic location. The VPN technology ensures all traffic is encrypted and not visible to third-parties even when the user is on an open network, such as the wireless network at a coffee shop, hotel, or conference center.
OkayFreedom override the IP address assigned by your ISP with one drawn from its own pool of addresses, allowing users to pretend to be connecting from a different location. This is quite handy for a business user required to keep the company's Facebook and Twitter accounts up-to-date but is traveling in a country where the sites are blocked. This applies to other sites that may be restricted to certain geographies.
For example, if a user in the United States wanted to watch a livestream from the London 2012 Olympic Games, that user was out of luck because regional restrictions prevented the user from accessing sites outside of the US. With OkayFreedom, users could change their IP addresses to appear to come from a different region in order to view the games online.
When shopping for a VPN service, users have several choices, some of which we've reviewed. AnchorFree's HotSpot Shield Elite which received our Editors' Choice designation, proXPN, and Private WiFi from Private Communications are easy to use and good performers. Like these services, OkayFreedom offers both a free version and a paid version.
OkayFreedom comes in three flavors: basic, premium and premium "flat." Regardless of which version is installed, the user has the same level of security, privacy, ease of use and customer support. The only difference is the bandwidth cap, at 500MB per month for basic users and 5GB per month for premium users. Premium flat users have no bandwidth limits.
Pricing is a little complicated. OkayFreedom is free for users up to 500MB per month. To get more, users can pay for premium access, which is $5.95 per month for 5GB, or invite up to five more people to use the service and receive an additional 100MB per user. Premium users can also invite up to five more people, to get 500MB per user to reach the bandwidth cap of 10GB per month. It might just be easier to pay for the premium flat service for $11.95 per month and not worry about bandwidth restrictions. That's actually a pretty good deal compared to some of the other services on the market. Unlike HotSpot Shield, OkayFreedom does not display any ads on its free version. It offers more bandwidth than proXPN, making it a more appealing product, pricewise. Bulk pricing also kicks in for annual subscriptions, as opposed to going month-to-month.
Wonky Installation Process
Installation was a little strange, which is never a great way to start a review. The link on the Website dropped a downloader tool, which I had to execute to get the actual installation file. There was nothing on the site to indicate the first file was just a downloader and not the installer.
The installation itself was familiar. Like Private WiFi, OkayFreedom replaces the actual hardware adapter on the machine with a virtual network adapter provided by OpenVPN (TAP-Win32 Provider V9). OkayFreedom also downloads security certificates at the end of the process, and then displays a page with terms and conditions.
The problem is, the page is in German. Google Translate tells me the top line is "You must accept the terms and conditions to be allowed to use OkayFreedom. Read them carefully and click at the end of the page to 'Accept.' Otherwise, you may not use OkayFreedom." I guessed it was the Terms and Conditions page, and that I would have to hit "Accept" to continue, but not many people would have thought to scroll to the bottom of the page to see the button. They could have easily closed the window, and wondered why the software didn't install.
One of the biggest problems with terms and conditions and privacy policies is that people just hit okay without reading. Having a page in a foreign language without even the option to switch to an English-language page just compounds the problem. I hope Steganos changes this part of installation so that users can at least switch to a different language to see the page, or have language-specific installers.
Auto-Connect
The field of VPN services is an increasingly crowded one, but Steganos offers an auto-connect feature that is unusual. OkayFreedom relies on a Chrome extension or a Firefox add-on to detect when a user is accessing a geographically restricted site. At this point, the VPN service automatically sets up a connection with a VPN server in the appropriate region to give users the necessary geographic identity to proceed.
I had the Chrome extension installed, but I was unable to see the software kick in automatically when trying to access the BBC's iPlayer to view the livestreams for the Olympics. I managed to get switchover to view iPlayer to work under Firefox, though, but couldn't replicate on other sites consistently.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/GPgDPzN493o/0,2817,2408407,00.asp
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