Something which may well unite Hackaday readers is the experience of being “The computer person” among your family or friends. You’ll know how it goes, when you go home for Christmas, stay with the in-laws, or go to see some friend from way back, you end up fixing their printer connection or something. You know that they would bridle somewhat if you asked them to do whatever it is they do for a living as a free service for you, but hey, that’s the penalty for working in technology.

Bad Laws Just Make People Avoid Them

There’s a new one that’s happened to me and no doubt other technically-minded Brits over the last few weeks: I’m being asked to recommend, and sometimes install, a VPN service. The British government recently introduced the Online Safety Act, which is imposing ID-backed age verification for British internet users when they access a large range of popular websites. The intent is to regulate access to pornography, but the net has been spread so wide that many essential or confidential services are being caught up in it. To be a British Internet user is to have your government peering over your shoulder, and while nobody’s on the side of online abusers, understandably a lot of my compatriots want no part of it. We’re in the odd position of having 4Chan and the right-wing Reform Party alongside Wikipedia among those at the front line on the matter. What a time to be alive.

VPN applications have shot to the top of all British app download charts, prompting the government to flirt with deny the idea of banning them, but as you might imagine therein lies a problem. Aside from the prospect of dodgy VPN apps to trap the unwary, the average Joe has no idea how to choose from the plethora of offerings. A YouTuber being paid to shill “that” VPN service is as close of they’ve ever come to a VPN, so they are simply unequipped to make a sound judgement when it comes to trusting a service with their web traffic. They have no hope of rolling their own VPN; setting up WireGuard and still further having a friend elsewhere in the world prepared to act as their endpoint are impractical.

It therefore lies upon us, their tech-savvy friends, to lead them through this maze. Which brings me to the point of this piece; are we even up to the job ourselves? I’ve been telling my friends to use ProtonVPN because their past behaviour means I trust Proton more than I do some of the other well-known players, but is my semi-informed opinion on the nose here? Even I need help!

Today Brits, Tomorrow The Rest Of You

At the moment it’s Brits who are scrambling for VPNs, but it seems very likely that with the EU yet again flirting with their ChatControl snooping law, and an American government whose actions are at best unpredictable, soon enough many of the rest of you will too. The question is then: where do we send the non-technical people, and how good are the offerings? A side-by-side review of VPNs has been done to death by many other sites, so there’s little point in repeating. Instead let’s talk to some experts. You lot, or at least those among the Hackaday readership who know their stuff when it comes to VPNs. What do you recommend for your friends and family?

Header image: Nenad Stojkovic, CC BY 2.0.