VPN for Android
With so many people using Android phones and tablets as their secondary and, increasingly, their primary means of accessing the internet, it becomes ever more important to secure your online privacy using a VPN service (as the recent revelations about blanket surveillance by the United States NSA on its own innocent citizens has just served to highlight).
In addition to government spying, the popularity of P2P file sharing apps such µTorrent for Android mean that protecting yourself against anti-piracy enforcement agencies and copyright legal trolls should be a high priority.
µTorrent for Android is a fantastic app, and lets you download files on the move. It is also yet another reason why you should use VPN on your Android device.
Android’s built-in VPN client
All* versions of Android come with a VPN client built-in, which supports the PPTP andL2TP/IPsec VPN protocols. We discuss the merits or otherwise of these different protocols in this article, but they can summarized as:
- PPTP – despite its continued popularity in the business world, PPTP is not very secure, and should only be used for ‘quick and dirty’ VPN connections, or when no other option is available. On the plus side, it is very easy to set up
- L2TP/IPsec – is secure, although thanks to the need for entering a long preshared key, it is a bit fiddly to set up. In the desktop VPN world it has been largely superseded by OpenVPN, but it remains a good option, and one that is available to all* versions of Android.
Because OpenVPN is only possible on recent Android phones (see below), almost all VPN providers offer some support for the native built-in client, supplying the necessary infrastructure and setup guides for either or both PPTP and L2TP/IPsec.
*With the exception of heavily modified versions such as that used by Amazon’s Kindle Fire range, which have had the client deliberately removed – use VPN on a Kindle Fire or Kindle Fire HD.
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Setting up VPN using the native VPN client
1. Open the VPN settings. This varies a bit by Android version, but in general go to Settings –> More settings -> VPN
2. One potentially irritating aspect of the client is that it requires you set up a screen lock if you don’t already use one. Just follow the prompts.
Here we have set up a pattern lock as we think it looks pretty!
3. Touch Add VPN network
4. Enter a name for your VPN connection, choose Type, and enter the details given by your VPN provider
PPTP setup is ridiculously easy
L2TP/IPsec setup is still pretty easy, but needs you to enter a long preshared key
5. To start the VPN, go to VPN settings (step 1), touch the VPN connection you want, and enter your VPN username and password
6. Voila!!! You are connected.
Notice the key icon in the taskbar, which lets you know that you are connected to a VPN server.
| Well Now You are Secured and Using a Free VPN which is the default one in your mobile download and surf the Internet ANONYMOUSLY only with | Computer Expert Hackers | .
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