A Chinese version of… everything

For countries like China, well it seems it has been set up as a policy. But on their end, instead of only blocking those popular services, they launch their version. So for any great online platform out there, you can find the Chinese version:

–  in the search engine field, when most regular internet user would refer to Google, Chinese would be molded to use Baidu.

– while we tweet a lot, Chinese would use Sina Weibo for micro-blogging.

– while we are busy updating statuses on Facebook, the chances are that a considerable portion of the Chinese online population would be hanging on Renren.

– while Youtube still reigns on the video platform, it won’t surprise me that there soon will be a Chinese version.

I won’t try to argue against (or for) the reasons behind those approaches. However, one thing’s for sure: there will always be another popular platform rising after the death (or the obsolescence) of today’s popular ones. It has already happened often:

– when Google outpaced Yahoo as the most popular search engine platform,

– when Facebook became the place to hang on, to the disadvantage of MySpace.

Indeed, this is common in the internet technology space. And it’s even happening now.

Instagram? Or, maybe, Pinterest?

Instagr.am has quickly become the preferred photo-sharing service for mobile users (at least for those using  Apple iOS and Android phones and tablets). Once again, Yahoo (who owns Flickr) missed the turning point of the mobile trend, thereby “leaving” most potential Flickr users to Instagr.am (who, BTW, was quickly bought by Facebook for a massive $1 billion). Indeed, mobile is taking over a significant portion of the internet usage.

If we consider another popular platform on the internet, it’s Pinterest: I’m sure you’ve seen it popping in your “internet timeline: people pin to a board, share photos. Again, we go back to that same media: photo.

In fact, whether it is with Pinterest or with Instagr.am, photos are playing a significant role in their success. On the other hand, people are also telling stories with pictures. Every internet user has a digital camera or a smartphone that come with a digital camera. Moreover, as part of an internet that has become social, most of those photos will be shared online.

At first, people will take photos of their families and pets, but once riot happen, or other “interesting stories” unfold, chances are there will be a lot of citizen journalists that will capture the moment with their camera and upload it on popular platforms – be it Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, or whatever …

What do you think? Which one will be the next blocked platform?

We know that there have already been attempts to block access to Facebook, Twitter and Youtube during recent events (at the Arab spring, or n China), so the question I raised on the title of this article: which online platform will be the next one to be threatened by censorship according to you? Come on, let’s play the game and try to “predict” it… Bets are on.

Answer in the comment section.

Favorite VPN solution – survey details

On the survey itself, we’ve added a question about your location: indeed, we are dealing with VPN as a solution for overcoming geo-limitation, and this question just makes sense since it will tell us how spread VPN solutions can be.

Please note that, on the question about your preferred VPN solution, we’ve added a “comment” section so that you can tell us why you prefer one solution compared to one another.

No personal info required

Feel free to answer the survey so that we have a better understanding of what you are actually using. You would notice that some questions are mandatory, we’ve also taken into consideration the fact that some of you may not want to share personal information (name and e-mail for example), so we’ve left those “questions” as optional. Don’t worry, you don’t have to answer those two questions (even though we’d love to know you more

So here is the survey, feel free to have other people take it- the more answer we get, the better

View Survey

Why the number of VPN users matters?

First of all,

• this would give a great indicator for knowing how serious are internet users with regard to the safety of the data they are transferring over the internet.
• but this will also is a great indicator for knowing which countries are most sensitive to using VPN services. Having these figures would give us an indication of the usage people do on the internet.
• finally, it will give an idea of how accessible VPN services can be.

Well, those are only a few reasons, but depending on your standpoint, there may be other reasons for finding out those figures. If you are a VPN provider, this will give you a good grasp of the market. If you are a simple internet user, this will give you an idea of the number of people who have opted for a VPN service for securing some of their internet transaction- this will surely leave you wondering why they have to do so.

So what do we know so far?

What we’ve noticed is that there’s a lot of offerings in the VPN area. While VPN has mainly been a professional service geared toward big companies with different branches, more specific uses have raised for the SOHO office as well as the simple internet user. Here, on how-to-hide-ip, we tend to focus on the latter category since our users want to chose themselves their VPN solution for their own needs, not for the whole company’s IT system (this is a very different industry).

As I went on the internet searching for figures (I must also admit that I didn’t spend hours searching for it), the most precise figure I could find out was the 700 000 VPN users that Sweden has. This figure was mentioned by a study made by a group called Cybernorms, from Lund University. According to that study, that’s 40% more compared to the 500 000 users they have identified two years ago. That same study mentions that 200 000 of these users are aged between 15 to 25 years old. That’s a pretty awesome figure, and very precise: Sweden being the home to the pirate bay file-sharing platform, one can understand why there’s such a high number of young people using VPN services to anonymize their connections.

Crowdsourcing the figures

When I tried to look for similar figures for other countries, my quick-search didn’t really reveal a lot of things. Then, I just said to myself, we’re in the internet age, instead of trying to figure out where to find those figures by myself, why not ask the readers – they may have some figures too already available, or they may have already found some useful resources that deal with that topic.

So, I’m reaching out to how-to-hide-ip readers and ask you to refer us to any online resource (or actual figures – please mention the source) that can give us an idea of the number of VPN users in this world (or in a particular country, city).

Off to you, readers! Let’s share numbers so that we can make this unscientific study a reference in the VPN world

What to expect from a locator app?

But let’s see first some of the features that you can expect from the best phone locator app that will help you track your Android phone should it be lost.

In fact, most Android phone now comes with GPS-feature. This is quite interesting since some applications can report the GPS location of the lost Android. Suppose that you’ve lost your Android phone and that you can remotely plot on a Google map where it actually is. This isn’t sci-fi and actual examples of such situations have already be seen. But this only works if you have installed such apps on your Android phone before it’s lost.

Lock the phone from the distance

Another interesting feature that you may expect from an Android App is the ability to lock the phone, or report to you the conversations happening on your phone should it receive another SIM card. In fact, wouldn’t it be great to be able to track the activities that are one with your lost Android phone?

On the other hand, I’m not sure blocking the phone is actually a good option since there’s a lot of hackers and tools out there that allow unblocking a phone. But anyway, if you know some great tool to efficiently lock a stolen Android phone, feel free to share in the comment section.

If you are more concerned about the data contained in your Android Phone, you may want to remotely wipe the data that it has stored.Personally, I’ll feel comfortable to be able to remotely trigger a wipe of my android phone should it be lost. At least, I can be certain that  I have no personal stuff wandering in someone else’s hand.

At some point in time, you may want to be less pessimistic and hope that the person who may have found your Smartphone is a good guy/gal. But even then, they need to know who/where to send back the phone. Some applications can allow you to remotely display a message on your Android phone giving some instructions to whoever found it about how to give it back to you. You never know how good people can be sometimes.

But how to trigger those apps?

Most of the times, you have to install first the apps (before you lost the Android phone), then depending on the apps, you may trigger the action you expect from the Apps by sending some special SMS code to your phone, or by sending an e-mail to it.

Names like “Look Out mobile security“, “Where’s my Droid”  are often quoted when it comes to addressing the aforementioned issues. Do you support those applications? Or have you chosen to use different tools?

What is the best phone locator app you found? Please share it with other how-to-hide-ip readers so that we can be prepared whenever we lose our Android phones.

On the other hand, the once called “The Pirate Bay” polled its users about their use of a hide IP service, and it showed up that 70% of the users are using a VPN or a proxy service(or are planning to do so). The interesting thing is that out of this 70%, 51% are still in the planning phase to use a VPN or proxy service while 4.8% are already using a paid service. From that same study that the Pirate Bay has done, 12% have reported that they aren’t even aware of those concepts of hiding IP, VPN or proxies.

How-to-hide-ip readers, please do us a favor, help those people a bit, redirect them to the multitude of articles that we’ve already written here, and if they are looking for a solution, you’ve got a lot of options that we have already covered here.

Why those VPN figures?

Well, it may be too obvious, but peer-to-peer file-sharing has always been considered as piracy. The concept of legal peer-to-peer is yet in its infancy age. On the other hand, there’s a lot of pressure and legal threats on those kinds of services nowadays that leads to users being more conscious about anonymizing themselves when surfing, and especially when launching any peer-to-peer services.

If we consider the US especially, with that SOPA bill, and other threats over internet users, people want to free themselves from the threat of being sued. As the discussion has moved to the legal matters, it all boils down to definitions: and without getting into the details, there will always be a risk that some legitimate use of the internet would be assimilated to piracy.

A growing market for VPN and proxy demand

I can see you thinking that this is great news for VPN and proxy vendors. Well, this ain’t false. The more the threat of being sued will be, the greater the demand for such services. The good thing, though, is that, here, at how-to-hide-ip, we’ve reviewed both paid and free solutions thereby leaving to you the decision to opt for one solution or another. Yes, the demand for anonymizing end-user internet connection will always grow – especially with all those legal threats to “control” the internet. There will always people who will be rebel enough, or who just don’t want to get into troubles.

As a closing note, let’s be clear once and for all, here, at how-to-hide-ip, we aren’t here to promote piracy, we’re here to talk about solutions that already exist for anonymizing your internet connection.  As we started with figures, let’s end this article with another promising start:  the report published by “the American Assembly” from Columbia University mentioned that “of the 30% of Americans who have “pirated” digital music files, 46% indicated they now do so less because of the emergence of low-cost legal streaming services. Among TV/movies pirates: 40%”.

What do you think of these VPN figures? Please let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Why do we do VPN reviews?

The purpose of these VPN reviews is simple:

– Check if some VPN providers we have recommended before are still worth recommending. As a blog who want to establish itself as a trustworthy recommendation source, we want to review from time to time the services we are recommending thereby ensuring our readers that we fully do our homework before putting our “recommended” stamp on one solution.

– Identify other VPN solutions that may have emerged since the last recommendations we made. VPN field is an ever-changing place to be. More and more players are getting into the ring, and with the advent of cloud computing, the need for a reliable VPN solution increases. This also means that this VPN market is becoming more and more interesting for other service providers. We want to be on top of what’s going on and give our readers our view/review on those new players’ offerings.

– Find out if some new technologies/offers have emerged that are worth mentioning/trying. Our readers have purchased some VPN solutions, and at some point of time, they have to decide if they should “blindly” renew their contract, or consider other new solutions that may fit better to their ever-changing needs.

In fact, how-to-hide-ip is going to purchase some of those packages (so that our readers don’t have to), install them and test them. And we need your help – the help of our readers.

How can you help?

Instead of deciding by ourselves which products to test, we want to hear you. This is the opportunity for you to influence the services you think that are worth considering to test. If you’ve browsed through the archives of this blog, you have a rough idea of the VPN services that are usually recommended here. Moreover, if you are subscribed to our newsletter, then we have sent you a list of VPN providers that we are recommending. This is the time where you can influence the choice of VPN reviews.

Whether you think that there are other services that are worth recommending, or you think that there’s a nice offer you’d like to test but you don’t feel confident enough to make a full review, don’t hesitate to flag it to us in the comment system.

We will do the testing for you and we will publish our results on this blog. Isn’t it nice? Think about those offers you always wanted to test but didn’t do because of a lot of reasons. Indicate them to us, and eventually tell us in the comment system what feature do you especially want to see reviewed. We will do our best to get some of them properly reviewed and tested.