The internet can be a hairy place. How do you protect yourself?

There are a number of things you can do to stay safe and anonymous. One of the strongest solutions is to use a VPN, or virtual private network.

It's a solution frequently employed by large companies to keep its internal communications to itself and to let employees securely connect to its network while they're out of the office.

By logging in to the network via a VPN client, all of your internet activity and communication is routed through a "middleman" computer (or maybe even several). Your IP address (and therefore your physical location) is concealed, and it becomes harder to follow you around online.

If you want to harness this technology for yourself, it's pretty easy. You need to first install a VPN server on a computer that you want to route your internet traffic through. We already have some tutorials on how to setup your own VPN server from our forum and tutorials page.. Then setup your vpn client on the computer you'll be browsing from. You are now connected.

If this sounds like too much trouble and you don't want to finagle with the setup, you can just opt for a service that offers their own vpn client so you dont have to setup anything on your computer like AnchorFree. It's free if you go the ad-supported route or $30 a year to go ad-free. AnchorFree will handle and anonymize your traffic, even checking it for malware before delivering it to you.