journal features

VPN software

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Kawasaki, 2020.05.17

One of the irritants about being mid-way between two countries is the way that national boundaries still play a part in some services like telephones and media. North American 1-800 numbers don't always work across all areas of the continent, and most are impossible to deal with from Japan.

At the same time, services like Netflix and Disney+ restrict their content by country for reasons of licensing arrangements or marketing initiatives irrelevant to the consumer.

So we're using VPN software on our laptops that makes it easy to pretend to be in another country. You just select the destination in the remote country and connect. These things have been around for several years but they're now free of issues such as the terminating IP's being blocked by the content providers.

rand()m quote

Society is indeed a contract... [the state] is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

—Edmund Burke