13 posts
Most VPN listicles are paid placement. This guide is not. What actually matters: jurisdiction, audits, protocols, kill switch design, and red flags.
Free VPNs sell the data they promised to protect, inject ads, rent out your bandwidth, and in documented cases turn client devices into botnets. Here's the receipt.
DNS leaks happen when domain lookups bypass your VPN tunnel and reach your ISP. Smart Multi-Homed Resolution, IPv6, and WebRTC all open side channels. Here's what leaks and how to plug each one.
What to look for, what to ignore, and the red flags that should kill a purchase. Jurisdiction, logging, kill switch type, protocol support, audits, pricing transparency.
WebRTC is a browser API for peer-to-peer connections. Pages can use it to fetch your real public IP even with a VPN running. Here's why, how to test, and how to disable it per browser.
Most VPN kill switches live in the app and react after a drop has already leaked traffic. A real kill switch fires before the handshake completes, at the kernel level. Here's the difference.
Every DNS query, every domain via SNI, every connection's timing and volume. Here's what your ISP knows, what they sell to whom, and how a VPN changes the picture.
OpenVPN is fingerprinted in 30 seconds. WireGuard is blocked in Russia, China, and Iran. Here are the protocols that still work in 2026, ranked by effectiveness against state-level DPI.
DPI systems inspect your traffic payloads, not just headers. Russia's TSPU detects OpenVPN in 30 seconds. Here's how DPI works, which protocols it catches, and which ones survive.
XRay is the proxy platform that powers VLESS, Reality, and most modern censorship circumvention tools. It's not a protocol. It's the engine that runs them.
VLESS Reality performs a real TLS handshake with sites like microsoft.com, forwarding their actual certificate. To any DPI system, your VPN traffic is indistinguishable from normal HTTPS browsing.
VLESS is a lightweight proxy protocol from the XRay ecosystem that delegates encryption to TLS, eliminating double-encryption overhead. Here's how it works and why it matters for VPN users in censored countries.
WireGuard is fast, but it's trivially detectable by DPI. VLESS with Reality makes your VPN traffic indistinguishable from visiting microsoft.com. Here's how it works and why it matters.
