Networking

Image: Optus
Moreton Bay Regional Council has rolled out a number of IoT water tank sensors that remove the need to send staff to remote locations to check on water levels. The sensors are connected via low Earth orbit nanosatellites, and have been estimated to save the council around AU$20,000 each year. The council partnered with Optus Enterprise and Myriota on the deployment, with Optus parent company Singtel having a stake in Myriota. “As a council we have made great strides in implementing smart technologies, from our AI road scanning system on garbage trucks to pathway defect detection e-bikes, just to name a few,” Mayor Peter Flannery said. “These water tanks are critical in supplying water for toilets and other amenities at our region’s remote areas, which are used by many locals and tourists each year.” Further up the Queensland coast, Livingstone Shire Council said last year it was trialling smart lights to help confused turtle hatchlings. Due to the street lighting around the area, sometimes when the hatchlings leave their eggs, they can become disorientated, fail to find the horizon, and stray from the path they should be taking into the ocean. Even after they reach the sea, the hatchlings can sometimes be lured back by the lights.

The lights are connected to a LoRaWAN network provided by NNNCo, which was deployed to the shire in 2019. On Thursday, Optus launched a feature in its My Optus app dubbed Sidekick that allows customers to ask contacts to check in with them. “Many of us can identify with that feeling of wanting someone to check in with us in a little while to make sure we are okay, even if we can’t exactly pinpoint why we feel that way. It may feel awkward to ask someone for that extra assurance,” Optus director of digital AI Kate Brodie said. “Optus Sidekick can help you prearrange a time when Optus will let the people you care about know you want them to check in on you, and only gets in touch if that time arises. We have also discovered that it’s not just women who may want to use Optus Sidekick, but also kids walking home from school, people out for a late-night walk, and even an elderly neighbour who walks to the store alone.” A beta of the feature is being run on iOS. Related Coverage More

Atlassian CISO Adrian Ludwig spoke to ZDNet this week to discuss the Atlassian Confluence vulnerability — CVE-2021-26084 — and defend the company’s response to the problem.Ludwig said the vulnerability was initially reported through Atlassian’s bug bounty program on June 30th by Benny Jacob and that their security team quickly realized it was a critical issue. The patch was available by August 15 and security bulletins were sent out on August 25. They also submitted the vulnerability and patch to NIST and other government organizations so that it could be disseminated further. The information was sent out to Atlassian’s channel partners and account managers so that emails to customers could be sent out. Atlassian has its own test instances of Confluence and began seeing evidence of automated exploitation around September 1. Ludwig said it was bots probing the services and attempting to exploit them using the vulnerability. “As part of our normal process evaluating a vulnerability, we go back through the logs of our environment and our infrastructure and look to see whether there’s any historic exploitation. In this instance, we did not see any exploitation prior to our security advisory going out, but we did see it starting about September 1st,” Ludwig explained. “On September 3, having confirmed that, and also, having heard that there were plenty of folks that have not yet patched, we put out an update to our advisory saying that we have seen evidence of active exploitation and also encouraging people to patch.”Ludwig said Atlassian sent a second notification to customers after security companies and government agencies, like US Cybercom, began to send out notices about the problem. 

Despite Atlassian’s efforts, thousands of organizations were still vulnerable to the issue. Security company Censys found that the number of vulnerable Confluence instances was more than 8,500 as of September 5. Jenkins, a leading open source automation server, announced on Saturday that its deprecated Confluence service was successfully attacked through the Confluence exploit. As of Wednesday evening, security company GreyNoise found that hundreds of organizations were still being targeted through the vulnerability despite the notices and news coverage of the problem. GreyNoise CEO Andrew Morris said there was a big uptick on Wednesday in Atlassian Confluence attacks, with “over a hundred devices opportunistically exploiting the vuln and counting. If you haven’t patched, you’re owned.”Morris told ZDNet that GreyNoise runs a large network of collector sensors in hundreds of data centers around the globe and saw the first opportunistic exploitation occur at 4:45 pm on August 31st.”We’ve seen it ramp up quite a bit in the last few days. And now, just today alone, we’ve seen over a hundred devices opportunistically attempting to exploit this vulnerability out on the internet,” Morris said, putting the number at 144.  “All that means is that if if Atlassian Confluence customers have not patched in the last week, it’s still extremely important for them to do so, but what’s even more important than that is probably calling an incident response team or network hunt team because there’s a really good chance — I would say like, 99.999% — that any Confluence customers that have not patched in the last week have probably been compromised.”Bad Packets reported that CVE-2021-26084 exploit activity was being detected from hosts based in Russia targeting their Atlassian Confluence honeypots. They previously said they “detected mass scanning and exploited activity from hosts in Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Nepal, Romania, Russia and the US targeting Atlassian Confluence servers vulnerable to remote code execution.”Of the instances in Atlassian’s environment, Ludwig said all of the attacks have been automated and all of them have been cryptomining. Morris noted that it is hard to tell who exactly is exploiting the vulnerability because many times threat actors commoditize access, exploiting new vulnerabilities and then selling access to the system to other actors. “They could be some combination of APTs, criminal groups, financially motivated groups, government state actors, or even people that are trying to build up their botnet quite a bit. So it’s not altogether clear,” he said. “But usually when things like this happen, at least some amount of the bad guys are directly financially motivated and usually the quickest path to monetization is using cryptojacking. In this case, I don’t have any evidence to suggest what the bad guys are doing once they compromised these devices.”The problem with updatesLudwig told ZDNet that the vulnerability is a “classic challenge that on-premise software has had to deal with forever.””I remember 20 years ago, when I was at Adobe, we made a decision that we were going to start doing monthly security bulletins because that was a way to drive more consistency in terms of getting updates out there,” Ludwig said. “But even that level of consistency is just not sufficient to get people to patch on a regular basis. We’re fortunate that the Atlassian products don’t have, frankly, a lot of security advisories that go out. It can be months, if not a year, between when these go out. They’re relatively uncommon, but that also makes it a little bit more challenging to make sure that people are updating quickly because they’re not in practice the same way they might be for some of their other enterprise products.”He added that those who have internet facing services and are not able to update in 24-48 hours should consider moving to the cloud. “You really need to consider getting to a point where your security is not dependent on the process that just doesn’t conform with modern expectations for how quickly you need to update. Right now, I don’t think we’re ever architecturally going to fix the fact that it’s hard to push out a software update, notify everybody, have them take action and do that faster than exploitation starts to happen,” Ludwig explained. Ludwig said Atlassian does not know how many organizations have not updated their systems or which ones may have run a script that they provided as part of the advisory process for customers that did not want to update. Ludwig said he personally checked with customer support this week and noted that they are getting comments and questions as some run into issues updating their software. “In general, the volume of that has been lower than we’ve seen for previous security instances. So it seems like things are going pretty well,” Ludwig said. “For those who are attempting to do the update, it seems to be working. And the script also provides an easy way for people to make sure their environment is protected.”Ludwig added that they followed up with some customers on Friday and have provided Atlassian field teams with additional information.He told ZDNet it was difficult to know how many customers had been affected, how many customers are still not in a safe place and how many customers are “not in a safe place because they’ve made a conscious decision.””We will follow up when we can, but my expectation is that there will always be some number of instances of software on the internet that’s out of date and that’s being exploited,” Ludwig explained. “Ultimately, we want to do everything that we can to make sure customers get patched or apply the scripts that they need to as quickly as possible.”A number of IT experts defended Atlassian’s response, saying it is typically difficult to get customers to update software, particularly during and after holiday weekends.  David McNeely, CTO at ThycoticCentrify, said it was particularly difficult given that it simply takes time and in many cases requires changes to control approvals and subsequent downtime to manually perform updates or patching. Morris of GreyNoise similarly defended Atlassian’s response, noting that this kind of thing happens “pretty regularly.””I think that when something like this happens, it’s really easy to rush and want to pile on to Atlassian for doing the wrong thing or making their customers vulnerable. They are responsible, I’m not absolving them of responsibility. But this happens to pretty much every software company on the planet,” Morris said. “From time to time, a vulnerability is disclosed, a patch is released and then there’s a period of time where the vendor wants you to patch as soon as humanly possible. But they can’t make you do it.”This situation is particularly bad because of how many organizations are affected and because the timing — Labor Day weekend — was tough, Morris added. “It was kind of a perfect storm because Confluence runs on the internet, which means that it has to be resilient to attackers that would come in from anywhere on the entire Internet. It’s not like it’s buried deep inside someone’s network, where it would be a little bit safer by default,” Morris added. “If this is running in your environment, I would really, really strongly recommend patching and calling an incident response team.”  More

Image: Microsoft
Microsoft has announced plans to cement Azure Space as a key player in the growing Australian space market through new partnerships with Nokia, the University of Adelaide’s Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML), and the South Australian government.Microsoft launched its Azure Space initiative last October. Azure Space was developed by the tech giant to position Azure in the space and satellite-related connectivity and compute part of the cloud market.Azure Space Australia’s operations are based in Adelaide’s Lot Fourteen and is headed up by former US Air Force colonel Lynn McDonald.On Thursday, the tech giant said it inked an agreement with Nokia and the South Australian government to build communications, connectivity, and advanced data processing solutions featuring satellite imagery, AI analytics, and 5G-based technology that could be used for various applications such as rail safety, mine automation, defence, and public sector use cases.Microsoft’s Azure cloud, Azure Edge, Azure Orbital, and emerging Azure Space, AI, and machine learning technologies, plus Nokia’s 5G Digital Automation Cloud platform will be leveraged to build these capabilities, Microsoft said.Nokia also plans to expand its Adelaide-based 5G services so it can co-develop these use cases with the Azure Space team. “We are delighted about this agreement with the South Australian government and the opportunity to work with Nokia as we bring together interdisciplinary experts to develop, test, and deploy new technologies and strategies that respond to some of the biggest challenges facing organisations today,” McDonald said.

“This important collaboration with Nokia will allow Australian organisations in multiple sectors to take a giant leap forward into a new era of communications and cloud computing, making the most of space data and technology and catapulting them to the very forefront of digital innovation.”Additionally, Microsoft has signed a memorandum of understanding with AIML to jointly explore how advanced cloud computing, AI, computer vision, and machine learning can be applied in space.Dubbed Project AI Off Earth, the pair will conduct modelling, emulation, and simulation of complex space operations and systems; build algorithms for on-board satellite data processing; develop solutions for the remote operation and optimisation of satellites, constellations, and swarms; and address space domain awareness and debris monitoring.”Although focused on in-space technologies, Project AI Off Earth will explore how space-related technologies and data, and cognitive systems can be used to support automation of multiple different industries, help establish smart cities, as well as address sustainability and important environment challenges,” Microsoft Australia Azure Space engineer Nicholas Moretti said.These latest announcements follow the launch of a Microsoft for Space Startups Australia Program in July. The new program was designed to support space startups, give them access to Azure credits, and provide a range of Microsoft technologies, technical specialists, and mentors. Office of Planetary Observations and Spiral Blue were named as the first startups to join the initiative. Related Coverage More

National Broadband Network CEO Stephen Rue told an Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) conference on Wednesday that the broadband wholesaler is open to the idea of consumers being able to purchase a prepaid NBN plan. “We sell our services through retailers, and we’d be very happy to work with retailers to the extent that they want to bring in prepaid products that services a portion of the community and we’d be very happy to work with them,” he said. “We ourselves, we don’t sell directly to consumers.” NBN is currently involved in a Special Access Undertaking consultation that has seen the wholesaler float three possible future pricing options. On the options put forward by NBN, ACCAN said the halfway house model that removes CVC on plans of 100Mbps and quicker was the least worst choice, followed by the reworking of its current pricing structure, and finally the flat priced model that removes CVC altogether. At the time in August, ACCAN called on NBN to introduce its low-income product before current pricing discussions were completed due to New South Wales being in lockdown. “NBN Co has been consulting on a low-income product for vulnerable households since 2019, and we were led to believe that this much needed product would finally come to market this year. We’re still waiting,” ACCAN CEO Teresa Corbin said.

“People need connectivity now; they can’t afford to wait for months and months until the regulatory process is over.” ACCAN said in its submission that the entry-level plan should be the 25Mbps plan, not the current 12Mbps. On Wednesday, Corbin confirmed the prepaid option was raised in conversations around NBN pricing. “We’ve had on the table on offer to work with industry around a low-income product or the sort of new product … with the prepaid,” Rue said. “It’s an ongoing discussion.” Related Coverage More

Image: Aussie Broadband
Aussie Broadband announced on Wednesday it would raise AU$114 million via an institutional placement. Making good on its statement in its recent results that the company expected to make one acquisition in the first half of FY22, the company said the money would be used to “support growth by M&A, new business product and technology development, and/or further fibre and network build.” “We are very encouraged by the strong level of support from new and existing institutional, sophisticated, and professional investors. We greatly appreciate the backing of existing shareholders who participated in the placement and welcome new shareholders that have joined the register as part of the equity raise,” Aussie Broadband managing director Phillip Britt said. “There are promising opportunities to execute transformational acquisitions in the business segment that will complement and improve Aussie Broadband’s position in the market.” The announcement follows the company appointing a head of mergers and acquisitions in April.  In its full-year results, the telco reported revenue increased 84% to AU$350 million, and earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation prior to AU$1.5 million in IPO expenses jumped five-fold to AU$19 million. In the fourth quarter alone, the company reported revenue of AU$100 million. See also: Best internet provider in Australia 2021: Top ISPs

Aussie Broadband said when handing down its results, that due to ongoing lockdowns around the country and the impact on NBN CVC expense, it would not be providing guidance. In the recent ACCC NBN speed report, Aussie Broadband saw its error rate blow out, doubling its 0.18 daily outage rate to 0.36. This increase occurred as every other telco tested saw a dropping error rate. Responding to the numbers, Britt said the company “keeps an eagle eye on network usage” and upgrades the network if it sees peaks beyond its normal range. “The ACCC’s report here covers data over a 24-hour period. That means it includes things like scheduled outages, CVC upgrades, and fibre upgrades. Typically, planned outages take place between midnight and 6am. This is to minimise the impact to end users because most people don’t use the internet at that time,” Britt told ZDNet. “One of the reasons why we do this is simply to move customers from one CVC and put them onto another one, so the current CVC doesn’t get overloaded. “We also think it’s important to look at outages that last for longer than 60 seconds because these are more likely to have an impact on end user experience. From the ACCC’s report, we’re relatively low compared to other telcos in this area.” Earlier in the week, Aussie Broadband announced it entered into a decade-long deal with VicTrack to access each other’s fibre network.The swap will give Aussie Broadband the ability to roll out its 100G business fibre services to Traralgon, Morwell, Warragul, Pakenham, Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, and Warrnambool, as well as additional redundancy in metro areas. The telco will also build access for VicTrack to a number of NBN points of interconnect for a cost of AU$1.4 million.Thanks to the deal, Aussie Broadband said the capital expenditure previously allocated for Victoria could now be shifted to other states.Related Coverage More

SoftBank announced on Tuesday it has gained a 4.5% equity stake in Deutsche Telekom as part of a new long-term partnership. The partnership will see both telcos enter into an equity share agreement, which will entail Deutsche Telekom acquiring around 45 million T-Mobile US shares from SoftBank in exchange for issuing 225 million new Deutsche Telekom shares to SoftBank. In a subsequent step, Deutsche Telekom will also exercise call options to acquire an additional 20 million T-Mobile US shares from SoftBank by re-investing $2.4 billion of expected disposal proceeds from the announced sale of T-Mobile Netherlands. Deutsche Telekom is the parent company of T-Mobile US. As a result of these transactions, SoftBank will become a 4.5% shareholder in Deutsche Telekom while its equity stake in T-Mobile US will drop to 3.3%. The deal will also see SoftBank become the second largest private shareholder of Deutsche Telekom. According to SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate’s 300 portfolio companies will gain access to approximately 240 million new customers across Europe and the US. “The transaction diversifies our telecoms exposure and results in SoftBank becoming DT’s second largest private shareholder, while retaining meaningful exposure to high-growth TMUS,” SoftBank COO Marcelo Claure said.

The move follows SoftBank last year selling around two-thirds of its T-Mobile US shares to Deutsche Telekom. Last year’s deal was split into two parts: The first being SoftBank Group selling over 198 million of its T-Mobile US shares to T-Mobile US itself, while the second was an option to buy an additional 100 million T-Mobile US shares. At the time of the sale, SoftBank had only owned a stake in T-Mobile for two months after the telco merged with the then-SoftBank owned Sprint. Last month, SoftBank Group reported a 39% year-on-year dip for its first-quarter results, posting ¥761.5 billion in net income. This was despite the company posting almost ¥1.48 trillion in net sales for the quarter, which was 15.6% more when compared to the same period last year.Related Coverage More

Why picking a good VPN can make your life better  Consumer Virtual Private Networks (VPN) have become increasingly important for people who want to stay safe online, whether it’s for work, entertainment, or when passing through airports and cafes with free wifi.  There has been a boom in VPN adoption in recent years. While employees have been using VPN to securely tunnel into a corporate network for decades, Edward Snowden’s 2013 NSA leaks made more people jittery about mass surveillance. Russia’s and China’s recent bans on VPNs show how contentious the technology has become for governments. A raft of national security laws, such as the UK’s 2016 Investigatory Powers Bill, also spurred interest in consumer VPNs.

Anyone with the know-how can set up their own VPN with a remote virtual machine in the cloud for about $10 a month in one location, but many people want a VPN to access content in different regions, which makes price, speed, locations, and server capacity important. Mainstream consumer VPN services let average computer users create a secure point-to-point encrypted tunnel through which data can travel and can shield metadata, such as a home computer’s IP address.   If you’re paying a monthly fee for a VPN, it should work like any utility, humming in the background without noticeably disrupting downloads and uploads.   For me, as a tech news reporter based in Europe, I find a VPN useful when I need to check out Google’s US Chromebook and Pixel pricing to see products and prices that are not immediately available in the UK, Europe or Australia.  So a VPN has many diverse functions. A major drawcard for consumer VPNs is that many people just don’t like content being geo-blocked by Hulu, Amazon, Google, and Apple. You also might be a resident of the UK who travelled abroad and now can’t see premier league football matches, some BBC content or shows only available on Netflix’s UK service.  But picking a VPN provider is tricky because consumers need to trust the VPN provider is protecting data as claimed. 

That’s where third-party audits come into play and may help identify lemons. Nearly all VPN providers claim not to log user data and suggest their location of operation will prevent law enforcement from Five Eyes nations acquiring data. Not all subject their products to a third-party audit.  All my VPN speed tests were carried out through Ookla’s SpeedTest.net from a home fibre broadband connection just outside of Stockholm. I generally experience non-VPN download speeds of 70 Mbps and slightly faster upload speeds around 80 Mbps. Latency is normally about 3-5ms without a VPN.     

Reliable with a reputation for solid product

Locations: 160Countries: 94Simultaneous connections: 5Kill switch: yesLogging: noPrice: £9.42/month (USD $12.95), or 12 months for £72.74 (USD$99.95)Trial: 30-day refund guaranteeSupported platforms: iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows, Linux, game consoles, smart TVs, routersExpressVPN was founded by Peter Burchhardt and Dan Pomerantz in 2009, making it one of the first mainstream consumer VPN services at a time when free public Wi-Fi was rare, the iPhone didn’t exist, and people weren’t as concerned about government snooping, computer security and online privacy. ExpressVPN operates from the British Virgin Islands, which has favorable laws for those who want to keep their data private. ExpressVPN has subjected its performance claims to an audit by PwC in 2018 and an audit of privacy and security claims by German security outfit Cure53. However, that only covered its Chrome extension.It is one of the more expensive consumer VPN providers but it also has a solid reputation for providing a reliable service with plenty of options to configure the service.     It is investing in its alternative to the widely-used OpenVPN VPN protocol called Lightway. It launched this month and promises much faster connection times, faster speeds and more reliable connections.       With the native ExpressVPN app, establishing a connection to a server anywhere takes at most a few seconds. Connections to the US provided reliably fast download/upload speeds but latency was larger due to distance. Many Brits temporarily reside in Australia and may have picked up a few TV shows that are only shown locally. Similarly, connecting to a server in Australia resulted in high latency (ping) with download/upload speeds ranging between 43/46 Mbps to 18/9 Mbps.     These were the SpeedTest results (ping in ms, download/upload speeds in Mbps) when connected to:Hong Kong (397, 44/1.61)Melbourne, Australia (508, 19/9)Frankfurt, Germany (64, 44/64)London, UK (60, 66/49)New York, USA (171, 55.7/54) Pros:   Fast connections, decent speeds to major content markets    Simple and non-intrusive user interface    Frequent audits and reports are published   Broad platform support  Cons:   It is relatively expensive    Browser extension only supports Chrome and Firefox

One of the top consumer VPN providers

Simultaneous Connections: 6Kill Switch: YesPlatforms: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, Android TV, Chrome, Firefox, router, Fire TV/Kindle Fire, Xbox, PlayStation, MediaStreamer Logging: None, except billing dataCountries: 59Servers: 5517Trial/MBG: 30 dayNordVPN is generally considered a winner on speed and the number of servers it has across the globe. Not all VPN services have a monthly payment option even though prices are quoted on a monthly basis. NordVPN actually has a one month option, which costs £10.61, including VAT. NordVPN accepts payment via card schemes, pay platforms from Apple, Google and Amazon, Klarna, and cryptocurrencies. The one-year plan costs £52.39, including VAT, or £4.36/month. There’s also a 2-year plan that’s cheaper, costing £87.91 a year, including VAT, or £3.66/month.  NordVPN is operated by NordSec and its parent company, Tefincom & Co., S.A., is registered in Panama — a jurisdiction that technically doesn’t require it to store user logs and is outside of arrangements with Five Eyes alliance nations. It recently completed a security audit of its VPN apps with VerSprite, the cybersecurity company it’s partnering with for its bug bounty program, which it’s run since 2019, shortly after disclosing a breach at a data center it used in Sweden. NordVPN was co-founded by Lithuanian entrepreneur Tom Okman, who ZDNet covered in a recent in-depth profile.  Notably, NordVPN relies on WireGuard rather than OpenVPN. The former has a much smaller codebase, reducing the likelihood of security vulnerabilities lurking. It’s also developed NordLynx, NordSec’s WireGuard-based next-gen tunneling solution. NordSec tests indicated it would double the performance over OpenVPN and IKEv2 protocols. NordVPN always performs well in speed tests and has been at the forefront of the auditing trend for VPNs. In 2020, it re-engaged PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Switzerland to probe its no-log policy claims for one week. It first engaged PwC in 2018 to assess its no-log policy. These were the SpeedTest results (ping in ms, download/upload speeds in Mbps) when connected to a server in:Sweden (15, 48/76)Australia (547, 56/6)Hong Kong (411, 36/9)New York (188, 42/67)Los Angeles (295, 61/12) London: (58, 45/60)Netherlands: (55, 71/75)Germany: (54, 62/79)

A Swiss-based VPN that tried to make encrypted email simple

Simultaneous Connections: Up to 10Kill Switch: YesPlatforms: Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Linux, Android TV, ChromebookLogging: Strict no log policy, except billing data Countries: 55Servers: 1,287Trial/MBG: 30 dayProtonVPN is another service worth considering for privacy-conscious Brits. It’s a Swiss-based VPN that was started by former MIT and CERN scientists who first launched the encrypted email service ProtonMail in 2014 and started ProtonVPN in 2017. It doesn’t appear in most top US-focussed consumer VPN lists, but is worthy of consideration in the UK because of its location and record on privacy. It uses known VPN protocols such as IKEv2/IPSec and OpenVPN. Network traffic is encrypted with AES-256, while key exchange is done with 4096-bit RSA.ProtonVPN has commissioned audits for all its full-release software from SEC Consult, a reputable Austrian security consultancy.Being Swiss-based, Proton claims it can’t be coerced by Five Eye alliance nations to hand over user logs. ProtonVPN applications offer a built-in Kill Switch feature or the Always-on VPN feature.There’s a decent free version with three locations and “medium” speeds, while the “Basic” costs €4 (£3.41) a month charged at €48 per year (£40.93). It includes 350 servers in 49 countries and allows for two VPN connections on a “high speed” connection. There is also support for blocked content, P2P/BitTorrent support, and NetShield-based adblockers. The €8 (£6.82) a month VPN package is likely to be the best option for people willing to spend on a decent VPN. It includes 1,200 servers in 55 countries and offers up to 10 VPN connections with speeds up to 10 Gbps. ProtonVPN delivered respectable performance when connected to a server in New York (92 ms latency, 37/59 Mbps download/upload speeds). On an un-congested LA-based connection, it had a latency of 166 ms, and download/upload speeds of 64/73 Mbps. ProtonVPN is a solid VPN and it just announced a major speed boost with its “VPN Accelerator” technology for paid accounts with the ProtonVPN app. The VPN Accelerator speed boost works with multiple VPN protocols, including OpenVPN TCP, OpenVPN UDP, Wireguard, or IKEv2 VPN protocols. It could be a game-changer for high latency servers.There’s a handy “quick connect” option and connecting to ProtonVPN takes just a few seconds. The UI is helpful too, putting the Kill Switch — if you want to block the internet if your VPN connection drops out — up front, along with the adblocker controls, and its Secure Core option to route data through the privacy-friendly countries. These features are for the paid subscriptions.  The version offers three locations. The instance I tested included servers in Japan, Netherlands and the US. In my SpeedTest broadband tests of ProtonVPN’s free service, download and upload speeds were about 10 Mbps slower when connected to a server in the Netherlands, which is plenty for streaming HD video. Connecting via Proton’s US servers was a much slower experience on the free option, with download/upload speeds of 10/23 Mbps, and latency of 252ms.These were the SpeedTest results (ping in ms, download/upload speeds in Mbps) when using Proton’s €8 (£6.82) a month VPN connected to:Hong Kong (30, 48/51)Australia (30, 35/25)Germany (30, 50/13)London, UK (29, 40/28 Mbps)USA (29, 40/28 Mbps) Note: Proton’s maps indicated that all connections outside of Europe, by default, went through a server in Iceland as a first hop, which is likely why its latency appears lower than other VPNs. Pros:It supports a decent free tier VPN serviceSupports more devices than most on a single subscriptionHas undergone publicly available audits and values transparency Interface offers shortcuts to key security and privacy configurationsCons: It is more expensive It’s a young VPN service It’s server infrastructure is smaller than the well-established brands

A VPN that values transparency

Simultaneous Connections: Up to 5Kill Switch: YesPlatforms: Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Linux, Android TV, Chrome, Firefox, games consolesLogging: Countries: 37Servers: 780Trial/MBG: 45 dayAptly-named Swedish VPN provider Mullvard (‘mole’ in English) is an interesting choice for consumers and offers a single price of €5 (£4.27) a month, making slightly more expensive than larger rivals. However, its simple, flat pricing isn’t designed to encourage annual or three-year subscriptions. It has fairly broad country coverage and is upfront about which VPN servers it rents and owns. Its ‘owned’ servers are located solely in Europe and the UK and support speeds up to 10 Gbps. Generally Mullvard uses 31173 Services AB to host its owned servers. These are faster; however its rented servers are all dedicated. The service supports OpenVPN and Wireguard tunneling protocols. Users can configure it to work either exclusively on one protocol or have the Mullvard app select the protocol automatically.     Mullvard stands out for its transparency about its server infrastructure and any server issues it’s facing. It also has a clearly and thoroughly explained document outlining its no-logging policy and what payment information it collects — basically nothing that could identify the user. It doesn’t require a username, password or email address to establish an account and instead generates a random account number for each new account. The only details for each account it stores are the account number and the time remaining on that account. Mullvad accepts cash, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, bank wire, credit card, PayPal, and Swish (the Swedish peer to peer payment system co-funded by major banks).Mullvad has undergone three major security audits, making it a leader in VPN transparency. In 2018, Mullvad contracted German consultancy Cure53 and Assured to vet it for security vulnerabilities in its app. In mid-2020 Cure53 audited its apps for Windows, Linux and macOS as well as iOS and Android and disclosed all bugs found. In December 2020, Cure53 audited Mullvad’s infrastructure to look for security issues and privacy leaks. Once again, Mullvad disclosed all issues found.   Mullvad VPN AB is owned by Swedish parent company, Amagicom AB. Mullvad VPN AB Amagicom AB are 100% owned by founders Fredrik Strömberg and Daniel Berntsson who are actively involved in the company and are keen on researching cybersecurity issues.Additionally, Mozilla selected Mullvad’s VPN infrastructure to run its own Mozilla-branded VPN. Though Mozilla doesn’t state it uses Mullvad on its website, the link to its “full list of servers” redirects to Mullvad’s. Hopping between countries was simple. The app chooses the optimal location within each country. I experienced no dropouts when switching countries. Speeds were fastest within Europe, but slow on the US west coast and Australia. The desktop app is lightweight and has a simple interface that doesn’t take up too much screen space.Latency and speeds connected to Mullvard servers in different locations (ping in ms, download/upload in Mbps):   London (45, 51.18/60.3)San Jose, USA (324, 25.99/49.49)Switzerland (77, 61.31/61.22) Sydney, Australia (603, 6.06/60)Brazil (458, 18/52) Frankfurt, Germany (52, 50/65) Paris, France (63, 53/72) Hong Kong (412, 11/1.24) Pros:Easy pricing that doesn’t encourage multi-year subscriptionsDecent speeds and great infrastructure across EuropeA focus on privacy and security with investments to prove itProvides extremely clear information about user information it collects Cons:Compared to multi-year subscriptions, it is more expensiveIt is a smaller VPN than it’s larger rivals with fewer serversFocussed more on VPN services across Europe

 Simultaneous Connections: Up to 7Kill Switch: YesPlatforms: Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Linux, Android TV, Chrome, Firefox, games consolesLogging: Has a no log policy Countries: 90Servers: 6,900Trial/MBG: 45 dayCyberGhost has a few friendly features and offers that make it appealing to general users. The company offers a free one day trial of its VPN service and a longer than usual 45-day money back guarantee, plus it’s relatively cheap. It claims to have 38 million users and says it does not collect or store user IP addresses, DNS queries or browsing history. Its headquarters are in Bucharest, Romania. A few years ago, it didn’t offer a connection to servers in Russia but now it has one in Moscow. The company does produce a transparency report but it hasn’t been audited by a third-party for several years. Compared to rival VPN services, CyberGhost is cheap. Its three year plan costs just £1.99 a month billed £77.61 a year. The two year plan costs £ 2.89 a month and is billed at £69.36 a year, while the one year plan costs £3.45 a month and is billed at £41.40 a year. During tests, the VPN offered decent speeds and fast connection times. ProsAbundance of servers Cheaper than most VPN providersConsNo recent audits 

How did we determine the best VPNs?

This roundup of the best VPN providers considers a variety of reasons that UK residents would want to use a VPN and which providers could be the best for them, factoring in price, trustworthiness, security claims, and connection speeds. I tested each VPN’s connection performance in multiple locations over a week during work hours. All of them offered similar speeds and, naturally, these were all slower than without a VPN enabled. As expected, more distant locations resulted in higher latency but some VPN services offered slightly better speeds. I also checked whether the provider had undergone a recent audit as this is an important signal of transparency.  

How do you choose the right VPN?

Picking the right VPN depends on multiple factors, from home router and network equipment to the ISP and their interconnections. That means choosing the optimal VPN provider in terms of speed and performance will depend on specifics that are unique to each user. Whether one VPN is better than another also depends on why you want to use a VPN in the first instance. 

Do I need a VPN when I travel?

The one case where everyone could benefit from a VPN that supports multiple devices is travel. Right now, travel is less likely due to the pandemic but once it becomes a more realistic possibility, a VPN can provide protection at the airport, hotels, shopping malls, and other places where using a public Wi-Fi connection is convenient but risky. Alternatively, when you’re abroad and need to access content that’s only available to IP addresses in your home country, a VPN can be useful. Other situations include when visiting a doctor’s office and you don’t want to be associated with the location you’re accessing the internet from for obvious privacy reasons. In this respect, it’s worth considering both the price and the terms of the contract. It might, for example, be worth paying a little bit more for a VPN that offers the service on a month-by-month basis rather than comparing the monthly cost that must be paid on an annual basis. That is, you might only need it for a few days or a few times a year.  

Does everyone need a VPN?

Many people won’t need a VPN on a daily basis when connecting from a home network, but it can be a handy tool to have on the ready when the occasion arises. In that sense, it can be helpful to have as a utility that can be used from a laptop or a mobile device. 

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Agora announced this week that it would be investing $100 million into real time engagement applications and tools, touting the technology as an important step forward in a more digitally connected world.Executives from Agora and dozens of others spoke at the company’s RTE2021 conference this week, touting the ways real time engagement technology has gained prominence, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.With millions stuck working and learning from home, Agora said there has been an explosion of interest in using real time engagement for everything from healthcare services to gaming, educating and even working. The technology’s growth in usage has coincided with the emergence of metaverse tools that seek to create digital worlds where people anywhere can congregate, share and collaborate online.Agora CEO Tony Zhao said the disruption of the pandemic prompted people to seek out more natural interactions with one another, and he noted that many people are now tired of simple video connections. With real time engagement, people have been able to create a slate of new tools, applications and solutions. Zhao said internal Agora data has shown that there is an explosion in demand for mental health services as well as more social entertainment, gaming services and even fitness applications that can be accessed any time, anywhere. He noted that demand for telemedicine services grew by more than 4,000% last year and real time engagement helped healthcare officials simulate physical visits to doctors’ offices. New metaverses also allowed people to work and learn together from across the globe. 

Zhao cited the success of Tribe XR as an example of the value real time engagement can provide. Tribe XR CEO Tom Impallomeni explained that the technology has allowed them to create a virtual world where DJs and music producers can practice, play and perform for digital audiences. They use virtual reality systems to simulate DJ equipment and help people learn how to DJ through VR headsets.In partnership with Agora, the company now offers a way for users to upload music and perform on Twitch, Youtube and through integration with other metaverses.Agora’s real time engagement platform has helped Tribe XR create a video calling system where teachers and performers can connect with audiences from any device without using VR. “Real time engagement technologies take people off their isolated islands and out of their silos, connecting them together in a more natural and meaningful way. From New York to San Francisco, to Bangalore to Dubai, physical distance is no longer an obstacle,” said Reggie Yativ COO of Agora. Through the Agora platform, teachers have created applications that allowed them to reach thousands of students in real time while entrepreneurs and activists have been able to use interactive audio streaming and livecasting to create chatrooms, hold live panel discussions and participate in events. Everything from sing-a-longs to dates, cooking and shopping can be done using the real time engagement platforms. One of the biggest areas real time engagement is seeing interest is in gaming. Barbara Pickering, head of innovation and technology at HP, spoke at length about the HP Omen gaming division which has been hard at work on Omen Oasis, part of Omen’s gaming hub software. Pickering said HP is working with Agora to combine gaming experiences with video streaming. Although platforms like Twitch and others have become popular, many gamers only want to share video streams with a small group of friends as opposed to a wider, one-way audience. With Omen, gamers can communicate through video, watch each other play through games and hang out together. Pickering said it has been difficult to facilitate because streaming and video sharing during games is demanding, requiring high quality rendering and fluid motion. “Our challenge is to bring gaming to a communal space akin to watching someone play an arcade game over their shoulder,” Pickering said, adding that real time shared and interactive experiences have become a huge business. More than 60% of gamers want to share their gameplay with other gamers but most only want to share it with a group of 20 people or less. “Gamers often want to share with their friends and for the experience to be interactive. For that you need a real time solution. Agora wants to make streaming real time, with latency in the milliseconds, and the investments they’ve made in backend infrastructure and proprietary algorithms to optimize network traffic and video streams have helped as Omen Oasis seeks to expand the gaming experience to be even more socially engaging beyond the typical multiplayer dynamics,” Pickering noted.  “With Oasis we’re providing a really simple interface for people to jump into social game sharing with a focus on audio and video sharing.”Agora said real time engagement is also being used by mental health platforms like Talkspace as well as workout platforms. Edward Krakus, senior vice president of product at Agora, touted their software defined real time networking — called SD-RTN — that enables developers to scale quickly and deliver fluid real time media delivery. “The network adaptive streaming architecture combines variable-bitrate streaming technology with proprietary logic that provides the best media experience for every user,” Krakus explained, noting that the tool is designed to build experiences for a wide variety of devices, video processing speeds and WiFi connections. Krakus said Agora wants to make it easier for developers to use the company’s API for an expanded set of use cases. With the API and SD-RTN, developers will have the ability to publish multiple streams from any device, control streams of subscriptions, expand their channel management capabilities and have access to advanced layout controls that support sophisticated video display management as needed for virtual events and education use cases, Krakus said. “The ability to democratize access to RTE technology and to accelerate time to market for developers is another area where Agora continues to invest,” Krakus added, noting that the Agora App Builder has seen a massive amount of interest. People have built video experience platforms and even flexible classroom tools to facilitate online learning applications. Agora’s extension marketplace also features dozens of fun tools that can be added to apps like face filters, voice filters and content moderation tools. Virginia Liu, senior vice president of ecosystems at Agora, said the company plans to invest $100 million dollars in the RTE ecosystem, hoping it will continue to “change how we work, live and play in the future.” More