
One of the projects I’ve been working on lately is creating a system where I can be as anonymous as possible while doing hacky stuff on the Internet through Tails. The other reason is just the simple fact that the client won’t run on Linux. That’s one reason why I wanted to find an alternative to the stock TunnelBear client. It’s not very customizable and it tends to stop working at random times, and when it gets disconnected, it takes a really long time to reconnect, if it’s able to reconnect at all. The actual VPN client software, however, still leaves much to be desired. I do have to turn it off when posting to certain sites like 4Chan that interpret VPN traffic as spam or abusive content, which is a major pain in the ass, but other than that it serves its function rather well. TunnelBear is a paid VPN, and for the most part I like it. Never ever use one under any circumstances. Seriously, free VPNs are a joke, a literal scam. The only difference is which companies are collecting your data. And due to the magic of subpoenas and B2B Big Data marketing, that data is instantly available to governments and corporations whenever they want it, so in practice using a free VPN isn’t any safer than using no VPN at all. I swear by paid VPNs as opposed to free VPNs, because free VPNs almost universally collect massive amounts of data on you and use that data to bombard you with ads. There are a lot of VPN services out there, but I will focus on TunnelBear since I’d like to be able to get into the nitty-gritty details of my experience rather than having to be vague and general in an effort to be widely applicable. I’m going to talk about my personal experience establishing TunnelBear service through OpenVPN.


TunnelBear is a paid VPN service that provides both end-to-end VPN encryption and anonymous proxying, using AES-256 encryption for all connections, and collects only a bare minimum of data from customers. In this article I want to talk about one of my tech adventures from shortly after I went on vacation, which is that of getting OpenVPN up and running and using it to contact the TunnelBear servers.
