Outline - Your DIY VPN

Internet is surely not a safe place and each time you connect to this mysterious world of internet you are putting your privacy at risk. There are hackers and other people out there who are waiting to sniff on the packets you send or receive. A Virtual Private Network is the route most people would want you to follow.

A Virtual Private Network helps you protect your identity on the internet by encrypting the traffic you send or receive and bouces it back from a server located far away, so that no one else can understand what is it that you are browsing or watching over the internet and also hides who is browsing it and from where. A GREAT TOOL!! isn't it?

Well, VPN sure are great tools but they do come with a paradox. The paradox being that VPN although helps to hide you and your information from some form of surveillance but it does makes it vulnerable to the central server or the organisation who is controlling the VPN. So, you see, you are not totally protected for you may never know how these VPN providers use the information they gather from you.

An alternative to using a Virtual Private Network is the infamous and much more secure way of browsing internet by using the TOR network. To use the TOR network you need to have a TOR enabled browser like Orfox. Basically, what the Tor browser does is that it relays your request to other nodes that are connected to the network and after a certain number of hops between the internal nodes of the TOR network, the request is sent to the internet and then the response is again transferred through a series of hops to the sender node. This makes it practically impossible to track that from where was the request generated, thereby securing your privacy.

Though, TOR is a point ahead in terms of security when compared to a VPN, it lacks behind in a key factor which is the speed. Due to relaying of the request and response between a number of randomly selected nodes the latency introduced in the network is very large which leads to very slow speeds when compared to that of a VPN. So, it just destroys the entire user experience.

Google's parent company, Alphabet came up with a new software that solves all these issues related to privacy of the users on the internet - OUTLINE.

Outline lets users set up a virtual private network on their own server or atleast on a cloud server that they own. Jigsaw, is the unit that has developed this software. The software is based on the open source VPN software ShadowSocks, which also provides similar functionalities, but Outline distinguishes itself from it and other already existing VPN softwares by its simple to use interface and as Jigsaw claims that Outline is designed to be used even by the less tech savvy organisations and people easily.

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 All it takes you to setup a VPN using Outline is half a dozen of clicks and few minutes unlike Shadowsocks which require using a command line interface for generating cryptographic keys and other complex stuff. Jigsaw, also mentions that unlike Tor, Outline is "not an anonymity tool" and it might be possible that the website you visit may know about your identity.

The whole motive behind this project is to help users get rid of the fact that while using a VPN your privacy is in someone else's hand. As using Outline users can setup a VPN on their own server thereby preventing any kind of logging of their activities.

What are your thoughts on this DIY VPN solution from Google. Let us know in the comment section below.