Protect your privacy online: Setup of VPN Ipredator service in Ubuntu

These days our privacy online is compromised at best. Every possible piece of information concerning our behavior on the web is collected by the various services we use like Google related services, Facebook, Twitter and so on. These are the information we gladly give to these and other web companies. Other than those there are many more information about ourselves that we're barely or even not aware of giving to third parties of various nature. The most obscure and alarming problem is to be aware of which data government agencies and the various police branches are collecting, how they're doing this and what they plan to do with the collected information. Some say that if you're not doing anything wrong then you have nothing to worry about. However this concept is illocical other than a moral aberration. Is it not a human denigration to live under the constant and pervasive vigilance of an obscure entity? Again, who knows what the collectors are doing, or will do, with the collected data? To whom will they hand the data over? To quote Alan Moore "Who watch the watchmen?".
The concept of privacy itself is a nonsense online. However there are certain "rules" or choices, some more general some others more technical, that if followed can ensure if not a complete privacy protection at least an higher degree of safety online. One of this rule could be chosing a Linux distribution as operating system in order to achieve the best protection (read virtual immunity) against malware. One could also choice open source software against proprietary as the first is generally safer because the code is under the constant vigilance of the community. And so on...
One more technical rule which is the object of this post is connecting to the internet via a VPN server. Wikipedia defines the VPN as A virtual private network (VPN) is a computer network that is layered on top of an underlying computer network. The private nature of a VPN means that the data travelling over the VPN is not generally visible to, or is encapsulated from, the underlying network traffic. Similarly, the traffic within the VPN appears to the underlying network as just another traffic stream to be passed. A VPN connection can be envisioned as a "pipe within a pipe", with the outer pipe being the underlying network connection.


Recently I decided to give a try to Ipredator, the Sweden based VPN service created by the guys behind the famous tracker indexing site The Pirate Bay. So far I'm quite satisfied by the service. The speed is quite good for my usage. It collapsed just three or four times so far. The only drawback is that if you're an American user Ipredator will prevent you to watch videos on sites like Hulu because you'll basically surf with a swedish IP number.

Anyway, the VPN website doesn't offer any instruction to connect your Linux operating system to their server but I assure you it works and the procedure to setup the connection is very simple.
First of all you need to obtain a username and a password by buying the 3 months term of service for the price of 5€/month.
Now the technical part. Note that I've done this in Ubuntu 9.10. I suppose the instructions are valid with minor modifications for a lot of distros.

Step 1:
First right click on the Applet NetworkManager and choose "modify connections". Then select the VPN tab and click Add.
Choose Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP)

Note: if you can't select the VPN tab or you have some other issue here you need to install the PPTP plugin for the network manager.
Open a terminal and type sudo apt-get update
Now type sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp


Step 2:
fill in the gateway, your Ipredator username and password as you see in the picture below

Step 3:

Now click Advanced and select the options shown in the picture below. Mostly it's use Point-to-Point encryption (MPPE) and 128-bit security.

Step 4:

Now you're basically set up. To connect to the VPN server just click without releasing on the connection manager icon (top right in Ubuntu) and when the menu appears just choose VPN Conncetions and then Ipredator (provided that you named it like that during the setup). If all goes well a lock icon should appear on top of the connection icon. 

Step 5:

Now that the connection is established you can check that you're really running with a Swedish IP address. You can either note that the commercials in Facebook turned in Swedish or you can cheek the IP on an IP locator site like ip-address.com

Surf smart and safe folks.