2022 VPN Village – Team Community

The VPN Village is a two-week virtual series of events focused on VPN user education and solidarity. The events held over the last week of November and first week of December will address gaps in user education around VPNs, the challenge of analyzing and selecting a VPN, and will show attendees how to set up their own VPN servers and proxies to support their communities and users combatting censorship globally.

The Village is part of TCU’s VPN Community Initiative which was formed in 2022 to bring together a diverse group of individuals working within and around the VPN ecosystem – including providers, researchers, digital security specialists and technologists – to collaborate and share knowledge.

You must RSVP for each session individually. Sessions will take place on either Zoom or BigBlueButton, and the link(s) to your session(s) will be emailed to you a few days before the event.

Can’t attend? Don’t worry! The notes of each session will be stored on wiki, including slide decks and worksheets used. Please note that more sessions will be added in coming days!

Sessions

1. Run Snowflake Proxies and Strengthen Internet Freedom (Workshop)Tuesday, November 29
   Speaker: Gustavo Gus, Community Team Lead, Tor Project
   09:00am to 10:30pm EST
   Have you considered helping users from censored regions to access the free and open internet? Snowflake is a new pluggable transport that allows people from all over the world to access the open internet. In this workshop, you will learn what Snowflake is, and how to set up a proxy and help censored users bypass internet censorship.
2. Threat Modeling 101: Understanding When to Use or Not Use a VPN (Talk and Q&A)Wednesday, November 30Speaker: Trinh Nguyen, Director of Safety and Technology, Team CommUNITY
   08:30am to 10:00am EST
   How do I know if I should use a VPN? Across VPN review sites and advertising, VPNs are often marketed as a “one size fits all” solution for nearly any digital safety and security woes. However, downloading and using a VPN is not always the solution that will best address your needs. In this session, attendees will learn about basic risk assessment and threat modeling, VPN use cases, and how to determine when using a VPN may be helpful, or may not be.
3. “All of them claim to be the best”: A multi-perspective study of VPN users and VPN providers (Presentation and Q&A)Thursday, December 1Speakers: Reethika Ramesh, CS PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan, and lead researcher at VPNalyzer
   11:00am to 12:00am EST
   Earlier this year the VPNalyzer team “All of them claim to be the best”: A multi-perspective study of VPN users and VPN providers, reviewing the key findings of their study of 1,252 VPN users and qualitative interviews of 9 VPN providers which highlights the human factors of VPN use. In this session, join Reethika Ramesh, lead VPNalyzer researcher and co-author of the aforementioned paper, to hear about the key takeaways from the VPN user survey and VPN provider interviews and find out about new developments with the VPNalyzer Tool, a desktop tool that helps test and identify security and privacy issues with your VPN.
   
4. Getting Started with Outline: Helping your friends and family access the Open Internet (Workshop)Tuesday, December 6Speaker: Vinicius Fortuna, Software Engineering Manager, Google & Daniel LaCosse, Senior Software Engineer, Google
   09:30am to 11:00am EST
   Outline is an industry-leading, high performance solution for protecting your online activity. it relies on members of the community to spin up and manage their own VPN servers for others to use – and its Manager software makes it quite straightforward. In this 1.5 hour workshop, participants will not only learn about what Outline is and how it works, but will additionally set up their own Outline VPN server which they can then share with their networks.
5. How to Critically Choose a VPN Service (Talk and Q&A)Wednesday, December 7
   Speaker: Viktor Vecsei, COO at IVPN
   10:00am to 11:00am EST
   In a market so saturated with commercial VPN providers, it is a challenge not only to determine if you need a VPN or not, but also to navigate search results and the network of VPN review sites as you try to find a trustworthy VPN.
   What are the key things you should look for when determining if a VPN service is trustworthy? How can you determine if a VPN recommendation site is legitimate? What red flags signal that you should steer clear of a VPN provider?
   In this session, you will learn how to recognize signals of trustworthiness in VPN providers and more effectively analyze VPN recommendation resources in your search for a VPN service that respects your privacy, safety and security as a user.
   Note: This session is not geared toward high-risk users or those for whom anonymity and/or circumventing severe censorship is a necessity.

For more detalis about the event click here.