Many People Cannot Access the Board from Thailand

[fatjack1]

I am now back to normal.  Don't get it.  And probably never will.

[Baddad]

I was looking at how Hola actually works. Running a VPN requires servers and bandwidth, and no-one can do it for free. It turns out that Hola does it by injecting ads into web pages. It also turns your computer into an exit node which allows other people to use your internet connection. You definitely do not want that. There are unconfirmed suspicions that it may also contain spyware.

 

You should always be suspicious of free software unless it is open source. Hola is not open source. Free open source software tends to be safer because some sad git like me will have read through the source code and made a big noise on the web if it was doing anything untoward. With closed source software it is much more difficult to figure out everything the software might be doing.

 

If you want to use a VPN, pay for one that has a good reputation.

 

Quite often problems with accessing specific sites occur when an ISP's DNS servers get screwed up. The DNS server is the software that resolves website names to real internet addresses. Sometimes they get screwed up until eventually someone gets around to fixing or rebooting it. You can easily get around this by telling your own computer to use a public DNS server instead of the ISP's default DNS server. How you do this depends on your operating system, but you can Google how to do it in your particular version. You need to find the TCP/IP properties of the relevant network connection and change the DNS server address from automatic to some fixed values. I use Google's DNS servers because they are easy to remember (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) and they are faster and more reliable than most ISP's DNS servers.

 

In Thailand you might want to use Google's DNS servers for another reason too. Your local DNS servers will tend to find you the local versions of big sites that have different regional versions. Using a DNS service in the US will find you the US versions, in English. Some people say that the speed of the more distant server could be an issue, but I haven't found that.

[brewster]

True working normally for me now too.