Hotspot Shield Editor's Review

Surf with safety with today's awesome LAN utility.

Mean people stink.

Unfortunately, this world is filled with them, and they would love nothing more than to steal your identity and live off the fruits of your hard work. In order to protect yourself online, you need powerful tools. This is where Hotspot Shield comes in.

Hotspot Shield is the only free VPN service available on the internet today. With it, you can surf in private, keeping your personal and private information personal and private.  Hotspot Shield works on both wireless and wired connections, and has no bandwidth limitations (meaning you can push and pull as much information as you'd like through its masking capabilities.  The best thing of all is that it works on both Macs and PC's, even those running Windows 7 and Snow Leopard.

Regardless of where you surf, at home or out and about at the local bookstore or coffee shop, Hotspot Shield will protect your entire web session.  Your identity is invisible, and your online purchases are protected from outsiders.  No one will know you as you, unless you sign into a specific website with your user name and password while you're there. Standard antivirus and spyware software protects your computer, but not your web activities. Hotspot Shield will.

Hotspot Shield does this by creating a virtual private network (VPN), or private tunnel between your computer and your Internet gateway. This prevents people from viewing your surfing activities, and other communications over the internet.  The best thing about the application is that it’s free.

Pros: FREE, Easy to install and use

Cons: May interfere with local network traffic to networked printers and disk drives. May interfere with other VPN software (like the kind you use for work). No configuration options so specific traffic (like communication with your networked printer or storage) can be permitted.

Conclusion: Hotspot Shield is a great tool at an unbeatable price. You can't go wrong with it. It masks all your traffic, even that to your local network devices like storage and printers.  We had some trouble in this area after installing and using Hotspot Shield.

version reviewed: 2.09