I’ve been using vpn safetydot for a couple years and just today I received a message saying if I want to continue to use the service, I would have to pay almost $25 a year.
Are there any free versions that do the same thing available in the Google play store that I could use on my Nvidia shield?
Personally, I wouldn’t trust a VPN that is free. They need to make money to be able to provide this type of service. Servers, costs of running, support and maintenance aren’t necessarily cheap. That’s a great deal for a yearly subscription.
It’s not a vpn, I use IPVANISH…what I was referring to is a little green dot that flicks on and off every 30 seconds in the top of your screen to continuously let you know whether or not your vpn is active or not. IPVANISH is like $80-$100 a year. I agree, I’d never use a free one. Sorry if I didn’t explain myself properly in my post.
1st, thank you, love monitor dot and your contribution to everyone’s privacy. One q that I’ve wondered for way too long without asking, does it matter it the monitor dot app is routed through the firewall or not? For instance, way back when I had IPVanish I would check a box for almost every single app within the GUI to bypass the VPN because I only wanted 3-4 app to route through the VPN at all (Syncler, MX Player, etc.) but everything else like Netflix to bypass the VPN tunnel. Fast forward to SurfShark with the brilliant of a simple “include” list instead of the exclude list a la IPVanish, and now I simply select the 7-9 apps I want within the VPN side of the split tunnel… but I wonder, with how you coded the app, does it matter if MONITOR Dot is on the inside or outside of my (per streaming box) VPN tunnel?
This is the post I was searching for!
I tried to block theor domain on the router but the app will not work without being updated and now works only on trial basis
Oh, sorry my bad… didn’t realize there’s an app that does that! That’s actually good to know about. Weird these vpns don’t include it in their own app that works with Nvidia/GoogleTv like it does on desktop.
I’m assuming that the app would make it extremely obvious to the end user if it can’t reach that site because otherwise users wouldn’t have a reliable way to be sure that I can think of. It looks like your server responds to my ping attempts, so I could test that capability from either inside or outside of the tunnel letting me know the path exists and your server is reachable at that point in time. I’ve seen times in the past when my Internet wasn’t connected at boot and Monitor Dot took over the entire screen saying there’s an error with the connection, I’m guessing that’s the check it’s erroring from, that it wasn’t able to phone home. I guess I never really thought about it too much before and how it worked. On some level I think I assumed the app would know the local IP of the system it was installed on and then try to send packets to itself either from inside the vpn tunnel or outside… but now that I actually try to picture the details about how that would work… … I’m betting that was a bad assumption lol:sweat_smile:
When you manually start the app, it will do an update check right then, and if that fails, it will immediately display an error. However, when it does it’s once a day update check in the background, it won’t display an error unless the update check failed for MANY consecutive days - meaning it won’t show an error unless it was unable to connect to the server after many daily attempts.