Someone have mercy on a poor old gray-haired college professor...

[david smith]

Guys, I have zero clue what I'm doing.  As research for some courses I'm teaching and for personal enjoyment, I'm using https://worldwidetorrents.eu/torrents-details.php?id=818 to source and DL old comic books.  I decided to pay the 40.00  year to get tunnelblick to block my identity, but now that I have it set up, I realize that I have no clue from configurations and etc -- I assumed it would be as 1, 2, 3 as setting up an anti-virus program on a PC -- and clearly it's not.  Can anyone tell me how to set the configuration so that when I go onto this website, tunnelbick os blocking the authorities from seeing that I am downloading material from it?  I will happily send you you $20 or something on Paypal for your time if you can write me out a quick tutorial.  I'm not tech-savvy, and this is a just a giant headache for me trying to make sense of it.  "Dammit Jim, I'm a history professor, not a cyber-geek!" > <

Dave

[Tunnelblick developer]

First, please read Tunnelblick's description of VPN Privacy and Security. Using a VPN may or may not block "the authorities" from seeing what you are doing, depending on what "authorities" you are concerned about. It may hide your activity from your institution's IT staff, but not from the NSA (and now the FBI and all other USA security agencies) or your country's equivalent, or from worldwidetorrents.eu.

Then, you may need to contact your VPN service provider. That is the organization which gave you your configuration files, and perhaps a username and password, and to which you paid $40 for VPN service. For more information, please see  Getting VPN Service.

Tunnelblick is just the free software that many VPN service providers recommend or supply to their customers. We do not provide VPN service, just software.

That said, using Tunnelblick is pretty easy.

Assuming you have installed Tunnelblick and launched it so it is running:

1. Click on the Tunnelblick icon in the menu bar (near the Spotlight icon, usually).
2. Click on "Connect abcde" to connect to server "abcde".

When you are done:

1. Click on the Tunnelblick icon in the menu bar (near the Spotlight icon, usually).
2. Click on "Disconnect abcde" to connect to server "abcde".

Since I don't know anything about your VPN service provider, I can't be more specific, and am using "abcde" in place of the name of a real configuration that your VPN service provider provides. And please note that this assumes that your VPN service provider configured OpenVPN correctly. For anything more, you'd need to contact them.

Three privacy-enhancing settings that you should enable in Tunnelblick if your VPN service provider doesn't are:

Route all traffic through the VPN

and

Check if the apparent public IP address changed after connecting.

and (this will be disabled if you don't have a "tun" configuration)

Disable IPv6 (tun only)

All of these can be set on the "Settings" tab of the "Configurations" panel of Tunnelblick's "VPN Details" window.

You should also be careful that the VPN doesn't disconnect unexpectedly (this is completely dependent on your VPN service provider). One thing you can do to have Tunnelblick notify you if this happens is to set up a sound to be played if an unexpected disconnection occurs. You can do that on the "Sounds" tab of Tunnelblick's "Advanced" settings window, which you get to by clicking the "Advanced" button on the "VPN Details" window.

Good luck!

On Thursday, January 19, 2017 at 12:34:27 PM UTC-5, david smith wrote:

[chris...@syndasein.com]

AS one professor to another,  the guys to whom you paid the forty bucks are the ones to ask. I use nordvpn on mac, windows and linux pc's if you have a mac or windows with newer operating systems your VPN provider should provide a simple setup application which includes a "kill switch" to stop your torrrent client should the VPN connection fail. If you still don't get it we will need to know which VPN provider you have contracted with and which operating system and version you are running on ie "OSX yosemite" or "Windows 10" or "Linux trusty PPC".
Cheers,