RSVP to the 2022 VPN Village
2022 VPN Village
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.
How to RSVP
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 our wiki, including slide decks and worksheets used.
Please note that we will be adding more sessions in coming days!
These are the ones we have confirmed thus far.
Upcoming Sessions
Tuesday, November 29
Run Snowflake Proxies and Strengthen Internet Freedom (Workshop)
Speaker: Gustavo Gus, Community Team Lead, Tor Project
09:00am to 10:30pm EST (What time is it in my city?)
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.
Gustavo Gus joined the Tor Project in 2018 and is the Community Team Lead. Since 2007, Gus has worked as a FOSS and security consultant and digital security trainer for activists and human rights defenders in the Global South. At Tor, he organizes digital security training, facilitates Tor relay operator meetups, coordinates the user support team, and helps the Tor Anti-Censorship team on investigations when Tor is blocked.
Learn more about how to run a Snowflake proxy
Wednesday, November 30
Threat Modeling 101: Understanding When to Use or Not Use a VPN (Talk and Q&A)
Speaker: Trinh Nguyen, Director of Safety and Technology, Team CommUNITY
08:30am to 10:00am EST (What time is it in my city?)
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.
Trinh Nguyen is a holistic security and movement building trainer and oversees the safety and security of the Internet Freedom Festival including its partners and participants. Trinh has over 15 years of training experience, previously working on campaigns for reproductive justice, anti-oppression, Internet Freedom, and pro-democracy efforts in Vietnam. As a movement building trainer, Nguyen incorporates capacity building and cybersecurity tactics to help diverse grassroots pro-democracy and human rights movements achieve digital resiliency and organizational security.
Laura Tich is an Information security consultant and founder of SheHacks_KE, a community of women in cybersecurity in Kenya. She is a cybersecurity trainer and digital privacy advocate. Tich works as a cybersecurity advisor to Ford Foundation's BUILD program.
Learn more about how to determine when a VPN can be helpful, and when not
Thursday, December 1
“All of them claim to be the best”: A multi-perspective study of VPN users and VPN providers (Presentation and Q&A)
Speakers: Reethika Ramesh, CS PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan, and lead researcher at VPNalyzer
11:00am to 12:00am EST (What time is it in my city?)
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.
Reethika Ramesh is a fifth year PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan. She is the lead researcher at VPNalyzer: an academic research project that analyzes the VPN ecosystem through large-scale data-driven studies. She also investigated Russia's decentralized national-level censorship system, including their throttling of Twitter in March 2021.
Tuesday, December 6
Getting Started with Outline: Helping your friends and family access the Open Internet (Workshop)
Speaker: Vinicius Fortuna, Software Engineering Manager, Google & Daniel LaCosse, Senior Software Engineer, Google
09:30am to 11:00am EST (What time is it in my city?)
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.
Daniel LaCosse is an engineer on the Outline Team who's previous work includes a TEDx talk on the logic of storytelling and building the Vine web player from scratch (RIP). He spends his free time improvising board games and trying to convince random strangers they should only be building their apps on the web.
Vinicius Fortuna is the engineering lead of the team at Jigsaw that protects people’s ability to participate in the global internet. He has led the team through initiatives to prevent censorship via stronger internet standards and platforms; mitigate censorship via circumvention tools such as the Outline VPN and Intra; and expose censorship via measurements and data analysis.
Wednesday, December 7
How to Critically Choose a VPN Service (Talk and Q&A)
Speaker: Viktor Vecsei, COO at IVPN
10:00am to 11:00am EST (What time is it in my city?)
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.
Viktor Vecsei is a privacy activist, researcher and writer. He is the COO at IVPN, a privacy-focused VPN provider, where he works on increasing transparency, honest communication and improving ethical standards in the commercial VPN space.
Thursday, December 8
Everything You Wanted to Know about VPNs But Never Asked
Speaker: Elijah Waxwing, Senior Technologist, Calyx Institute
9am - 10am EST (What time is it in my city?)
Come join Team CommUNITY and Elijah Waxwing from the Calyx Institute to ask all of the unanswered VPN questions you have been putting on the back burner! Have questions that were not answered in the VPN Village sessions? Or did new questions arise after attending a session? Share them with us during an hour of all-things-VPN chat.
Elijah Waxwing (he/him), Senior Technologist, has been working on the issue of digital justice, autonomous infrastructure, and surveillance of social movements since 2000. He is a software developer, systems architect, information security specialist, and manager.
This is a Glitter Meetup, join the text-based session on the IF Square on the TCU Mattermost
Thursday, December 8
NewNode VPN: Internet Access In Shutdowns And Disruptions (Presentation)
Speakers: Arina Shalunova, Project Manager at NewNode & Marina Feygelman, Executive Director at NewNode
10am - 11am EST (What time is it in my city?)
There is a lot of talk about VPNs to fight censorship and using VPNs for security, but there’s a missing piece: what do you do when the internet isn’t there? Internet shutdowns generally happen at the times when up-to-date information is most important.
NewNode VPN helps users reach information even during internet shutdowns, using peer-to-peer and device-to-device connections. In this session, you will learn how the NewNode VPN works and what other NewNode-protocol products are available to support users in an internet shutdown or disruption. Individuals affected by internet shutdowns or who work with affected groups are encouraged to join this session.
Arina Shalunova joined NewNode in 2020. She is interested in digital rights, access, and community education.
Marina Feygelman is the executive director of NewNode, leading it from an idea to a deployed protocol with millions of users across three products. A molecular biologist by training, Marina has spent the last five years fighting and exposing internet censorship.
Learn how NewNode VPN can prepare you for an internet shutdown