People in Texas as they buy their first VPN
This exchange happens a couple times in Community with different characters. I’ve always assumed it was a reference to Gary Oldman in Leon: The Professional but is it possibly something else?
my favorite is the call back to this scene in a later season.
Is this scene a play off of Gary Oldmans’ character in The Professional?
Of course High Quality Giffers know all about VPNs. Doing what they do is illegal in many parts of the world… or should be.
Doesn’t Opera have a free one built in?
This is absolutely an homage to Leon.
In the captions it always says as Gary Oldman or something before the line, so I’d say that’s likely
Yes but I wouldn’t trust that one. Did a quick lookup and it looks like they keep records. Might not matter if you’re just trying to change your location but It makes it a less effective VPN. PrivateVPN is what I go with but I know not everyone wants to pay for a VPN service.
I think Apple products have one built-in, too (though not called such)?
Oh good catch! Can finally consider this mystery resolved.
Let us not forget this classic, horrifying edit.
Good to know. I’ll stop using the Opera one to purchase my bombs and poisons.
There are several VPNs that don’t keep records or have canary pages if they’re court-ordered to start without telling people. Though, yes, you’re going to have to either pay for that service or build your own VPN (which takes an initial investment and a little know-how).
I’ve heard people in some communities demonize NordVPN, claiming it isn’t safe. But it claims to carry no records, it has a canary page, and most of the arguments I’ve heard have boiled down to, “YouTubers and influencers advertise it. IT HAS TO BE TERRIBLE!” I used it for a while and it had some nice conveniences, but I ended up deciding I wanted something more lightweight with fewer features, so I ended up with Mullvad which claims to not only not keep user data, unless you pay with a credit card (which isn’t recommended), they don’t even know anything about their customers. You can pay with cash or buy activation cards on Amazon or something. To them, you’re a number, not a man. That is a level of inconvenience with fewer features, so while I recommend it to people who are privacy-focused (and if we were really privacy-focused, we shouldn’t be on social media at all) there are VPNs that other people would more likely get greater benefit from.
Anything that claims to be a free VPN, though, is going to be useless. It’s either defeating its own purpose by stealing your data and selling it, or it’s crap. You can’t run a VPN as a business for free. The closest you’ll get is TOR, which, if you’re privacy-focused should probably be your browser of choice. It’s just, that privacy comes at the cost of it being slow as hell.
(I just want to make sure it’s clear, I’m trying to add to what you said, not “correct” or argue against it in any way.)
Texans just want porn, they don’t care if others technically know about it. If they did they’d already have a vpn, right?
and it looks like they keep records.
Pretty much every VPN says they don’t keep records until the subpoenas come, and then they suddenly have all the records.
There’s only one that I’ve heard of that showed up in court to testify that they do not keep records and had no way to provide the prosecution with records that didn’t exist.
As long as you’re not using them to commit war crimes I think you’re fine using Opera. But if you are, you definitely want to cover up that online trail. Best of luck!