Hello and welcome to 1 Cool Thing, PCMag's daily show, where we show you one
cool thing, which we are testing out here in the PCMag labs.
I'm Sascha Segan this is Max Eddy and if you are watching us live on Facebook
then please comment and ask questions, so Pete is here to take your comments
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subscribe. We have a new 1 Cool Thing for you every day now our one cool thing
today is a relatively rare five-star product here at PCMag. Now we do all
sorts of products on 1 Cool Thing. I think recently we had a two or a two and
a half star products. Those are things we don't necessarily recommend, but a 5 star
product is a product that we recommend above all others. It is the epitome
of its category. It is the apotheosis. It is Nord VPN. Now we have a huge
amount of VPN coverage, alright. Oh man, do we. And so how many VPNs did you
look at to get to the idea that Nord VPN is the best one available?
Well actually came to that conclusion last year, when I was doing this so that
was I think we were looking at 20 some of them, 24? I can't quite remember.
And then you include all of the different versions of them so that
number climbs up to closer to 50. Yes it's been a lot. It's quite a few
VPNs, but we just did some new rounds of testing and Nord VPN held this position
as a 5-star EC. Ok, so what do you rate VPN... so actually, first of all, we should
probably establish what is a VPN. Why do people need VPNs? We don't have
any Lego here, but... Sadly no, yeah we have a really great Lego video explaining
VPNs that it's much more entertaining than I will be, but Sasha
let's say that you are the Internet. And that is in fact true.
That is true. And here I am on on my computer and I want to reach the
Internet. Now normally when I would connect to it, my information would just
flow directly to you. But when I turn on a VPN it creates an encrypted tunnel
directly to your brain, but with a VPN server in between. So it connects from
this computer through the encrypted tunnel to the VPN server and then on to
the Internet. That means that the ISPs can't see what you're doing. That means
anyone else on your network cannot see what you're doing. That means that if
you're connected to a free Wi-Fi network that you don't know if it's safe or not,
they can't see what you're doing. So all that information is
protected from everyone around it until it exits onto the Internet and then it's,
you know, up to its own pretty much. First of all there's the safety
aspect you're pointing out yeah where the various parties in between you
and your final connection can't see what you're doing whether it be as you said
your ISP, the free Wi-Fi hotspot, the hackers who are snooping on the free
Wi-Fi hotspot, etc., etc., etc. But VPNs also have the aspect that a lot of people are
interested in that to the destination website your traffic can appear to be
coming from a country that you're not in. If if law enforcement requests the
details of your traffic or what you're doing on the Internet, can that protect
you from it? Yes, well, I mean this is the thing, like within reason yes. So NordVPN
does not keep logs about user activity online, they're based in Panama which
means that they are not beholden to any particular laws requiring them to hold
on to user data or to hold on for that data for any length of time. And it
also gives them the option to sort of weigh the choice of whether or not to
respond to requests from law enforcement. Obviously, I think most VPN companies
want to be good actors. And if they receive a court order or a subpoena, or
they believe that the information is solid and will be in the public good,
sometimes a VPN company will disclose, say, the personal information that they
might have: billing information, for example. But a good VPN company will not
be able to tell law enforcement what websites you've been to. So let's look now
we have a laptop here. We have a laptop. That is running the NordVPN
interface. Now first of all, NordVPN works on what kinds of devices? So pretty
much everything. It's got a native application for macOS, not OS X,
macOS, Windows, Android, it's even got an iOS? It's got iOS. Pretty sure
it's got Linux, I cannot remember off the top of my head. The good news is you
can set it for any of these servers, any VPN server and then configure your
operating system to work with their service you don't necessarily need this
lovely first party client, but it does make it much much better. NordVPN is also
one of the unique companies that offers plug-ins for browsers so you can connect
just the information inside your browser and everything else will travel in the
clear. That's useful if you are concerned about, say, if you're you're really
a hardcore gamer, as I know you are. You don't want to slow down your
your gaming experience by using a VPN necessarily. So you can just use that
plug-in to secure your web traffic. So this interface. What's going on in
the interface? So this uses a very very lovely sort of whimsical view of the
Earth. It reminds me of the risk maps from like the old 1950s games. And what I like
about this is that it's very very straightforward. You just click this
button. You just click this button and it automatically looks for the best
server to connect you to. So that's probably going to be the one with the
lowest ping time. In that country? Yeah. It's looking for whatever
it's got the lowest latency so it's probably going to be the one that's
closest to you. Now, I have just installed this and I just realized I did not
connect it to a Wi-Fi network before I got on the show. So it's not going to be
able to get on there, but once it does this will turn green and you'll be
connected to there whichever country this is. You can click on this, for example,
if you want to go through this map interface. You can say: Oh I want to
connect to Canada. You can of course go through this lovely list. Okay. And
have favorite servers. I really like Albanian server. And you can have these
Specialty Servers, which is one of my favorite features. So these are servers
that Nord offers that are keyed to do these specific things. So if you're
concerned about DDoS, if you want to have a dedicated IP address
which you can purchase through Nord to avoid that that IP blocking we talked
about earlier, if you want to route through 2 VPNs, because 2 VPNs is better
than one... maybe. Ok Mr. Robot. Sure you can get onto the
servers specifically for BitTorrent and P2P sharing. That's, you know, a little bit
more complicated. We can get in that later. We can say they exists.
Yeah. And my favorite one... Oh, this is apparently a touchscreen, that's news to me.
I was just trying to scroll. I've been using this for three years and I had no idea. Really?
This is a touchscreen. I feel really stupid. Do you use Windows much, Max? Yeah, I do. Daily.
As I said. So a great feature that Nord offers that very few competitors do is the ability
to connect to the Tor network via VPN. So the Tor network is true anonymization.
Well a VPN will hide your IP address, it is still, you know... you can still figure
out who somebody is. Or you always narrow down to a group of people you can
correlate traffic and all that. When you route your traffic through Tor, you don't
just hop from your computer to a VPN server. You hop from your computer to a
VPN server into the Tor node and you'll be routed through like three or four
other computers before you finally hit the internet and that effectively
anonymizes you. Does Nord have a Kill Switch? For apps,
you mean? So that if you lose your VPN connection, it
cuts off your Internet? Yeah that's a pretty standard feature for pretty much
all VPNs at this point. I think in some cases
it'll be down to the individual app on your machine you're running. Sometimes
it's a little bit harder to do that. For example, iOS it's really difficult. You'll
see a very wide discrepancy in the features in iOS VPN apps because
of some of the restrictions and some of the extra scrutiny the Apple applies to
VPN companies. Okay, let's take a look at... So first of all, do we have any questions
out there or people are just dazzled by the phenomenon of virtual private networks. And they should be.
We've gotten a couple questions just about speed and how much Nord
would slow you down. Okay, let's go to the charts. Let's go to the board. Yeah, so here on
the big board we have Max's charts. The fruit of labor. Yes. Showing the various
testing, the various test speeds of various VPNs. Please tell me what we're
looking at here and what a taller or shorter bar means. If I go around
will you still be able to see that? Yeah okay. So I'm gonna go over here
so we can get a good look at this. So we're going to start with latency because this
is where the story begins. Now, latency is a measurement of how long
it takes to like ping a server and come back. So usually, the closer a server it
is, the better the latency. So this test... You know, I will concede that we're
connecting more or less randomly. We're using whatever server that the
company tells us is the best. But you can see that Nord does quite well. It only
increases your latency by 15 percent, the leader in this category. I'm gonna point
out - with all of these charts short bars are good long bars are bad?
Yes, in general, sometimes they're above the zero axis, sometimes they're below
it's still bad. And this is a function of my lack of understanding
about Excel, but here we are. So 15 percent it only increases your latency
by 15 percent. That's very good, that usually means that there's a lot of
servers around. In fact Nord has 3,400 servers across the
world. It is the leader in that category followed closely by Private Internet
Access which has 3275. But the leader in latency is actually a Tor Guard 6.67
percent above that means that their their server was slightly closer, just a
little bit. Wait, wait, wait, so Tor Guard's latency is greater than
just using your ISP? That feels impossible. No, it's the opposite way
around, it's less latency. I mean right, right. But, like this
comes down because we're using the ucl test server, that probably means that the
Tor Guard server is closer than the ucl server. And I and you know no
offense of Tor Guard or anybody else, but now that I've been doing this for
several years now I wouldn't be surprised if some companies were like:
Hey, maybe we should make sure that we have a server somewhere in the New York
metro area. So moving on from this, the download speed is probably the most
important test that we run. Everyone who's concerned about how long it's
gonna take to get big big files off the Internet. As you can see down here Nord
is doing very good. Nord slows down your speed by on average five point zero six
percent that's very very very good. Obviously you can see there's some other
ones that aren't are doing that hot. Now, on this side
I run a second set of tests for this test I'm connecting to a ucl excuse me
ucl service that we use to do all these speed tests. We connect to a
test server in Anchorage, Alaska to get a baseline and then we use that same test
server while connecting to a VPN server in Australia. So this is like I have put
as much in between this connection as humanly possible.
And this is to speak to things like people trying to
use foreign Netflix through an e-book. Exactly exactly and this is this is a
very convoluted path that I have asked them to go through. And as you can see
Nord is not the best, but is doing quite well it only create decreases your speed
by 73% which sounds like a lot, but it is still absolutely functional and still
well within the parameters I would expect to see. The leader in this
category is Anchor Free, they are very surprising. But, but, but Anchor Free
comes with some very serious caveats which we can just but you can
read about in my review, that's a better place to have that discussion. The last
one we look at is, of course, upload speeds. Now this one I think we'll start
with international. Here's everything is more or less the same. Okay. Everything
ends up in just about the same bracket that's been that way for years,
so it's fine don't worry. And down here you can see almost almost no change for
upload speeds. That's really really good 5.3 percent I've been very happy with
NordVPN. I will say the NordVPN is not like ever going to be the fastest,
but it also doesn't need to be. It offers so many great features as a great
interface. It's a little bit more expensive than you would pay for a
service like Private Internet Access or and then
another VPN service perhaps, but it's that quality of service, this excellent
results, the technology behind it, they're just a great company to work with. And so
when we talk about price, by the way, we have it's $11.95 a month,
but they... it looks like they really frequently have
long term promotion. Right, so if you want to go in an annual plan
you could pay $69 a year, if you want to go on a two-year plan its $59 over two
years. So the idea is whether or not you want to pay upfront a lot of money or a
little bit of money over time. Very few companies have the option to connect to
the Onion network, for example. That's so useful, so convenient to make this kind
of a complex security technology very accessible, that's what Nord is really
good at. Okay great, any more questions out there? Is there a device limit with
NordVPN? Yes, so on average most VPN companies will only allow you to connect
five devices simultaneously there are a few exceptions this and they can don't
score as well. But Nord is unique in that they offer six, so you can get that one
extra device. You can also, if you are into the DIY stuff, you can try to
configure your router. I was going to say. Can you connect to any routers directly
to the VPN so that you don't have to worry about the individual devices in
your house? Yeah, absolutely. That's a very common thing that VPNs offer. Some VPN
companies I believe Tor Guard and a few others will actually sell you a router
with there is pre-configured with their with their stuff on there. So the idea is
when you have a router that's connecting to your VPN instead of your computer
tunneling, it's your router creating that tunnel. So that means that everything
inside your network is now being protected by that VPN. There's some
advantages to this and like really obvious ones - like you don't to worry
about how many devices are connected, you can extend VPN protection to say your
smart devices. like your smart fridge, that can't run a VPN on its own.
But it also means that you can do things like Chromecast within your home. For
example, if you have any VPN running not just Nord, any VPN on your phone, you will
not be able to Chromecast, because it's sending that data to a server that's
outside your home. Chromecast will not work in those contacts. So you'll be able
to get that protection, yield these Chromecast, if you put it on a router.
Love them all. Any more questions? Let me see the sheep.
So if I have to use it through the router, will Chromecast still work?
Yeah, Chromecast will apparently work. I have not tried this myself because
my router is a mystery to me and I'm okay with that. That's the life that
I've chosen to lead. But if you have the VPN connected to your router that means
that your individual devices inside that network are not tunneling out and then
coming back in. That's the problem with Chromecast and VPN. So if you have a VPN
on your phone and you're trying to do Chromecast, the data from your phone is
actually being sent out and then coming back in. And one of the things Chromecast
is looking for is is that information local. And when it comes back it's like:
Oh, it's not, I can't I can't do that. And it's encrypted on that end so whoa. So
yeah, if when you have it on the router it should work, I'm not gonna... I can't
speak to its full on efficacy, but I see no reason why it wouldn't. Okay great,
so NordVPN is one of our Editors' Choices for VPN service but it is also
five stars, which means that we recommend this VPN enthusiastically without
without any restrictions wholeheartedly from us to you. Full throatedly.
Absolutely. Thank you all for watching. This has been 1 Cool Thing. If you are
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