short version

Normally you connect to the internet by laptop/phone wifi to your Wifi Access point/router and it passes it to the modem. It passes it to you internet provider till it get to where you wanted it to go.

 Imagine a second wifi access point/router with the same id and wifi password that is controlled by me.

 Your phone/laptop cannot tell the difference which one it is connecting to.

now I just need to copy all your wifi traffic going though my access point/router

I will know where you go what you did and any passwords you used and ever redirect you from

where you wanted to go to where I want you to go and trick you into installing my software on your

computer.

 VPN is a program that encrypts your traffic from A to B so that I cannot read it and is difficult or almost impossible to decrypt with out the keys. VPN's need a server and client to encrypt and decrypt on each side.

many home routers have a built in vpn server and client programs are available for most any OS and most phones. I use a VPN  both on my computers and phone for most of my work.

I vpn to work (vpn Server) from home using my desktop as a client and when not at home I use a vpn to home vpn server on my laptop and phone clients.

I find that most home router vpn server are a bit hard to figure out and may not be current technology so I recommend to new users and students to use a old pc  64 bit 512meg ram 10gig HDD will be more that enough and two network cards with IPFIRE or pfsence is a easy to use home server that includes openvpn servers and a great way to learn basic routing.

we have built quite a few at the install-fest and would be happy to help anyone interested.

the next one is Saturday at UAT 40th and baseline 10-4pm