Remote Desktop Software

Allen

Not unless you have a mile-long cable.

Brandon

Generally speaking if you want safe and secured browsing across the Internet, you need to bounce off Internet proxy/relay servers and anonymize yourself. What this means is your IP address information is hidden behind some other server, and that server does the browsing on your behalf and relays the information back to you. If you go to that’s one such technology that will allow you to browse anonymously on the Internet.

In regards to using VPNs to get to your home PC, yes you can definitely do that. There are many many ways of doing that, from commercial top quality products like gotomypc.com, logmein.com that will allow you to access your home machine securely from anywhere to proprietary solutions that will allow you to log onto your home router over a VPN….to free products like VNC and SSH. You just need to have the technical know-how if you plan on implementing this yourself. VNC is a free remote desktop control tool. SSH is a powerful tool that contains a feature called port forwarding that basically allows you to pick a local port on your own machine and connected to a port on the remote machine. What usually happens is you connect to your home machine (running SSH server) from the cafe using an SSH client like Putty. The connection is encrypted, giving you a VPN. Inside the connection, you can specify any type of port number between your computer and a host on the remote network and route traffic through it. So let’s say you wanted to browse the Internet through your home network from the cafe…you would specify something like:

local port 5901: remote home PC IP address: 5900

what this will do is connect securely and allow you to remotely control your home PC. once you control the home PC, you can pretty much do whatever you want on it, including surf the Internet from it.

Joann

VPNs, once the “tunnel” is created can use the gateway on the VPN. That means that once you are connected your internet gateway is from your private network. There are options to allow the “Local” gateway but doing so, in the system you describe, would loose the benefit.

For this to be truely secure, the VPN has to be encrypted, the quick easy ones are not!

Here is a good group of articles from Microsoft

Wanda

I use Strong Vpn and you cant connect to your private internet connection from an internet cafe with unsecured wifi. You are connecting your computer to there computer via your internet service provider. You need to set up your computer with the connection wizard on your computer. They give you a user name and password to do this. You also get a different ip address
They have video tutorials to show you how to set up your computer it is not very difficult you can watch them now to get an idea of how to do it.
also you can look at their frequently asked questions to answer some more questions you might have.

Gilbert

There are many VPN offerings, each with its own properties; generally speaking, VPN-ing to your home computer using an IPsec-based VPN (with encryption+integrity protection enabled), or using the SSL/TLS-based OpenVPN, ensures that the Internet cafe won’t see the contents of your communications.

This assumes that you use *your own*, hopefully spyware and keylogger-free, computer/laptop from the cafe. If you use a (public) cafe computer, then you either have to trust that computer (i.e. the cafe operator, and everyone else having had physical access to the computer), or all bets are off; encryption/VPNs/SSL/TLS do not remove the trust requirement in any way.

There exists another significant factor contributing to “safe browsing using an Internet cafe computer”; the ability to login using a one-time password (OTP) instead of a normal password. That is, if you have to use an Internet cafe/kiosk computer, then it is safer to log into websites using OTPs rather than passwords. In this sense, having a VPN that supports OTP-based login would be of advantage. However, this requires that the Internet cafe computer has the required VPN client software.

The service at lets you log into websites using OTPs without the Internet cafe computer having to have any software other than a standard browser. Note that, however, you will need to trust that service with your password (instead of the Internet cafe computer).