joepie91

Don't use VPN services.

No, seriously, don't. You're probably reading this because you've asked what VPN service to use, and this is the answer.

Note: The content in this post does not apply to using VPN for their intended purpose; that is, as a virtual private (internal) network. It only applies to using it as a glorified proxy, which is what every third-party "VPN provider" does.

• A Russian translation of this article can be found here, contributed by Timur Demin.
• A Turkish translation can be found here, contributed by agyild.
• There's also this article about VPN services, which is honestly better written (and has more cat pictures!) than my article.

tylerhall

<?PHP
// Generates a strong password of N length containing at least one lower case letter,
// one uppercase letter, one digit, and one special character. The remaining characters
// in the password are chosen at random from those four sets.
//
// The available characters in each set are user friendly - there are no ambiguous
// characters such as i, l, 1, o, 0, etc. This, coupled with the $add_dashes option,
// makes it much easier for users to manually type or speak their passwords.
//
// Note: the $add_dashes option will increase the length of the password by