The Hotspot Shield software encrypts all Internet activity from the PC and routes the packets through AnchorFree’s servers. When Hotspot Shield is turned on, AnchorFree assigns the computer an IP address belonging to its network. When a website tries to look up the user’s IP address or geographic location, it receives information about AnchorFree’s servers, instead. All network data sent and received is encrypted, making it difficult for anyone trying to ferret out information about your online activity. Turning on Hotspot Shield allows users to surf vanilla-HTTP Websites as if they are actually HTTPS-secured sites.
Features
Hotspot Shield v2.50 has two states—on and off. When it's on, all traffic goes through AnchorFree servers and everything is encrypted. When off, it’s online browsing as usual. It’s pretty easy to tell by looking at the connection icon in the system tray or on the top of the browser whether the VPN protection is active or not.
Hotspot Shield can also warn users whenever they land on a known or suspected malicious website (as determined by AnchorFree’s database of more than 3.5 million malicious sites). Users are also prompted whenever they connect to an unknown wireless network to turn on Hotspot Shield. I was able to configure the tool to skip the notifications altogether and automatically activate Hotspot Shield on unknown networks.
Hotspot Shield is available in two flavors, free and Elite. The free version displays ads to the user while it is turned on, while Elite is ad-free. AnchorFree has several plans available for Elite, including $4.99 a month, $29.95 a year, or “pay-as-you-go” packs of 20 days for $10. Users can pay by one of the many options, including credit card, PayPal, prepaid cards, and mobile phone payments using premium SMS.
I didn’t notice any differences between the free and Elite versions except for the advertisements. On the free version, every single time I activated Hotspot Shield to begin my VPN session, the tool would open a new browser window to open a start page with ads and a video automatically playing. While it makes sense to support the free version of the tool with ads, the method used felt overly intrusive and irritating. I was annoyed enough that paying $29.95 a year for Elite sounded appealing. The software also comes with an optional browser toolbar to display a 720 pixel x 98 pixel ad. The ads were shown only when Hotspot Shield was active.
Getting Started
The first thing I saw after launching the installation executable was the option to install the Hotspot Shield toolbar. I was very pleased to see that AnchorFree has turned the toolbar option off by default. I don’t like having my browsing space reduced with toolbars (which is especially important when working on smaller screens), so the fact that AnchorFree didn’t try to push it on me was a big plus, especially since it meant the company was giving up ad real estate.
During installation, Hotspot Shield installs a plugin for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, Hotspot Shield Class and Hotspot Shield Helper 1.0, to handle the VPN activity for those two browsers. I didn’t find any extensions installed for Google’s Chrome Web browser. The installation process installed three services, the Hotspot Shield Monitoring Service, Routing Service, and Tray Service. Hotspot Shield created three icons during installation: one in the system tray, one on the desktop, and one on the top bar of each browser installed on the machine.
I was a little surprised to see Hotspot Shield modify the browsers this way. It seemed intrusive that a browser plugin could stick an icon anywhere it wanted. It’s a great idea and the perfect placement, but the idea of one app modifying another without asking left me...a little squeamish.
I was also irritated when I uninstalled Hotspot Shield and found that my browser settings, such as my Home page, reverted to default. My Home on IE and Mozilla changed to msn.com and Mozilla’s version of Google search, respectively, instead of the pages I had set. It’s a minor quibble, but it was yet another example of Hotspot Shield mucking around my Web browser that left a sour taste in my mouth.
Ready, Set, VPN!
Once installed, Hotspot Shield appeared as a green shield icon in my system tray and on the top of the browser, next to the minimize buttons, to show that it was active. When Hotspot Shield is not active, the shield is red. The shield looks oddly out of place when the top of the browser is transparent, as happens when the Windows 7 desktop is set to an Aero theme.
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