I am also in this club. 
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Not to one-up you, but my work pays me a $40 a month stipend for my phone so I’m REALLY being cheap at $15 a month. But the way I see it, next time I need to buy a new phone, that $25 a month over the course of a few years basically will balance out (though I will probably convince them to pay for the phone, they paid for my current one).
On top of that, the fact that I’ve had enough referral credit the last 3 years, I’ve only actually paid for 1 year out of the 4 years I’ve had them. I’m almost up to enough for another free year when it comes due in 6 months too…
Occasionally I notice de-prioritization but only in areas where “real” T-Mobile and AT&T were also slow in the past, so I don’t even know if it is de-prioritization or not.
If I used a lot of hotspot, I’d definitely spring for the 15GB or even 20GB plan.
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Yeah, I really like being able to pre-pay and then know I won’t have a bill (which could go down with referrals) for another year.
I can’t say that I’ve ever noticed this.
I can say that now I may have to consider joining the Windscribe club just because of the first paragraph in the About this app section of their listing in Google Play Store:
Have you ever farted on a packed plane, panicked, and started hoping and praying no one knew it was you? Now imagine the plane is the internet and your fart is your browsing history. The passengers sitting next to you are your ISP, advertisers, and government agencies. And let’s just say they love the smell of a good fart. Without a VPN, they would instantly know you farted. Then, on top of that, every time you went back on the internet, you’d be forced to watch ads about farting, and travel recommendations to bean farms around the world.
This is genius.
Probably one of the reasons I like Mint too (though Windscribe definitely is a bit more crude in their jokes).
Everything I’ve read seems to confirm that their “we do not collect and sell your browsing habit data” is actually true as well. You get 2 gigs free if you don’t want to give your email, and 10G free if you do. I hardly ever get marketing emails from them and they just go to junk when I do (though I do usually read them for a laugh). Just be careful not to click “unsubscribe” in the email or you get downgraded to 2 gigs, and have to remove and re-add your email to go back to 10.
Oh and happy forum-versary.
I won’t ask where you placed your Ryan Reynolds temporary tattoo. 
It isn’t, but thanks!
Well on this user name anyway. Unless the cake icon is a glitch.
Nope. Not a glitch. 
I’m not even sure that’s what it is. One area is next to a huge hotel and casino, and has always been slow no matter what carrier I’ve had, even non-MVNO with top priority.
The other is near a large mall (yes, they still exist). However it is slow even late at night, with full signal bars. It isn’t an area I used to go a lot when I had the “real” companies, so not sure if it existed before or not. Late at night you wouldn’t expect de-prioritization to be an issue, maybe it is just a tower problem in that area.
Ironically in big cities like Boston and New York, never seen any slowness at all. At home I’m about 500 feet from a T-Mobile antenna (nicely hidden in the steeple of an old school that is now apartments) and I get crazy good signal and speeds. And probably a bit of cancer as a bonus (not as much as the people that live in those apartments though).
OK fine happy forum-versary to this particular alias.
Still nope (this is my only Wyze Forum account), but I appreciate the kind wishes, anyway!
That’s the term I was looking for. Thanks!
Used to be a very dirty word in the security industry.
It’s still a dirty word as far as security goes because it risks data leakage.
It also creates 2 pathways for internet traffic, one of which isn’t secure, but regardless of that, having 2 pathways increases the potential attack surface.
It also increases risk of malware infiltration because a device can get infected with malware outside the VPN tunnel, then spread it to the corporate network when they start using applications routed through the VPN.
And while not security issues by themselves, split tunneling increases complexity which causes a lot more misconfiguration leading to vulnerabilities (might accidentally route sensitive traffic outside the VPN).
In general, the security industry still doesn’t like split tunneling. It’s mostly for convenience or cost saving.
Had the following settings overnight:
Hotspot off
Data Saver on
VPN by Google on (me); off (wife)
Private DNS on (automatic)
Adaptive connectivity off
No mobile data use on either phone! Will leave as-is tonight. Any other variables to try testing to help troubleshoot? Thanks, all.
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Luckily I never had any issues in the ten years of using it. Like always, you have to be careful what you connect to.
Also, some banks won’t let you spoof your location and IP. Unfortunately, I can’t cancel my bank.
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Nah, the security industry has wholeheartedly accepted it now.
And by that I mean they went from
“NO way, no how, absolutely not”.
To
[BIG SIGH] “Fine, I GUESS”
The setup that MS has put together works pretty well but there is always the chance that someone at the company messes it up. But with people remote working a lot more these days, it is sort of a necessity. From my toying around and messing with my company’s setup, it does what it is supposed to. Heck many of our offices actually just have a generic internet connection (with firewall etc) and we VPN even when in the office.
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I’d say keep that setup, see if when it happens again it happens on one phone and not the other.
If it happens on both phones when one has the VPN bypass and the other doesn’t, I’m guessing it is your ISP taking down internet for several hours overnight for upgrades etc.
Yeah, more like grudging acceptance that it’s going to be reality anyway rather than embracing it as equally secure… It still has data leak issues. It kind of depends on the level of security needed. If a group needs good, real high quality best practices security, they still won’t allow it.
But most groups don’t really need such strict security. I guess it depends how likely your organization is to be the primary, intentional target of attackers vs a random stack that is just treating ports, etc.
My company is a huge target (and we’re also one of the biggest security consulting firms in the world, ranging between #1 and #3 depending which metric you look at). The reality is, people opening email attachments/clicking links, visiting a site that the proxy/blacklist/heuristics doesn’t catch, etc is far more of a problem now. Split tunneling itself is not that big of a security issue, not nowadays with all the layers of security (port guard to make sure you don’t bridge an insecure network to the VPN, URL and IP blacklists, far better endpoint security in both the browser and the OS than used to exist, Azure authentication, etc etc). There is really no reason to force a google search to go through the VPN and proxy server anymore.
Much like I don’t like IPv6 on home internet because it doesn’t have that “safety net” of hide NAT if all else fails, people also hang onto forbidding split tunneling as being much more important than it really is. Just us old timers having trouble adapting to the times 
In reality in the corporate environment, nothing sensitive is accessible from the internet, so even if something did leak, it would just fail to connect. Sure a hacker could gain some info from a DNS query or your SYN packet, but unlikely to be enough to do anything with.
For the home user, if you’re trying to hide something from your ISP (like file sharing) then leaking is much more of an issue, since both paths lead to the same place, and it will work either way (usually), but one protects your anonymity, and the other doesn’t. Obviously it could also be an issue on public wifi if things leak, but other than the DNS queries, what isn’t SSL encrypted these days? Heck most browsers even use secure DNS if the server supports it.
For me the VPN is another “safety net”, in the unlikely scenario of a Man in the Middle attack, or some site failing to redirect to HTTPS, it is nice to know it is there when on a network I don’t trust. But let’s be honest, the VPN doesn’t protect you end to end, someone could have hacked the site you’re visiting or be sniffing an ISP router, and get you at the remote side (or any number of places between the VPN provider and that company/site).
One of the things we see most often (and I think you’ll hear this from anyone in the security space) is a company focusing way too much on a “common” or “well known” aspect of security that they think is important, while overlooking a glaring gap that is of far greater consequence and is far more important, because they haven’t adapted to the ever changing threat landscape and are just following old best practices and calling it a day.
Guess we’ve hijacked this thread enough at this point 
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Will do. Internet provider says no outages reported FWIW. I’m WFH and haven’t noticed any outages all day, but I wouldn’t know if internet dropped while sleeping. Thanks again.