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The Block | About | Blokada Insiders | Download How to get free access to Blokada VPN using Stellar Sep 18, 2019 We have been positively surprised by your interest in Blokada VPN. Over the last several weeks we have been working hard to improve it and provide features you ask for. Among other things, we have added multi device support, improved the UI design based on your feedback, added support for x86 devices and integrated several payment options. Today, we are adding another way to get access to Blokada VPN - using the Stellar platform. Here I explain how to start, and how to use it to purchase Blokada VPN, without paying. What is Stellar? Stellar is a modern payment technology that is fast and cheap. It uses its own cryptocurrency, Stellar Lumens (XLM), which you can hold using a wallet app, like Keybase. What is Keybase? Keybase is a messaging app as well as a cryptocurrency wallet. It’s a great way to start using Stellar. Why use Stellar to get Blokada VPN? No fees paid to banks Payment is very fast and simple No need to provide an email address Last but not least, there are several ways to earn free Stellar Lumens, which you can use to get access to Blokada VPN for free! How to get free Stellar Lumens? Learn Stellar. Earn XLM : You can earn XLM simply by watching some content about how it works. Keybase Stellar airdrop : Keybase is currently running a promo campaign and is sending $20 worth of XLM to existing Keybase accounts. Check your account, you may be eligible! The airdrop is closed for new users at the moment of writing, because of a brute force attack. However, it is possible Keybase will open it up again in the near future, in which case new users will be able to join to the airdrop. Stay tuned! How to buy Stellar Lumens? In case you didn’t succeed in earning free lumens, there are multiple cryptocurrency exchanges that allow you to buy XLM with more traditional methods or with other crypto such as Bitcoin. The official list of exchanges Freedom Isn’t Free: VPN Edition Aug 5, 2019 Freedom Isn’t Free: VPN Edition In The Block’s last article, we covered what a VPN is and how it works, with a particular focus on the VPN used by Blokada itself. As a discerning consumer of technology, you might be interested in using a VPN elsewhere besides your Android phone. To get started, you may well want to use a free VPN—after all, why not take the opportunity to dip your toe in before going for a swim? As I mentioned in a previous article, there’s a truism on the Internet: if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. Therefore, it’s worth carefully reading the privacy policy of any VPN product you use, especially the free ones, to see what the provider is doing with your data. On the other hand, most VPN providers know that their audience is likely to be privacy-conscious, so their free offerings are more focused on limiting overall traffic or particular protocols or services. If you do find that a VPN package wants to install adware or other unwanted third-party software, my advice is toif you swipe up. You can find a shield in the top left corner on every screen. You can activate and deactivate Blokada with that. The waves, coming out from the shield are representing the domain queries: the light greys are the allowed queries while the orange ones are the blocked. Cool, isn’t it? Another big change that v4 introduced is the VPN functionality. Blokada uses the VPN API of the device, thus, you can’t connect to such service if Blokada is running. To overcome the situation, Blokada has its own VPN that can be accessed while filtering is enabled. The VPN provides security, privacy and anonymity on the internet. Masking the user’s real IP address it makes content that is restricted for the user, available. While the main feature, filtering ads is free and remains free, this service is subscription based, costs 5€/month, and it is off by default. At the moment of writing the article there are 2 gateways, one in New York and one in Stockholm. Based on our tests, they provide great speed and reliability, streaming HD video wasn’t an issue at all and the phone didn’t consume much more battery. When you subscribe, you need to provide your e-mail address and, of course, the card details. This information is necessary to be compliant with the law and regulations, they are not bound with the 12 character long random ID that identifies you on our network. That is being said, this unique ID should not be shared with others. Only the servers use the ID, and they do not track you, neither your internet activity. As the ID and the information you provide at the subsciption are handled separately, we can not identify you on our network. In the meantime, Blokada remains free and open source, the team works to make the app better and ship all the features to provide you more security, protect your data and privacy. If you have questions or ideas, join our Telegram channel and let’s have a chat! Sincerely yours, The restless Blokada team: Karol, Sebastian, Johnny, Pascal and Peter On the Ethics of Ad-Blocking May 27, 2019 Some time ago, I had a conversation with a fellow college alumnus wherein he asserted that ad-blocking is unethical on the grounds that it deprives content creators of revenue. The argument is a simple one, and not without merit: the content creators of the Web deserve to get paid for their work, and the primary channel by which they do so is advertising, so if you want your favorite news sites, comic artists, video entertainers, etc. to keep doing what they do, you should view (and presumably click on) the advertising on their sites so these creators are able to make money. Whatever content you view on the Web, someone took time to create it as well as the infrastructure to support you viewing it. Even a personal blog will have multiple people involved: the blogger, possibly a paid Web designer, certainly whoever wrote the blogging software, and the staff who support the underlying Web server. Depending on the blog, the blogger may not be directly paying for those resources, but they do exist, and eventually all those people need money to live and hopefully thrive on. With advertising as the lifeblood of the World Wide Web as we know it, can we really afford to block it? Let’s take a step back and consider how we got here. In the halcyon pre-Web days, the Internet was largely free of advertising. Not completely, of course (I was shocked to discover that the first spam email was sent in 1978!), but in a text-based world, advertising was easier to detect and ignore, and we had these things called killfiles for individual message filtering or the Usenet Death Penalty (for those of you just joining us, Usenet is where Internet greybeards still hang out and remember what they like to believe was a more civilized time). At that time, the Internet was entirely supported by a mix of academic, government, and commercial interests, and the content” was created by active participants engaged in a free exchange of ideas (with the caveat that not all ideas or participants were equally valuable). With the advent of the World Wide Web, a shift began to occur. No longer was the Internet the sole province of nerds in computer labs; suddenly, the average person (who owned a computer and was able to access the Internet, so maybe not quite average”) was able to view fancy graphical content at blazing fast 28k speeds. I still remember being amazed to see Web URLs appearing in car commercials! While a lot of that first content was advertising itself, it was fairly straightforward advertising: if you navigated to a car maker’s Web site, you expected to see materials about that manufacturer’s cars. Of course, it didn’t take long until the first banner ad appeared. By the standards of the time, banner ads could be quite obnoxious, but the beginning of the real challenge of Internet advertising came in a more subtle form: the tracking cookie . One of the...