The Monthly Scribe

This is it everybody, the last month of the year, the final stretch of 2020. Do you recall the excitement in January? It was supposed kick off a fantastic new decade but that excitement sadly didn't last very long. What did last long though, is our undying perseverance to give you a great VPN service, our unquestionable determination to secure and anonymize every single one of your packets, and the strange jar of pickles left in the office fridge since March.

Just like the pickles, there is another thing that seems to last forever at Windscribe and it is the incoming spam messages we get in our inbox. Most of the spam is typical nonsense but every now and then, we are blessed with some truly great works. Sometimes it's thanks to Google translate, other times it's just pure gold from a spammer itself.

And so, in hopes of cheering you up this final month of 2020, we've sent a letter to Spamta Clause and asked him to grace you all with some of the finest interpretive poetry from our inbox. Enjoy these gifts from Spamta Clause himself. Kids look away as some of these messages might be a bit too naughty.

Lifetime Pro Giveaway

You wake up on Christmas morning, you run to the tree to start opening gifts and what do you see? That's right, an opportunity to win a Lifetime Pro code for Windscribe, just what you asked for! Spamta Clause was generous this year, Windscribe's Lifetime Pro plans are more rare than a VPN reviewer not basing their scores on the affiliate money they will earn.

If you'd like to enter the giveaway for this highly sought-after prize, all you gotta do is leave a comment in this thread telling us what you like about Windscribe and how it has helped you. We've heard some incredible stories from people who have sent in feedback and we realized that we enjoy having our ego boosted. Passing 28 million users a few days ago gives us much joy, but hearing from some of the individual people, that's when the tears start flowing.

So tell us why you like Windscribe, why it's so great and why you are ready to spend the rest of your LIFE using our service. Come January 1st, we will select a random commenter, make sure their answer has tickled our ego enough and give them a Lifetime Pro code. Good luck everyone!

As for the contest last month where we asked you all to come up with acronyms for R.O.B.E.R.T, we got some creative ideas but our favorite one came from /u/photo-smart who suggested: Robotic Octagon Battling Every Rotten Technology and even added a bonus idea: Really Ought to Be Everyone's Regular Technology. We wholeheartedly agree with that last one. Congrats to you /u/photo-smart, you will get the 1 Year Pro code in your inbox shortly.

Windscribe Updates

Mobile Apps

An update on the mobile side of of things includes a new way to pay for Windscribe! Before this, you'd only have the option for one month or one year payments in the iOS and Android apps, but we want more of your money and so you can now subscribe to the Pro plans in the mobile apps and leave it. We actually prefer you leave it subscribed because then we can buy more cool things for the office like a taxidermied platypus. Yes we need one, it's vital to our office morale and we will call him Steve the Secure Platypus.

Microsoft Edge Browser Add-on

A while back, Microsoft vastly changed how the Edge browser works, they gave up and converted to using Chromium as the base browser. That's great news because now we can take our Chrome browser extension and use it in Edge! Less work for us, more client support for you. If you're one of the people who is using the new Edge browser, feel free to download and try out our Edge add-on from here. Please bear in mind that we have not yet had time to do a deep dive for the Edge-specific add-on and so you'll see a few Chrome icons here and there until we fix those.

Mac Desktop App

We've received a number of emails regarding the Mac version of our desktop application and how it will be affected by the new Big Sur update. If you have not heard yet, Apple has decided to slap all privacy advocates across the face by implementing some changes to the latest version of Mac OS which affect how internet traffic is firewalled. There is a link in the Boredom Bits section below that describes these issues in more depth.

The new update does in fact affect Windscribe but not the actual VPN Firewall in the app. There are 2 ways that traffic can be filtered on Mac OS. The first one is with an application firewall and the second is with a packet firewall. The application firewall is what has been changed in the new OS, Apple no longer gives full access to how this firewall can be used and forces some applications through regardless of what settings you have. On the other hand, the packet filter works based on the IPs and packet data of your internet traffic and this is what Windscribe uses for its firewall. This functionality has not changed in Big Sur and so there is no concern about the Windscribe VPN tunnel leaking any data.

Where the effects of the new changes come into play are with the new 2.0 app which some of you are already using in its beta form. The new 2.0 app has the Split Tunneling feature which allows you to select which apps go through the tunnel and which ones don't. This feature uses the application firewall built into the system, the one that has been altered by Apple. As this is how the new OS will function, we can no longer offer the Split Tunneling feature in its ideal version, it will be a best-effort from us and might not work correctly for the applications you have.

Boredom Bits - News Edition

This month, we've decided to forgo sending you hilarious or intriguing videos and opted to post some more important news related to privacy instead. But you still get the funny cat pictures, don't worry.

First off is the update to Big Sur. As mentioned in the section above, there are some worrying privacy changes Apple implemented using their new M1 chips and architecture. Jefferey Paul has written a great analysis on all the issues with these new changes: https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/. Additionally, you can check out this twitter thread for some demonstrations of the flaws in the new system.

On a Windscribe-related note, the Microsoft Edge add-on we just published a few days ago has had a bit of controversy as well. Some naughty people (who will get coal in their stocking) decided to publish over a dozen fake and malicious VPN add-ons under the guise of legitimate VPNs. Windscribe was one of these add-ons and Microsoft finally took down the fake version from the Add-on store a few days ago. If you installed Windscribe for Edge before December, please remove it from your system and use this version instead which is the official release from us. If you want to read more about these events, TechRadar has an article about it.

Finally, a quick note about an announcement from Microsoft regarding a new security chip they call Pluton. Microsoft is working with AMD and Intel on this new chip which will be integrated into the hardware of your computer. Some concerns have been raised regarding the privacy aspects of this as it requires connectivity to Microsoft's cloud servers to update, opening a potential hardware backdoor. Wired has a great article diving into this new chip.

And the most important news is this album of funny cats, enjoy!

Thanks for joining us on this subreddit, we love our community and read much of your feedback. Tell your friends to join, we'll do something special at 20k subscribers! While you're at it, tell them to follow our Twitter for more real-time updates and the ever-growing Discord server too. Happy Holidays everybody!

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