Some medias seem to think that VPNs are something totally new and revolutionary. They're not. VPNs have been extensively used in enterprises for close to 15 years now, as more people started working remotely, and products like PCAnywhere and CloseUp started to show their limitation.
Medias are often confusing VPN (the technology) with the tunnels sold by various providers. They should NOT be mixed up. The goal of a VPN is, as the name implies, to establish a Virtual Private Network between two locations, across an insecure network (the Internet). It's intended use is to remotely connect two offices over the Internet, or a remote worker with an office. The office has extended a bit to also become homes, so users can remotely access their media collection back at home (for example).
The service the VPN tunnel providers are selling are just a by-product of the technology, which was NOT designed to that purpose (hiding your public IP by replacing it with that of someone else's network). People using these services should start questioning the implementation done by their provider, because a badly configured tunnel will severely put their home network at risk. Remember when I said the initial goal of a VPN is to connect two networks together? Part of what it does is bypass firewalls. This means your tunnel provider is bypassing YOUR firewall. How secure is the provider's own firewall (assuming they DO have one in front of their end of the tunnel)? That's one question not enough customers ever considered.
