Establish a secure environment to browse the Internet. Set up a proxy server and redirect all data requests to avoid detection and leave no traces of your presence in search engines and site memory. The utility provides the option to customize and switch VPN profiles.
Viscosity is an OpenVPN client. Therefore, it comes in handy for preserving your anonymity and security while surfing the web or downloading content. It works by hiding your real IP and creating a data-transfer tunnel, so it helps you avoid ISP rules. Although it can also bypass geographical restrictions, it does not seem to work for unblocking such streaming services as Netflix.
The application runs from the Menu Bar. It has a tabbed interface, which makes it easier to enter the data necessary to establish connections; yet, you may probably find it not as simple to use as other tools of the same type.
One of the advantages of this product is that supports not only connecting through the developer’s VPN service but configuring any other OpenVPN-based connection. A new connection can be set automatically by using a configuration file or by getting the necessary data from the selected server. If you decide to do it manually, you would need to enter such data as a server address, port and connection method. It is excellent that it lets you create rules to distribute traffic through the VPN or not.
In terms of privacy, it is good that no logs of your activity are kept. As to security, it uses the same strong encryption methods that characterize the OpenVPN protocol. However, the absence of a kill switch may add a risk of some data being accidentally sent without using the VPN connection.
All in all, Viscosity allows you to configure various OpenVPN connections and use them selectively. Luckily, there is a 30-day trial of this product, which you make use to see if it works for you.
v1.4 [Jul 26, 2012]
- Viscosity will now automatically switch between OpenVPN 2.2 and 2.3 as needed
- OpenVPN version can be manually selected under Preferences>Advanced
- Support for the Notification Center under Mac OS 10.8
- Security: Fixes a potential privilege escalation attack caused by exploiting the behaviour of ViscosityHelper and the Python framework (CVE-2012-4284).
- Security: ViscosityHelper hardened against privilege escalation attacks
- Security: By default Viscosity no longer allows for potentially dangerous OpenVPN commands to be used, including up and down scripts. Viscosity's scripting support is not affected.
- OpenVPN 2.3 patched to restore HTTP proxy support
- DNS stability improvements when running under Mac OS 10.7 and 10.8
- Fixes issue exporting zipped connections under Mac OS 10.8
- Fixes issue enabling automatic IPv6 on TAP interfaces under Mac OS 10.8
- Fixes issue importing a connection with non-ASCII characters under Mac OS 10.8
- Fixes issue importing some TCP based connections
- Various bug fixes and enhancements
