For those who don't believe that an ordinary commercial VPN service can improve your privacy, here's a simple experiment you can run at home: Get two similar computers, one with a VPN and one without. Use them both to download Hollywood movies through bittorrent, and see which one results in notifications of incoming lawsuits from movie studios.

Fortunately, there's no need to do this experiment yourself. Millions of people around the world have already done it for you.

It's a real mystery to me why the EFF continues to disseminate such bad advice on this one oddly specific topic. A VPN will not give you secure anonymity all by itself, but it is in many circumstances one of the necessary tools you'd need in order to have some degree of anonymity if that's what you're aiming for.

Is it just me, or does "draft emails confidently" seem like too awkward a phrase to inspire much confidence?