"This would be useful if you are on public WiFi on a regular basis or if you want to access country specific streaming media sites."

Right, exactly and I believe this is what it was initially created for and promoted for. It is software for folks that travel a lot and use their laptops in places where it would be best to protect them, hotels, cafes, restaurants...all those open networks and it is of course used by a lot of folks like Alan in Australia that complain "Hey, I can't see that video you posted because it is blocked in my country!"

It is easy to use, free to download and gets high marks from a lot of folks that know about this stuff. I'm not one of those folks but I've used it and it works.

"Politically, I'm sure a good hacker/coder could reverse engineer the software and figure a way to block it. China is probably working on it as we speak."

Ha, China and North Korea were a couple of places I thought of too! Wonder if they have access to the site to download it. Which is here for anybody interested:

http://hotspotshield.com/

On a recent flight from Iceland back to Boston the guy sitting next to me on the plane was a hacker, travelling with a group of 5 other hackers. We had quite a conversation. He was just a kid about 19-20 years old and though he was born and grew up in New England (hacker central thanks to schools like MIT among others) a lot of what he was saying seemed to be another language and went right over my head. Fun conversation though and he of course was very familiar with the school and university where Julia works...