VPN on Public Wi-Fi: What's Actually Protected?

For years, the conventional wisdom has been clear: always use a VPN on public Wi-Fi. But that advice crystallized around 2010, when Firesheep made session hijacking a point-and-click sport and HTTPS covered barely 30% of traffic. The threat model has been completely rebuilt since — client isolation, near-universal HTTPS, and HSTS preloading now protect most connections before the VPN even enters the picture. So what's actually left for a VPN to protect? In this episode, we conduct a technical audit of the VPN-on-public-Wi-Fi advice, examining the three residual gaps that VPNs still close: leaked DNS queries, non-web traffic from legacy protocols, and session hijacking vectors that HTTPS hasn't fully eliminated. We also look at real-world attack data — including the surprising finding that only seven evil twin arrests were documented worldwide between 2020 and 2025 — and ask whether the risk profile matches the marketing. Episode #794181 — open it directly at myweirdprompts.com/794181