The latest Developer version of the Opera browser offers a built-in free VPN with 256-bit encryption. This is very easy to set up and use and enables users to pretend to be in the U.S., Canada or Germany, and thus to get around region-blocking of Web content. The Developer version is 38.0, compared to the mainstream 36.0. Seems to work fine on a quick test — getting me to a version of Bing with German language news insets, via a German IP address.

1.2Mb, just to load Bing’s front page? Ooof.

Update, 12th May:

The new VPN now only works when you open a “Private Window” in Opera…

Alexander Street Press’s new Open Music Library has launched in beta. I gave it a 30 minute test. The OML uses a very odd definition of “Open”, once one gets to the actual fulltext link on a purportedly OA item. To the OML “Open” seems to mean either “erm, actually it’s behind a paywall” or “hey, it might be on Google Scholar, go look there…”. I’m guessing that this may be due to the curators building the OML from within an academic campus office. So perhaps they see items as open, whereas the outside world only sees a paywall?

The OML icons also contribute immediately to the sense that something is awry with the OML. People going to a public site called Open Music Library will expect to see friendly orange Open Access symbols, not forbidding black padlock-key signs (which are on the majority of the journals listed) indicating paywalls…

Of the 94 journals listed on OML, 28 lack the padlock-key symbol. JURN indexes all of the latter, and a few hundred more on aspects of music and musicology.