Problems

Because Sony Network Entertainment, Inc. is a bully.

Everyone temporarily blocks IPs if they receive too many failed login attempts from them, but only SNEI deems it necessary to spam providers with reports about them. The server hosters consider them abuse reports and trouble their customers (us in this case) with them. In other words: we risk having our servers shut down by this absolutely inappropriate behavior. We'd rather not bother you with this; please consider it an act of self-defense.

We believe that Sony is trying to fight botnet activity. This is legitimate and respectable, but they should choose their weapons more discreetly.

I know which company I don't buy from anymore.

Unfortunately that's correct. The CA certificate used to satisfy OpenVPN's requirement for verifiable TLS certificates has expired on May 28, 2013. We have build new certificates and installed them on the servers. Unfortunately this means that you need to use new certificates on the client side as well, and this means that you need to use a YF client version of 20130528-02 or above, older versions will not do anymore. Please update your client installation.

N.b. these certificates are not used to provide encryption or authentication. The OpenVPN session runs through the already protected tunnel.

This means that the OpenVPN process could not acquire a TAP interface (a virtual network interface) on your PC because all such interfaces are currently being used. In most cases there will only be one such interface (created during the installation of OpenVPN), so the message is equivalent to "another OpenVPN process is running". Open the task manager and find the "openvpn.exe" process (click "show all users' processes" if necessary), then terminate it.

If that doesn't fix the problem, check out the "Utilities" directory of OpenVPN (Windows start menu). Remove all TAPs, then create one (or some).

Generally, CGI connection mode is the slowest of all possible connection modes. This is due to the way it works, it needs to accumulate data before it sends it off to the other side. But you can adjust a few knobs and try to make it faster.

You need to locate the ".ems.cfg" config file first. Have a look at the user guide if you need help with this step. This file can be edited with any text editor, for example Notepad. Ensure the YF client is NOT running when you edit the file or your changes may be lost. It is difficult to break this file so don't hesitate to try...

There are four values that control the timing of CGI connections and you can change everyone of them, but I would not recommend changing any other timing but "cgi_uplink_maxdelay". Here are the parameters with their default values and their meaning:

• cgi_uplink_maxdelay. Defaults to 500 milliseconds. The YF client will accumulate data for at most this time until it initiates a new uplink connection no matter how much data has been accumulated. You might want to set this to a lower value, maybe 200 milliseconds.
• cgi_uplink_urgentdelay. Defaults to 20 milliseconds. The YF client will use this value instead of the previous value when it has frames to deliver that are considered urgent, for example acknowledgements.
• cgi_uplink_threshold. Defaults to 3. If this many frames (YF data units) are to be delivered, a new uplink connection will be made right away. Setting this to 1 will effectively disable data accumulation and make your connection much more responsive, but it will also create much more overhead. If you don't care about how many connections are made and how much overhead it generates, set this to 1 and don't worry about the rest.
• cgi_uplink_mindelay. Defaults to 1 millisecond. This is the minimum amount of time between two uplink connections. You should not set it to 0 and most people should not have to increase it, but if your network connection drops connection attempts that appear in bursts, try setting it to a higher value!

All these values normally do not appear in the config file and are not configurable through the front end. Just add lines to the file (it does not matter where) that contain the name of the value, a space, and the numeric value to which you would like to set it (no unit).

Optimum performance is probably achieved by setting cgi_uplink_threshold to 1 and cgi_uplink_mindelay to maybe 20. Try it, you can't break anything, if it doesn't work just remove the lines again.

If you see this message when trying to use OpenVPN, you need to start DHCP service in system services control.

Are you using any protection software that filters web requests? Many anti-virus applications include such a feature. Check your protection software and disable "WebGuard" or whatever it is called.

Background info: These apps try to inspect files sent by web servers and delay their delivery to the requesting application until they have been able to read enough bytes. This breaks YF.

First of all, if you see the message in this form then you are using a very much outdated version of our software. You should update your installation.

The message means that for some reasons the client installation (not you, not the user account, not the client version) is on our blacklist and cannot be used with our service anymore. The reason is that either one of the administrators or an automated system has seen unacceptable activity from a specific client installation (i.e. a specific PC) and wants to make sure that simply registering a new user account won't get the culprit access again. You should be able to judge for yourself if the person in question is you or not. The most popular reasons for getting on our blacklist are: sending SPAM, making fraudulent payments on our web site or on others, and committing all kinds of vandalism. It's not difficult to tell whether we actually meant you (your particular user account) or not: if we did, your account will be disabled and you won't be able to log in anymore, i.e. you never see this message. :-)

In most cases, our servers are able to identify each client installation uniquely (they only use this ability for the blacklist, nothing else). But unfortunately some installations cannot be told apart when they connect with older YF client versions. This is the case for practically all YF client versions before 20090826-01, especially for those released between March and April 2009.

So the simple and most effective solution is: remove your outdated YF client installation and install the most current version. We cannot solve the problem for you, you need to solve it yourself.

Two things.

First of all it means that you client installation is outdated, because otherwise you should see a human readable message instead and wouldn't ask this question in the first place, so please update your client installation.

Second, it means that you have exceeded the usage time limits of the FreeFreedom account. This account type is limited in usage time. Please note that multiple accounts used by the same person count as one -- the servers notice this.

There are two ways you can solve this. Either wait until both limits are no longer exceeded (we recalculate these values only twice a day if the limits have been exceeded, but every few minutes if not -- for technical reasons), or consider buying a BasicFreedom package or using BasicFreedom vouchers. Each time you buy a package or send a voucher all recorded usage time for this account gets deleted. If you need a working Your Freedom account to access our web page, use username "unregistered" and password "unregistered"; it only provides access to our web page and only through the web proxy feature.

Please understand that while we certainly want to maintain a free service for everyone we've got bills to pay -- servers cost money and employees want a paycheck every month. No-one gets filthy rich with Your Freedom.

It means that your account does not have permission to use the YF server (or service) from the country you are accessing it from. At the time of writing, there are two reasons why you would see this message:

1. You are a Sesawe user (see www.sesawe.net) and you are using the Sesawe version of the YF client from a country other than the ones on the list of supported countries for this client version.
2. You are a FreeFreedom user from Nigeria. Some of our servers do no longer permit this account type to connect from Nigeria. This is a defensive measure -- FreeFreedom accounts from Nigeria are responsible for over 95% of all SPAM sent through YF despite all our protective measures against it, and this is getting us into trouble with our providers. Say thank-you to your fellow citizens. Please use another YF server, and please do NOT send us email about it.

There's no way we can keep website admins from deciding which connection they will accept and which not. There are companies like Maxmind offering lists of "high-risk" IP addresses for fraud protection, and naturally a service like ours will end up on it. They've got a point too... we've got a good deal of work because of fraud committed through our systems, not to talk of all the SPAM. The very very sorry fact is that 95% of it all comes from only one country. :-(

In short, we're not telling anyone that the request is coming from a proxy service like ours. But it's really not that difficult to figure it out. And there's nothing we can do about it other than setting up the occational new server -- your best bet is to try the servers added last.

The YF client only runs with Java 6, not Java 5. Leopard does not ship with Java 6 but you can get it from http://developer.apple.com/java/download/ (download "Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update (whatever)"). Once you've installed it,  Java 5 is still activated by default. The installer we provide should be able to automatically ensure the right  version is taken; if that doesn't work try to change the default: Open Finder, go to Applications, Utilities, Java, run "Java Preferences". Move "Java SE 6" to the top for applications. This should solve this problem.

Well, what does it sound like? :-)  Your YF client installation is too old and you should upgrade to a current version, please see our download section. (In fact it's so old it cannot even display the text properly.) Once you've upgraded your YF client installation the message should go away -- if it doesn't you've tried to upgrade one of the installer types with the other. Best thing is you uninstall the YF client first, then install the new version. Your configuration is not lost if you choose to keep your settings (small installer version).

Have you enabled "true SSL"? If you don't need it (i.e. you can establish a connection without this option), switch it off.

Are you not using "true SSL"? If your web proxy breaks your connection early (i.e. very often, every second or so), try to switch it on.

Enable round trip time measurements by configuring periodic measurements every 2000 milliseconds. Start the connection and play your game. If you encounter latency problems, check out the message log -- are the round trip times going up in spikes? If yes, fire up the task manager, locate the java/javaw/freedom process (the name depends on how you started it), then right-click on it and change the priority to "higher than normal" or "high".

If you don't know how to increase the priority, here's how. Fire up the task manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del). Click on the "Processes" tab. Click on "Name" to sort by name. Locate the process (it's called "freedom.exe" if you are using the big installer version, otherwise it's called "javaw.exe" or "java.exe"), right-click on it and choose "Set priority". Select "higher than normal" or "high". A window will pop up, asking you whether you are sure. Say "yes". Unfortunately you'll have to do this everytime you run Your Freedom.

If that doesn't help, try another server. Try a different connection mode as well.

Btw. buying a package will not automatically improve latency. It is true that we prioritize sessions of paying customers but this only has a significant effect on busy servers. Also, more bandwidth will only yield less latency if the root cause of the latency is the lack of bandwidth, and the bottleneck is our shaping. If you consider to give it a try, please use our "Try Before You Buy" offer to ensure that you benefit from a package before you buy one.

• Don't use the full installer version (that's the 28 meg one). The full installer version comes bundled with a version of Java that is not running very well under Vista, if at all. Install a current Java Runtime Environment (we recommend Sun's JDK6 available from Sun's Java page and use the installer version or the ZIP version of Your Freedom.

• When using the installer version and you would like to run YF in dump mode, or if you are using OpenVPN mode, don't simply click on the start menu item to run it but right-click and choose "Run as administrator". If you don't YF won't be able to write the dump file in the install directory and it won't be able to install routes into the tunnel in the routing table.
• If you are running a 64 bit version of Vista, you need to add a command line option. Edit the links in the start menu and on the desktop by right-clicking on them, then choose Properties. In there select the link tab and locate the "target". Edit the value and append (after the double quotes and with a leading space) "--noappwizard".

For every YF account only one simultaneous login is allowed, meaning that you can only use your account on one PC at a time. When you try to log in a second time while your other connection is still connected, the earlier connection will be terminated and the client will show a "Duplicate Login" error message.

This message can also occur in rare cases where the YF client is having trouble shutting down a previous session on the server. Exiting the YF client and restarting it will solve the issue.