Hilariously, I'm in the UAE at the moment and wanted to call my Dad (who is in the states) from my Skype account to his cell phone. Unfortunately, the UAE blocks Skype -> phone (oddly Skype -> Skype works fine) calls so I just used logmein to connect to a XP box I have in the states, flip on the VPN setting, forward the ports on the router and then connect to it from my win7 box here in the UAE thus mading the call with no troubles. Took 5 minutes total, and I had never once made a VPN before...so if they are trying to stop terrorist activity or whatever they are going to need to try harder.