"If you're carrying around an additional piece of network filtering hardware, you might as well just run the VPN client on that, too." Perhaps - and of course

"If you're carrying around an additional piece of network filtering hardware, you might as well just run the VPN client on that, too." Perhaps - and of course that point is well taken. However, if the hardware device is complicated enough to actually run the VPN then you are back to wondering how it can fail, who can attack it and how things can accidently go around it. Not so with a slug - it is a dead simple bridge that can't be seen on the network.