VPN

Stands for "Virtual Private Network." (Not a competitor of UPN). This is a network term that isn't used very much (probably because VPNs are not very common), but at least you can impress your friends by talking about them. A VPN refers to a network partially connected to the Internet, but uses encryption to scramble all the data sent through the Internet so the entire network is "virtually" private. For example, a large company that has offices in multiple locations could send data to the different locations via the Internet, but encrypt everything that is sent, thus creating a VPN. It's sort of like having a secure Intranet over the Internet. Pretty cool.