[Crypto-chi] VPNs and your anonymity

[Freddy]

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Hi all,

Sorry for the short-ish email.

VPNs *aren't* anonymous. They are at best an encrypted connection
between you and servers someone else controls. They are great for a
couple of things: encrypting your connection from your ISP, hiding
your real IP and keeping your traffic from being sniffed from network
adversaries (say in a public wifi location).

There is a great article from a (I believe Comcast) customer who used
a VPN to encrypt their Netflix connection and immediately had better
upload / download throughput for their (legal) streaming. That's
because Comcast was sniffing their network traffic and throttling it
(IsComcast a malicious adversary in this case?).

However, VPNs are great for a lot of casual browsing, (for example web
tracking via Ad networks), cases where your traffic might blocked
(think region restrictions in playing BBC videos) as well as cases
where high anonymity is not needed (think Facebook, web
pages behind Cloudflare etc).

Freddy


On 02/15/2015 03:59 PM, Dan Massoglia wrote:
> I don't use a VPN. Love TorrentFreak though.
> 
> On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 10:05 PM, joe fuentes
> <joseph.fuentes at live.com> wrote:
> 
>> hello everybody For those of us who like to defend our privacy
>> and use VPNs as one of our tools, here's a rundown from
>> TorrentFreak. An update looks like will come out this month
>> later.
>> 
>> Let's take a poll. Do any of you use these? if so which one and
>> would you recommend it?
>> 
>> -Joe
>> 
>> 
>> https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-services-take-your-anonymity-seriously-2014-edition-140315/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> 
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>> 
> 
> 
> 
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