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Pornhub goes dark in Arkansas after age verification law kicks in
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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I'm lost here, why would you need a VPN running all the time?
Some people say that a VPN is like a tunnel.
This is actually incorrect. A VPN is actually like a condom.
So your ISP doesn't have logs on where you surf. I run 2 to 3 at a time. No one (I hope) knows what I'm doing.
VPNs have many uses, but I think it is overstated how much they provide in privacy. They can hide your public IP address, but your VPN provider still knows it (and you have to trust them that they won't keep all the information on you). And you can still be identified by your browser fingerprint which a VPN doesn't do anything about. Their encryption doesn't add much either, since most traffic on the web is already encrypted via TLS or SSL (when you use https sites).
They are however useful to access content that isn't available in all regions of the world, when all you need is to hide your ip (e.g. when pirating (i imagine most governments won't go through the effort to try figure out who is behind the vpn, but I'm not sure)), to allow you to access an institution's intranet from home, to allow playing LAN games with your friends when both of you are on different networks and behind a NAT, or in any other situation when you need to use the internet with another IP or need to route traffic to another network.
I have to ask, does a VPN really 100% anonymise everything? Like DNS and everything, so they can’t see the domains you access? Does this include the ISP but also the wifi router logs (for example on an open network)?
So the only way to find out anything is to raid the VPN offices and backtrack your real IP…?
It sounds like a too easy way to get away with anything online. 🤔
Privacy is a goal worth having in and of itself.
I can't believe there's still people on here in the current political climate saying things like "well I don't have anything to hide anyway, I don't care if evil corp / the state / any curious person knows my every move."
Well, I do care. It's none of their fucking business what I'm doing and what sites I'm visiting.
I agree 100%, I was just wondering about the technicalities - how much does using a VPN protect us.
As far as I know, the only person who has information on what you're browsing is the VPN provider. Your ISP would only see that you were connecting to the VPN, and how much data you were pushing and pulling from them but wouldn't even have the domain names of the things you were browsing, nor any packets that were actually exchanged.
The VPN provider could still have all of this information, but presumably not more unless you were doing a lot of stuff unencrypted or were using some weirdo middleware that could man in the middle your encrypted connections.
Very nice, thank you!