What VPN is currently the best? What is the cheapest one? Because from what I understand, you can't get one for free (not talking about 30 day trial)?
Also, is it really THAT safe and anonymous? After all, you buy it and register on your real information, and connect to it using your actual IP. Can't they just track you back?
Questions about VPN
Daniel Cook
Isaac Foster
bump i have the same question
Luke Smith
>is it really THAT safe and anonymous?
No. The purpose of a VPN isn't anonimity or safety. It's convenience for businesses. "VPN for online privacy" is just a way to sell snake oil to normies. It's not at all useful unless you're hiding from your ISP, in which case you can just use Tor which is safer and more convenient.
>After all, you buy it and register on your real information, and connect to it using your actual IP. Can't they just track you back?
The VPN can see what domains you're trying to connect to, yes.
On the web, IP is no longer used to track people because smartphones usually have a dynamic IP so it would be impossible to track smartphone users. Instead, each browser/device has a unique ID they're assigned online for tracking. People usually don't have identical browser and OS versions, GPU, CPU, computer screen size, addons, etc. All this data is combined into a single file and that file represents *you*, or at least your PC. So even if you change your IP it is trivial to figure out it's you who's visiting a website with trackers. Here's some sites where you can check the information your browser leaks to websites, none of which is directly tied to your IP (except that one browserleaks tab)
panopticlick.eff.org
browserleaks.com
Use Tor Browser if you want to surf anonymously. Use Tribler if you want to torrent anonymously. Use uBlockOrigin and block 3rd party stuff on it to somewhat prevent cross-website tracking.
Dylan Gonzalez
Thanks for the answer, so it's as I thought, it's not really that anonymous when we use VPN.
Do you really think though that every site can track our computer specs that easily and not until we actually do something that sends such information?
Like those sites that you mentioned, they require us to let them run script which checks for our PCs specs. My browser pretty much tells me that this is what the site wants from me,
or that some script wants to be run at least. So if I for example visit youtube, would they also be able to know the specs of my PC?
Asher Powell
>just use Tor
>blocked from every website in existence because the list of exits is public
>more convenient
Tyler Ward
yes
dont listen to paid shills and glows
Alexander King
It depends who youre hiding from i guess. If you just want your traffic over the wire to be encrypted from some sniffing shmoe when youre at starbucks, a vpn will satisfy that for the most part. But as others said its not enough to give you true anonomity, onion or garlic routing are probably better tools if that is what youre trying to accomplish.
Noah Phillips
>onion or garlic routing are probably better tools if that is what youre trying to accomplish.
Okay, enlighten me.
Eli Carter
>Do you really think though that every site can track our computer specs that easily and not until we actually do something that sends such information?
Visit the 2nd link and open the tabs on the left. All data is gathered automatically. If you have js enabled then it's all over. No user interaction is needed for javascript to work. If you go here browserleaks.com
Firefox (and anything based on it, like Tor Browser) is the only browser that has anti-fingerprinting which would block 99% of this shit and has the ability to make you non-unique. Combined with blocking js and Tor protocol it would be very difficult to track you.
>if I for example visit youtube, would they also be able to know the specs of my PC?
They'd be able to, yes.
websites that block tor are usually shit, so you're not missing out on much. and yes, this site is shit too. but it's not like it's important to stay anonymous on 4channel or eBay. but for everyday browsing tor works just fine.
Ethan Barnes
>Also, is it really THAT safe and anonymous?
No
>After all, you buy it and register on your real information
You can buy VPNs anonymously. Mullvad can be bought with cash. If I remember right, they encourage you to buy it in a way where they can't trace you easily. I buy VPN with bitcoin, and I buy bitcoin from random ATMs with cash. There's a decent enough degree of separation there to have reasonable anonymity (ie, I'm sure I'm on camera buying the bitcoin from an ATM, and withdrawing cash from my bank ATM but I'm just demonstrating there are vectors to buy VPNs anonymously).
>connect to it using your actual IP. Can't they just track you back?
Yes. Don't use VPNs for illegal stuff with the expectation of anonymity from agents that really want to find you. VPNs as a company make their money by selling you limited anonymity. They would fold if they just gave away your information to anyone that comes asking. Good VPNs will keep a limited subset of information with them and won't comply with information requests unless they are legally obligated to. This level of protection is usually decent enough for torrenting, DDL, accessing region-restricted content on netflix or hulu or whatever. Don't expect anything else from it.
Lucas Campbell
Basically, tor is onion and i2p is garlic. Theyre actually pretty similar; (paraphrasing from wikipedia here:)
Onion encapsulates a message "layers" of encryption, which is then transmitted through a series onion routers which only identify where they are sending information to and where they got the messae from, so no one should know the original sender. Garlic is similar from my understanding but it encrypts multiple messages together for added anonymity
Robert Edwards
So for the sake of complete annonimity you just need a tor browser and no vpn and that's it? Something is smelling fishy to me.
Why are VPN even a thing then when tor browsers can do that and even more?
Parker Martinez
I would give dvpns a try, the best one at the moment is sentinel.co (and also for free until it is no longer in beta)
privatix.io or mysterium.network are also great.
Easton Hughes
because tor is too slow for many things and you will have to solve for captchas on many websites, as they know the ips of tor exit nodes.
Dylan Edwards
The two protocols are actually very different. Tor is basically like a layered VPN, basically works like YourPC->VPN1->VPN2->VPN3->VPN4->website. So it can be used to visit normal websites, but it can also be used to visit .onion sites aka "darkweb". i2p is exclusively a "darkweb" protocol where you can visit only i2p sites and not Jow Forums.com, for example.
On Tor, you're jumping through multiple hosts until you reach a website. This means your latency will be higher and it also means it costs the network 5x more to deliver data to you which means the overall download speeds are not as high. So websites will take 300-500ms longer to start loading and you'll likely only have 1-5MBps download speed. VPNs offer higher speeds and lower latency, but they're still not anonymous because IPs aren't used for tracking. The power of Tor is not just in the protocol, but also in the Tor Browser because it's configured to be identical on every device. To a website, each Tor user appears to be the same person, so Tor users are untrackable unless you use JS exploits or unless they dox themselves.
Tor nodes are hosted by volounteers and some privacy focused companies. It's sticly a money sink and not made for profit, it lives exclusively on donations and funding. VPNs aren't "a thing" invented for privacy, as I've said they're mainly used for businesses (which usually set up their own VPN) because they're a convenient way of setting up shared networking outside of LAN. Consumer grade VPNs are a thing because it's easy to sell a useless product to people if you shill hard enough.
You can configure Firefox to be identical to Tor Browser but instead of connecting to Tor Network connect to a VPN. This way you'll be well protected by website tracking and your ISP, if that's what you want.
Logan Cox
Good info. Is a tor browser ready to use right after download/install? Are JS exploits a problem, and if so, how does one get rid of them? Or are they specific to certain websites. Which tor browser do you suggest?
Xavier Ortiz
Instead of buying VPNs try setting up your own. Smaller OpenVZ VPS isn't expensive and you'll learn a lot of about how networking and servers work while doing it.
You don't have to set up a VPN. If it's too hard you might just as well try setting up a shadowsocks server which is even better for masking your browsing traffic from ISP. Or, better yet, forget about installing something altogether and use ssh tunneling. It's as simple as connecting to a server and pointing your browser to a local port.
Don't buy VPNs, they're for peasants that aren't willing to learn about tech and don't care about their data being in someone else's hands. Manage your own privacy measures.
Thomas Turner
I just want to use that browser on regular websites, not on deep web shit.
Chase Gray
>Is a tor browser ready to use right after download/install?
You need to go into settings and enable the "safest" security setting in the security level (about:preferences#privacy). This will disable js though, but it's the safest thing to do. What you can do, if you need js and you probably do, is put the privacy shield into "Safer" or "Standard", then swap out NoScript for uBlockOrigin, then enable uBO advanced settings and disable js by default in uBO. Then you'd manually graylist (not greenlist) domains per website if you experience issues and need js on some sites. Note that you'll have to remove all filters in uBO because websites can see which domains you're blocking and thus figure out who you are according to which ad domains you block, though they usually don't do this.
>JS exploits
These are usually only used on malware sites, shady sites operated by blackhats or American/Chinese/EU/Russian governments which specifically want to target Tor users.
>Which tor browser do you suggest?
There's only 1. torproject.org
If you're using any websites where you'd log in, I recommend just using your regular browser for that, aka compartmentalize. Watch this for more info invidio.us
It supports non-.onion domains.
Jack Cook
From what that guy says this browser should be safe to use in the default state and actually gives idea to not change anything in the options, except for rising the safety setting to the highest.
Would you confirm that?
Elijah Collins
Also, can I use Tor if I already have a firefox browser and just swap them to use when I have to? (tor usage would be very rare, for anything else regular ff is enough for me)
Matthew Turner
It depends on what websites you'll visit with Tor. If you need to visit js dependent websites then I'd just block js in uBO instead of Tor settings because it's more convenient to have an option to disable js blocking on a single domain than have to re-open settings and enable js globally. As long as you block js in any way it won't really matter if you've installed uBO or not, as long as you disable it's adblocking feature.
Tor Browser is self-contained in it's own folder and won't interfere with your Firefox browser as long as you don't extract and install Tor in your Firefox directory.
Jason Wood
CryptoStorm,Mullvad,AirVPN
Sebastian Torres
es.thatoneprivacysite.net find it yourself and see which one fits your needs.
Liam Williams
>VPN
>Tor
oh hi there
Nathan Hernandez
>blocks your path