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Ask HN: Why do you use a VPN?

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Re: Ask HN: Why do you use a VPN?

#81

Post by throwoutway »

anderiv wrote: post #5

The term “VPN” has become a bit overloaded. It can mean, among other things: 1) a corporate VPN you connect to in order to gain access to corporate resources. Cisco AnyConnect, OpenVPN, IPsec/L2TP are examples of this type. 2) An overlay network that allows seamless (and secure) access to systems on disparate networks. Wireguard (and thus Tailscale), ZeroTier are examples of this type. 3) A way for individuals to obs…

The only thing left outside HTTP that the average person must worry for is unencrypted DNS requests .. but progress is being made there

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use a VPN?

#82

Post by sacrosanct »

Why? A few reasons:

- Spoofing geolocation to watch geo-locked content like BBC iPlayer (You need a UK IP for this)

- Torrenting. I don’t want to get scare letters from my ISP, so I use a VPN. I find Wireguard to be the fastest in this case.

- Protecting my network traffic on shady public Wi-Fi. Some public Wi-Fi hotspots could be malicious and could be spying or tampering with your connection.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use a VPN?

#83

Post by alexkm »

1. Sanctions. If person's country is under restrictions from the rest of the world, they need to spoof their location to be able to pay for various services.

2. Censorship.

3. An overlay network. Not really possible with most traditional commercial VPN services, but it will allow access to home devices and remote servers seamlessly.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use a VPN?

#84

Post by wutbrodo »

r0m4n0 wrote: post #56

I was poking around a government website one day, noticed a security issue, later showed someone that vulnerability I found, this person proceeded to poke around with the website for hours (unbeknown to me) without causing any harm. A few weeks later I had the somewhat local police take a lot of my belongings and charge me with a multi felony crime. I had to pay an attorney 10s of thousands of dollars to basically ha…

This was my first thought when reading OP's post. A big chunk of VPN usage is almost by definition for "nefarious" purposes. But the pt is that trusting government to reliably and morally define "nefarious" for you is incredibly foolish.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use a VPN?

#85

Post by wutbrodo »

docdeek wrote: post #60
wutbrodo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or, if I want to watch Russian State controlled news, why does my government get to block it? Woah, is this a real example? Where do you live?

Not OP but, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian state-backed media in France has been blocked/blacklisted. RT had three (or four?) different channels on TV here (English, French, Spanish, and Arabic I think) and they all have been disconnected.

Wow, that's wild. I'm aware that speech norms are very different in Europe vs the US. Without making any normative claims about which one is better, it's just very alien to me.
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