Silk Road forums

Discussion => Newbie discussion => Topic started by: phantomoto on August 04, 2013, 11:53 am

Title: What's VPN?
Post by: phantomoto on August 04, 2013, 11:53 am
Thanks
Title: Re: What's VPN?
Post by: DaveDoe on August 04, 2013, 12:06 pm
Virtual Private Network

Its software that encrypts all of your outgoing traffic and sends it to a private network, it is then decrypted and sent out as normal traffic but from the VPNs network. Incoming traffic gets sent back to the VPN and routed to you, hopefully without revealing your ip or anything like that. The advantage of a VPN is if your traffic is being watched thenall they can see is a strongly encrypted stream of data to the VPN.
Title: Re: What's VPN?
Post by: phantomoto on August 04, 2013, 12:13 pm
Thank you I still pretty new at all this How do I use VPN how do I get it ?can you use it with Tails ?
Title: Re: What's VPN?
Post by: DaveDoe on August 04, 2013, 12:20 pm
if you are using tor stacking a VPN on top of it actually makes you less anonymous. Tor is sorta like a giant distributed peer to peer VPN. Most people just use VPNs to download movies, music, ect with torrent without getting sued by rightsholders.
Title: Re: What's VPN?
Post by: upthera on August 04, 2013, 12:55 pm
 don't bother with a VPN for this kind of stuff.  not only will it not help it will most likely hurt and is not needed.   Tails makes TOR and PGP point and click simple, maybe too simple, but it helps remove much of the mystery and small mistakes in config files and settings that can lead to complete loss of anonymity.  edit:  VPN's have a place and use but not really the right tool for here.  Not for 99.99% of situations.  Tails used properly everytime with JS disabled and a strong Passphrase for your persistent directory, and not customizing it with plug-ins, fonts, and colours is your best bet for turn-key anonymity. Not perfect but it's what we have.  stay safe

EDIT:  ^^^ what dave said. 
Title: Re: What's VPN?
Post by: phantomoto on August 04, 2013, 12:55 pm
Thanks again