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earth-ruins:
pizzaalle:
xdvisyrx:
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wait, what about tor?
TOR is not a VPN. Both of them do useful things, and there is some overlap, but they work in different, complementary ways. Pairing them up makes for some very powerful security, so If you’re truly concerned about having your internet activity monitored, it’s best to use both.
TOR bounces your traffic around the internet so that if someone is trying to observe your activity, it becomes more difficult to trace where it’s originating from or where it’s going–including what sites you might be visiting, what you’re downloading or uploading and who you’re talking to. This provides you with more security because they can’t prove the traffic is yours. But TOR is not infallible. It works on the principle of the anonymity of crowds. If you’re in an area where not many people use TOR, then snoopers will be able to figure out it’s you just from process of elimination.
Important note: TOR is free, and by using it even if you don’t need it for anything, you are helping to protect your fellow citizens and activists! (It can slow down your internet traffic considerably, so you wouldn’t want to use it all the time, but even if you just fire it up periodically, it can be a big help.)
A VPN encrypts your traffic, meaning that someone trying to observe your activity can’t read your data. It can also cloak origin, in a different way than TOR does. One of the things a VPN does is hide your IP address with a different one so that the traffic appears to be coming from a different location entirely. VPNs also monitor their traffic so that if someone were to attempt to tamper with a message you had sent, it could be detected. Most private citizens face minimal threat of this sort of tampering, but if you were a celebrity or journalist, for example, it might be very valuable.
VPN stands for ‘virtual private network.’ What it does is, it patches your computer into a LAN network from a distance, so that your activity appears to be originating from and part of that network. You also enjoy whatever other resources and security measures that particular network has set up. Some businesses provide VPN access to employees, for example, so that when they’re working outside the office, they can still access network storage drives or expensive software the business has licensed for employee use. Financial institutions also use them to protect the security of sensitive information like credit card numbers.
Now, you don’t want to use a professional VPN for personal stuff, because companies usually log their data and might have questions for you about what you’re doing with their network in your personal time. But unfortunately a subscription to a personal VPN is usually not free. You can probably expect to spend somewhere between $50 to $100 a year for a good service, depending on the service you sign up with–but the thing about VPNs is that going cheap often means you’d be better off not spending your money at all, because a half-assed VPN may leave loopholes that leave you vulnerable.
Using the two together means you have a cloaked IP, data encrypted before it ever leaves your computer no matter how you’re accessing the internet, transmission monitoring to detect tampering, AND your data is being bounced all over creation to make it even harder to trace.
Both TOR and VPNs are pretty easy to use. Once they’re set up, all you have to do is log in to activate them. BUT as a note, if you want to set these up, you need to do some reading because there are some internet behaviors YOU will need to change in order to make sure you don’t give yourself away.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2ku6ExE