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Simplistic guide: VPN vs proxy

PostPosted: 17 Nov 2015, 10:30
by Tormeron
Greetings fellow friends and guests,

I've decided today to write to you on a subject which many get confused about due to it's small technical differences.

What is a proxy or vpn?

To put it in simplest terms, a proxy or vpn is a server on the internet which allows traffic to be rerouted through itself.

What then is the difference?

While both allow to reroute traffic proxies mostly are just for http traffic (port 80, Web surfing) and not necessarily encrypted, While this may be good if you wish to surf a website which is blocked in your country, It does not give you complete anonymity on the web.

You do have a lot of free proxies around the web, some are secure, some are logged, and basically if you go and use a free proxy, you better use it for non personal stuff.

A VPN on the other side has two functions:
1. As it's long name says "virtual private network", it allows for a person who is not in a network physically to remotely connect to it and use the place's internal network.
2. Some vpn servers have changed their purpose into allowing encrypted connections to be rerouted through them, it means that they allow for the same function as a proxy allows, except they reroute all your internet traffic through them, meaning your skype also is rerouted through the server.

What do I need?
As I wrote before, if the whole purpose you have for it is surfing geographically locked out videos on Youtube, you should be fine with a proxy.

If you need more than just web surfing then you need a VPN to reroute all that traffic as well.

Important: Not all VPNs are safe for use, some do log all traffic going through them, if you are about to use it to access your bank account, double check whether that specific vpn logs traffic or not.

the Tor project comes to mind when I think of proxies, their whole infrastructure relies on a lot of small proxies, allowing to give it's users web anonymity.

Be safe!