(…) the entire purpose and selling point of VPNs, which is to encapsulate incoming and outgoing Internet traffic in an encrypted tunnel and to cloak the user’s IP address.
No. That is not the entire point of a VPN. That’s just what a few shady companies are claiming to scam uninformed users into paying for a useless service. The entire point of a VPN is to join a private network (i.e. a network that is not part of the Internet) over the public internet, such as connecting to your company network from home. Hence the name ‘virtual private network’.
There are very little, if any, benefits to using a VPN service to browse the public internet.
that works, but a regular SOCKS proxy should do. for HTTP even a HTTP proxy. many VPN providers offer them too, btw… may help with mitigating this attack vector.
No. That is not the entire point of a VPN. That’s just what a few shady companies are claiming to scam uninformed users into paying for a useless service. The entire point of a VPN is to join a private network (i.e. a network that is not part of the Internet) over the public internet, such as connecting to your company network from home. Hence the name ‘virtual private network’.
There are very little, if any, benefits to using a VPN service to browse the public internet.
Well, for one, using one of those VPN providers has kept DMCA takedown notices away from me or the hosting provider of my seed box. So that is useful.
This is why it’s often best to just avoid the comments completely
I’ve run into issues multiple times where a site doesn’t load until I turn on my VPN with an endpoint in the EU
accessing services that are blocked in your region.
that works, but a regular SOCKS proxy should do. for HTTP even a HTTP proxy. many VPN providers offer them too, btw… may help with mitigating this attack vector.
Come to think of it, why do they even call this use case a VPN? I’d call that a proxy.