https://www.goldenfrog.com/blog/myths-about-vpn-logging-and-anonymity http://www.wipeyourdata.com/other-d...rthvpn-user-arrested-after-police-finds-logs/ Wondered what the experts here think of the above
Bottom line, you never know what logs are being retained, or by whom. Even if VPN providers don't log, their hosting providers and/or ISPs may log. So it's prudent to assume that traffic is logged, and that logs are retained. A single VPN service doesn't provide anything like anonymity. Even a nested chain of three or four VPN services doesn't match Tor. But the risk profiles are different, so they complement each other.
One question about Tor : is the signal encrypted/decrypted at my PC? Or can my ISP see the content (the site(s) I visited) and I'm only anonymous at the destination.
@Joxx - Content is multiply encrypted between your PC and Tor entry guards. A layer of encryption gets removed at the entry guard, another at the middle relay, and the last (except for HTTPS or other end-to-end) at the exit node. Your ISP does see the Tor client negotiating a connection with the Tor network, but there's no user content in that. Your ISP knows what directory servers the client hits, and what entry guards it uses. But that's it.
why do people wish to be totally anonymous on the web. What on earth have they do hide...? If anything using TOR or any other form of anonymity service makes you look more suspicious,especially to any surveillance.
The what on earth have they to hide is the typical question to try and shame people for wanting privacy. I saw a blogger who said any time he hears that he asks the person for all his email passwords so he can peruse their email. Why not if they have nothing to hide. No one has yet to give him their passwords.
Being gay in Saudi Arabia, for example. That's a capital offense. Or expressing displeasure with the Chinese government in the western provinces. Or dissing the king of Thailand. Or ... For me, it's mostly just pro bono work to help support people in such circumstances. For sure. I look suspicious as XXXX much of the time. But I could care less as long as "they" don't identify me. And indeed, it amuses me greatly that "they" may be wasting resources on me.
It's arguably a question asked by people who don't empathize with those living under repressive regimes. And/or people who don't realize how repressive their own regime actually is. And trolls.
There is always going to be some kind of logging, even if it is miniscule in size. There has to be, even for the purposes of diagnostics for networking, data storage etc... How can a data centre survive without conducting checks and storing details... it all comes down to how in-depth and strict the criteria was when the VPN decided to choose "that" data centre. ~Comments removed~
If a person runs a VPN on their real machine and then runs a VM with another VPN, and then starts up the Tor Browser, I would assume that this would make traffic analysis much more difficult.
There are a lot of reasons for various people around the world. And a lot of people are sick and tired of being tracked and having their personal data stored and sold and that sort of thing. So maybe another question might be, "why is it so important for people to spy on citizens and invade their space without their permission"? ...Another reason, too, is that it's kind of fun. Sort of a puzzle to play with.
this, maybe? http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/eu-rules-make-uk-porn-filters-illegal-so-it-thought-1526314 http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/t...ons-uk-porn-filters-are-illegal-34149785.html ah, tories and their so called morals.
GCHQ's "Optic Nerve" program collected images from Yahoo webcam sessions. Apparently some of the analysts were distressed by the prevalence of teenage "exposure". Nothing to hide? We are now entering an era where, apparently, according to Google's Schmidt, all our utterances will likely be algorithmically scanned for "hate speech". Anyone who knows about the perils of false positives will be pretty alarmed at this, and consider that anonymity is a really good idea. From a business point of view, it's my opinion that data protection authorities are negligent in failing to make all B2B communications encrypted, in transit and at rest. In addition, if their directors were fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders, they would also anonomise their communications. For example, it's well known that with mass surveillance and data mining, you can pick up the patterns of communications that occur when there's merger and acquisition activities going on (and that's just with the metadata) - which, rather obviously, you want to be keeping private, because you do have something to hide from at least foreign state actors (they'll tip off their own companies or indulge in a little institutionalised insider dealing). Foreign state actors are inevitably involved given the extent of data sharing between the X-eyes, and spying is principally about economic information.
One time, I asked a lawyer friend whether he encrypted email. He said no, because adversaries couldn't legally use anything that they managed to intercept. That seems naive, given the ease of parallel construction.
Extending that some: Tell that to a victim of credit identity theft! "Bad guys" didn't legally use what they discovered either, but someone still has to clean up the mess it left all over their life. The legality of any of this is meaningless as a defense.
Right. I once had my identity borrowed by an employee of a private mailbox business. But the owner caught it, and sent the relevant mail to me. It was easy to sort out, through "it's not me" letters.
Legality and the rule of law seem to be disposable concepts, and beyond the nominal bad guys, we have shyster lawyers paid out of public money to make extraordinary interpretations of law (in secret of course) to claim that whatever the administration wants is "legal". So, for example, if I wanted redress for intellectual property theft, distributed in an uncontrolled way though the X-eyes, I've got real fun even getting standing, and fighting a court battle against people with limitless funds and the get-out-of-jail national security defence.
