this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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Privacy
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VPNs are used for malicious purposes. After all if a VPN keeps no logs, doesn't track usage, and lets one pay with alternate currency, why wouldn't someone use one if they were wanting to commit a crime?
For any service it's a battle between avoiding blocking actual users, and keeping out the bots and malicious users.
A VPN with a paid dedicated IP may help, or a DIY VPN hosted on a VPS somewhere, but I'd argue it's not really any better than just using your ISP at that point since all your traffic comes from your own unique VPN IP.
But setting up a VPN on a VPS is not really going to do much for privacy is it? It wouldn't take much to work out who is renting the VPS and the VPS has no incentive to hold back any info if a they were issued a search warrant.
Feels like it becoming more and more challenging living on the Internet without leaving breadcrumbs all over the place.
TOR is just slightly harder to keep up on as far as being listed on the same tables as commercial VPN hosts because it's so dynamic. Anyone can spin up a node and be a relay or, for the brave/foolish, an exit node in a few minutes.
Privacy largely comes from a plausible deniability in that the person asking for a site could be the originator or they could just be relaying a request for the originator. Freenet, or now called hypha net is similar that way.
My perspective on internet privacy has long been that while I don't expect to be a ghost, I can make the picture as muddy as I can to make whatever profile they gather be as useless as possible.
Actually Tor relays and exits are published, public knowledge and you will be on every list that cares about listing those within hours of spinning up a relay or exit.
Interesting, I get a couple feeds that reference them but thought those where all gathered info rather than self published.
It's how Tor works. You have to publish your relay's address or else other relays can't find you. You can host a private/hidden guard node, but not an exit or relay.