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Comment by hellofunk | Hacker News Reader

Some of these points are partly why I chose to go with a commercial VPN regularly rather than Tor. There is also no change at all in my bandwidth with the VPN, and I can seamlessly use high bandwidth tools like Netflix, streaming audio/video, etc. Maybe Tor has improved lately to allow this kind of behavior easily also?

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Nope. Still an annoying process to stream YouTube, and it still chops. The general vibe of the Tor community is to not use up excess bandwidth unless you have to, because it chokes endpoints and gateways and leaves less room for others. I think a lot of gateways probably run some form of bandwidth limiter, but that's just speculation. It's considered extremely bad taste to do things such as high-volume P2P

I stream musicvideo on youtube via tor all day and if things are too slow I simply use the 'new circuit' button. It works very well.

The problem with these VPNs is that they can log your traffic. Even if they say they don't, what's to stop them?

Moreover, VPNs are juicy targets for surveillance corps since so many do use them to conduct illegal or questionable activities. My personal strategy is to use Tor with a private obfuscating bridge rotated frequently between hosting providers.

Do you mean you use Tor with VPN together?

Not quite, I'm referring to https://www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports.html

My favorites are obfs4 and StegoTorus, running on a private machine in some "cloud".

For certain kinds of streaming it might be nicer to use a VPN, even though, like others already pointed out it might still be used invade your privacy.

Not just that your provider might just log your actions, but VPNs are usually not trying to avoid various passive attacks, simply because VPNs are there to provide an encrypted connection, nothing more.

For ISPs (of the VPN) and others it's rather simple to look at where and how you enter and therefor an attack where people look at the (amount of) traffic that goes there, what the server on the VPN side requests. It's not impossible with Tor, but way, way harder.

In addition to VPNs usually being centralized and therefor easier to attack in such a manner your VPN also is likely to have fewer users than Tor, so it's way easier to look at it and draw conclusions.

Also VPNs tend to be better suited for (semi)targeted attacks.

Watching HTML5 video on Tor is fine, though I haven't tried a 2 hour movie in high resolution. The main challenge is that if you want to preserve many security benefits of Tor then you can't use Flash.

Tor's performance generally works well enough that I think most users could use it most of the time and make non-Tor usage a special case.

This is my normal mode of operation :) I use it on my phone, desktop, and laptop for pretty much everything.

How is it implemented on your phone? Does it cover all your phone's network usage?

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