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Comment by ohthehugemanate | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak for weird jurisdictions, but I use privateinternetaccess myself. I haven't tried it for torrents actually, I should give that a shot. I use it for

* getting around arbitrary region restrictions (that use case is rapidly disappearing)

* protecting myself against snoopers when on public WiFi. I'm very mobile, and often work from cafe/hotel/airport WiFi. They're mostly in the clear, but I VPN even over encrypted WiFi because of the below.

* I don't like ISPs selling my information. The service i use is fast enough that I can have it always on, without a noticeable speed loss... So I do. If my ISP wants to sell my browsing habits, they can buy them from me.

Now that you mention it, I'll totally try torrenting something. Curious to know how it performs!

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PIA actually performs rather nice with bittorrent. It is slower than a bare connection from your ISP of course, but fast enough for most purposes.

I do agree that hiding bandwidth and source is reasonable use-case, but then you don't really need to know about service jurisdiction, logging policies, activism, etc. So I just seriously wonder why anyone who actually care about real privacy and logging would use public services.

For people who care about real privacy, VPNs are useful to hide Tor use from ISPs. You use a nested chain of maybe three or four VPN services, and then hit Tor. Let's say that you were using targeted onion services while the CMU jerks were pwning Tor users. Instead of your ISP-assigned IP, the FBI would just know a VPN exit IP. And they'd need to successively subpoena three or four providers in order to get your ISP-assigned IP.

So you're the guy they are talking about on TV who has "bounced through 7 proxies" ;)

That's a Snowden reference, no?

But yes, seven hops is about the minimum for any prudently private person, as I see it.

But for true overkill, see https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/onion-ssh-hosts-for-logi...

It's not that hard to hit 30 hops, alternating VPNs and Tor onion services.

Nah not Snowden, it was just a joke because in TV shows whenever there is some kind of computer crime the technical specialists in the show (black hats turned white, etc.) talk about how the criminal is untraceable because they were hidden behind 7 proxies or such. Not saying you are a criminal it just made me smile/chuckle when you mentioned routing Tor over VPN which is also going through another VPN which in turn is on Tor, etc.

Thanks. I found this: http://kxan.com/2014/03/10/congressman-upset-with-edward-sno... And wondered why that was needed, given his situation. But now I see this: http://www.dailydot.com/technology/snowden-sxsw-seven-proxie...

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/good-luck-im-behind-7-proxies

Wow, that's a comprehensive guide indeed. Thanks for sharing

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