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Comment by ripdog | Hacker News Reader

Why are you using a VPN? I think the main reason (now that Netflix et al block all VPN IPs) is generally that you gain privacy from your traffic being mixed in with hundreds/thousands of other people's originating from a single IP. With running your own VPN server, your IP is trivially tracable back to you as an individual. So now what do you get - encrypting vs. your ISP and/or country hopping (with no streaming except amazon)?

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Not OP, but as the name suggests, a VPN is a virtual private network: you can use it to create a private subnet from where you can securely access your other computers/resources, even from a remote location.

For instance, at work we are mostly remote, and use a VPN (OpenVPN here) to access the local network at the office with our on-premise build servers, and it also allows developers to work together sometimes (one running a debugging server on their dev laptop, another debugging the client from their own laptop as if they were sharing a local network, when actually they are hundreds of miles apart)

Thanks, but I don't need the wikipedia summary of a VPN.

It didn't sound ad all like the OP was using his VPN to dial into work. He was dialing into a purpose-build VM which wasn't stated to do anything else - just tunneling his traffic for some unknown reason.

Op mentioned they use it while traveling. I use a VPN for, what are likely, similar reasons: I don’t trust the hotel networks or I want to access US region locked services while abroad.

Thanks for posting this - I was feeling stupid because I couldn't understand the same thing.

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