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Comment by gentleman11 | Hacker News Reader

> All the user’s requests are then sent through two separate internet relays. The first assigns the user an anonymous IP address that maps to their region but not their actual location. The second decrypts the web address they want to visit and forwards them to their destination. This separation of information protects the user’s privacy because no single entity can identify both who a user is and which sites they visit.

This sounds a little like a VPN but also like tor. I don’t really understand what it’s saying

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We are all guessing at how it works, but if I were to try to translate that description I would guess that the first hop is used to anonymize the source address and it relays with an address that provides a region or country (so things like web site language or geo restrictions continue to work) but that the actual destination is encrypted to a key held by the second hop. The second hop passes along the generic IP address as the source, decodes the destination, and makes the connection. Address anonymizer does not know the destination, exit node does not know the source and only sees a regional pool IP address.

At least for me geo detection is all over the place. Google thinks I'm in Bulgaria, rest of the ip2geo sites think I'm in SF.

I'm Turkey. You can actually pick if you want a close server or not but no country selection.

It also seems to use CloudFlare's network.

>It also seems to use CloudFlare's network.

So basically Cloudflare Warp+?

It's a 2-hop TOR.

Tor fundamentally doesn’t work unless it’s 3 hops though, or am I mistaken? The anonymity comes from the middle-man node? That’s why I said it seems a bit like a VPN because you have to trust a server to not log your actions

I do not think Tor necessarily requires 3 hops. See https://tor.stackexchange.com/a/497. It's just that 3 hops provide significant incremental benefit over 2 hops.

I don't think there is anything magic about three hops. You need at least two so that no single node knows both the source and destination. With a third node you are able to isolate the first and last hop from each other to make it more difficult for collusion, but needing a third hop is probably outside the threat model for most people. With Tor what is usually more important is making sure the nodes span different providers and jurisdictions.

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