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Comment by neilalexander | Hacker News Reader

The website is quite dreadful, excessively verbose in some places and totally lacking in others. It took me quite a few clicks just to learn that this is effectively virtual machines with Tor but still didn't find much at-a-glance information on what the user experience is actually like. Does anyone have any experience with this?

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You run two VMs in VirtualBox. One is a Tor gateway, the other is a workstation. Both run Whonix and are preconfigured for this. A virtual network between them is set up so that the workstation can only access the Internet via the Tor gateway VM, so it's impossible for connections to "leak" directly to the Internet without going over Tor. The gateway VM runs in the background and you run a regular browser in the workstation VM.

https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Whonix-Gateway

https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Whonix-Workstation

> Does anyone have any experience with this?

Only through Qubes, but I do most of my web access in a disposable (ephemeral) Whonix VM in Qubes, and it does exactly what it says on the box.

this imho is the way to use it. it is so easy once u get it set up. for me it was one of the simplest ways i found to use such systems.

I thought you might be exaggerating a little bit, but... oh my, this website is quite terrible.

Maybe the desktop site is terrible, I didn't check, but the mobile one is fine. Nothing to call home about, just a site like a million of other sites, describing a product and providing download links. They made an uncommon effort to secure themselves with long long long legal documents.

OP here.

I agree with you. Web design doesn't seem to be the strength of the Whonix team.. and got worse over time.

Basically, you download a Virtualbox image, import it and then have a hardened Debian VM with Xfce UI & some privacy-friendly apps like Tor browser & a crypto wallet. The internet is slow (because of Tor) & tcp-only, but sufficient for most things. Virtualbox guest extensions are included and most things work out-of-the-box.

> See DOS.

> See DOS run.

> Run_DOS_Run!

> It took me quite a few clicks just to learn that this is effectively virtual machines with Tor

Click "What Is Whonix?", scroll down, "Whonix ™ consists of two VMs: the Whonix-Gateway ™ and the Whonix-Workstation ™. The former runs Tor processes and acts as a gateway, while the latter runs user applications on a completely isolated network."

> Does anyone have any experience with this?

Whonix (KVM) is like running Debian with XFCE, but no matter what you do, your real IP address will never leak, at any point.

Well, unless you absentmindedly type in your mail address, name or any other real credentials.

That's not an IP leak.

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