Tell me about VPNs

[evil_ash_xero]

I'm interested in protecting my privacy more. Do these VPNs really work?

What are the best ones? Are there good free ones? Is it a program?

Thanks.

[rancor]

Depends on what you're trying to do, but generally I prefer to use TOR. VPNs usually cost money, whereas TOR is free and easy. I run a TOR exit node here at my house on a spare PC I have.

[evil_ash_xero]

What I'm trying to do is hide P2P and Torrent activity.

[Op Intensify]

You know, it's questionable how much privacy these services really offer. Plenty of people have been caught doing illegal crap and traced to an address while running through TOR or other sophisticated proxies.

Use Peerblock if you're trying to hide torrents. It's a pain to configure correctly because you'll often end up blocking the IPs you're trying to access, but it works.

[shmuppyLove]

You mean "proxies", not VPNs.

[rancor]

Just get a usenet subscription then. Giganews is awesome.

[evil_ash_xero]

That's awfully expensive. Would that TOR work for me at all?

I do use PeerBlock.

EDIT: I read that torrents over TOR is a bad idea.

So, TOR is good for internet browsing?

Is PeerBlock the only way to hide your IP on Emule? What's good for Torrents?

[rancor]

TOR is awful for high-bandwidth usage. It's pretty much only good for web browsing, chatting, or other low latency usage.
Giganews isn't the cheapest, only the best with the highest retention rate and servers around the globe. I think you ought to look into Usenet a bit more.

supernews is a good mid-level provider.
newshosting is the cheapest at $10 a month.

[evil_ash_xero]

Yeah, I tried TOR out. You can't even use Flash or Java.

I'll look into Usenet some more. Thanks.

[brentsg]

Ahh man, Usenet. I miss the playing with the oldschool stuff.

[Ex-Cyber]

Yeah, I tried TOR out. You can't even use Flash or Java.

That's not really a limitation of Tor, it's a limitation of Firefox's plugin interface. There's no way to force plugins to respect the browser proxy settings, so you basically have 3 options:

1) disable plugins,

2) enable plugins, likely wrecking any semblance of anonymity as plugins gain the ability to leak Tor-browsing-related info through your regular IP address, or

3) run the browser+plugins on a system that tunnels all traffic through Tor and contains no identifying information (private IP address, totally generic username/hostname/domainname, etc.)