what in the world is a vpn?

Benjamín Santana — Thu, 12 Aug 2021 20:53:10 +0000

What?

I'll tell you straight, and without any fancy words, after
this (I hope) you'll understand what a vpn is.

So..., what's a network? A bunch of computers connected with each other
right? nothing spooky, nothing new. For the sake of the argument, let's
say that all these computers are in the same physical place, say a lab,
or a building. These computers are visible to each other, so you can chat,
send files or whatever between them. Each of these computers have an
unique id, otherwise we wouldn't know which computer is which, let's call
this unique id: IP ;). So now every computer in our network has an IP.
And since each computer is in the same building, let's say they are in
a local network.

Now say there's a computer in some other location (physical location),
let's assume that the first lab we talked about was in the UK, and this
other computer is in the US. This computer, let's call it Cliff, wants
to chat, send files and everything with his buddies in the UK, he wants
to be in the same local network. But he is so far away, poor Cliff :(.

What does Cliff do? He uses a vpn!!!

First there must be a server (there can be several, but for the sake of
simplicity let's assume there's only one) that hosts the vpn, let's be
creative and call this server the host. If Cliff want's to do all this
cool things (chat and share files) with his friends in the UK, he will
ask them politely to connect to the host (the vpn server) he just
set up. Now all he has to do is connect to the host.

What happens now?, well, remember this id every computer had? I think we
called it IP. Well now every computer has two of them, the one from
the local network and the one that the host gave to each computer.

Now Cliff can see all the machines connected to the vpn host as if he
were in the UK. Ha lucky Cliff.

That's it, no bells no whistles, that is a vpn.

But Hey! What about all those ads I see from SouthVPN.

(This is a bit more technical sorry :()

Oh yeah, that's right. I almost forgot that, thanks for the reminder.
Well, you see, there are people in this world who want to make money.
Just kidding :).

What these companies are doing is quite creative. So I'll oversimplify
again, but, do you remember the folks from the lab in UK connected
to the VPN? Well, now whenever they surf the internet, the requests they
are making (Say they want to log in to facepad.com) will
first go to the host, and then they'll reach their destiny.

What? And do that helps them in any way?

It depends, this means all the requests they are making first go to
the host (if you already forgot the host is the vpn server), this
means all the web pages they visit, think they are making the request
from the place where the host is. In this case, US.

To put it briefly, all the web pages the folks from UK visit now will
think they're not from the UK, but from the US. (because that is where
the host is)

This also means that their ISP (internet service provider), will not
know what websites they are visiting. All they'll see is them making
connections to some server in the US: the host.

Does this help privacy?

You bet it does, your ISP can sell the info of the websites you visit
legally. Now all they'll sell is you connecting to the host.

Wohoo we are anonymous, that's great! Wait.. are we forgetting something?

Cliff!! He set up the server, he can see the websites we visit. Damn
Cliff I bet this was his plan from the beginning, we should have never
trusted him.

Now he can see the logs from the host and sell them or do whatever
he wants to.

Wait! Are we forgetting about anyone else? The ISP from the host!!
He can also see our logs and sell them. Damn Cliff.

Let's get serious

In the section above, instead of reading Cliff you can read your vpn
provider. This means they can see all the data your ISP used to log.

Can you trust them with that data? Well, that's up to you. There are
VPNs that have a no-logs policy, meaning they don't store anything.
But to be honest, you can't be sure.

Personal Opinion Warning
I'd recommend Mullvad VPN, they are the best I've seen in the privacy
aspect. Why? Go read a review on them. I don't want to make this post
to long.

Do vpn help in privacy in other way?

yes! and I'll talk about it in my next post. Then I'll discuss what
gives you more privacy, self-host a vpn or buying the service from
someone else.

Self-Hosting?

Can I be Cliff and make my own the host. Well glad you ask, I'll
cover that in the next article.

Where did you get this info?

teacher and co-workers. No Google Scholar, so take all this with a
grain of salt. :)

happy coding :)

ben

DEV Community: Benjamín Santana