There's a fair amount of FUD tossed around in sponsored ad reads of a lot of independent creator content these days, so much now that the colloquial use of "VPN" these days for the masses is not "allow me to gain access to a network I control from anywhere" but "help me route my traffic to a specific geolocation".

Half truths are spouted about "securing your connection" and "preventing tracking" are provided, without the supplementary information that device and browser fingerprinting do more to identify you as a user than geolocation does. With HTTPS, traffic is already encrypted, and any DNS-over-HTTPS or TLS provider will also mask where you were headed to, leaving much of the supposed benefits to be mostly snake oil.

If, however, you want to use it to access geofenced content, or you employ an obscurity-in-depth strategy to anonymize your identity, then sure, go ham. But as to why usage has exploded by the masses, a healthy dose of paranoia and influencer marketing.

Can confirm, it seems like every single YouTube channel I've watched in the past 2-3 years has had an ad for 3 or 4 VPN services. Plus, the internet is getting more segmented, when I send links to some US sites to my friends overseas they need a VPN to access it, which wasn't the case like 6-7 years ago.

Somehow my ISP can see what I’m downloading even though I use https etc and has sent nastygrams a few times when they didn’t like what they saw.

SNI isn't encrypted. They can see plaintext domain name of your https requests. Obviously, they can also see the IP you're connecting to. Maybe ECH will be rolled out at some point, and we can stop using SNI.

They knew the filename. May be a vulnerability in an external client app, not sure. Says it encrypts connections but must be leaking somehow.

Are you using torrents or something else?

If you downloaded a file over HTTPS, all they can see is the IP, domain name, and the amount of data transferred on a given connection.

If you're torrenting, you should be aware that a cross-reference between your IP and the files you're transferring is effectively public information.

Oh, how does that work? Sounds like the encrypted connection isn’t?

Trackers will share your IP with anyone who is trying to download the same file. This is more or less require in order for the protocol to work.

People/organizations run bots that pretend to be interested in popular downloads so that they can collect these IPs.

It's not a terrible result tbqh.

99.999% of airport wifi users don't know that their traffic is bridged. So unless WIFI-6 introduced some network segmentation features that I'm not aware of, it's still a good idea for Grandma and Grandpa Jo.

The reason it's ubiquitous on YouTube is because they are gouging the hell out of consumers. Honestly it should be provided by your ISP as a bundled service. Although then it's just Comcast gouging you instead...

there's still ISP domain level blocks (based on SNI) to contend with, even if they can't modify any content. Things such as court banned sites (pirating?), age restricted content, etc.

For me, at least when it comes to Tailscale, it was Tailscale SSH and MagicDNS. I haven't had to touch `sshd` at all, and I get automatic HTTPS certificates for machines connected to my tailnet. Also, it's free.

[1] https://tailscale.com/tailscale-ssh/ [2] https://tailscale.com/kb/1081/magicdns/

I don't do anything sketchy online, but I use a VPN for the same reason I use HTTPS rather than HTTP, ssh rather than telnet, BTC/XMR rather than my credit card (when possible), and LUKS FDE rather than nothing. I value my privacy, and I want to fight the false perception that privacy-enhancing tools are only for shady usage by shady people.

Use a VPN for the same reason you close the stall door in a public restroom.

(I'm not necessarily agreeing with your premise that VPN usage has recently grown; I don't know that to be the case.)

A VPN only makes sense if you trust the VPN provider more than your ISP, if not you're only making things worse.

I apologize for the language, it's needed for the dramatic effect, but who the hell actually trusts their ISP?

I see no reason to trust them less than shady companies selling "privacy"

There're shady companies selling privay and others like mullvad. They don't take your name on sign up and allow for paying with cash or BTC and even Monero.

Even if they'd log your IP and traffic (which they say they don't) they'd know way less about who you are then your ISP.

When I was living in a country that was putting up credible threats of large fines for ISPs reselling my data, I never really saw the need for a VPN.

Honestly my ISP is to incompetent to run anything, DNS, billing, provisioning, you name it. I know because because we used to do consulting for them. I am confident that there is no way that they'd be able to monitor my traffic, they can't even tell if an entire town lose connectivity.

Incompetence finds a way when money is involved. Notice how parking violations are performed with zeal but police can not be bothered for anything else short of an armed robbery.

Mostly because geofencing is getting much more widespread for various legit reasons (security, anti spam, licensing restrictions, etc) and very annoying for end users.

> various legit reasons (security [...])

"Security" is not a legitimate application of geofencing, in my view.

Any attacker can trivially use a VPN to defeat it, yet legitimate users are massively inconvenienced by it. I've had too many accounts (bank and otherwise) locked for the crime of trying to access them while traveling internationally.

Just my 2cents that I wrote about here[0]. It boils down to:

1. Ease of use for non technical folks (my dad in the post)

2. The dangers of having an exposed ssh port (even on non standard ports)

I just don't have the time or compute to constantly tweak my security settings for a publicly exposed port, so the easiest way to solve the problem is to not have the port publicly exposed

---

0: https://blog.imraniqbal.org/tailscale/

It feels like you may be solved a problem that didn't need solving? If you fully disabled password authentication, there's nothing to tweak; you can just ignore the log spam and not block the IP addresses and ignore it and it'll be fine.

> If you fully disabled password authentication

It is not fully disabled, my dads account has a password for sftp.

Its covered more in part 1 (linked at the start of the blog post) but the repeated attempts at ssh'ing into my server actually killed sshd (which is how I found out about it).

The other problem is that this "server" is hosted on a residential connection in my computer room. This is just something I don't want to deal with and using a VPN fixes that since I do not need to deal with it, and its easy enough for my dad to use

For VPN in the Corporate network sense, it's for easy access to your computers. You don't want to have to open ports on your router or hope that whatever world-accessible service you throw out there is secure - instead, Tailscale handles authentication, authorization (if you'd like to set up ACLs), and it handles NAT traversal without any open ports.

I think the parent is talking about consumer VPNs which using VPN protocols to implement a proxy service, providing very little of a private network.

what does "VPN use seems to have exploded in recent years" mean? I mean, what have you observed? "VPN" means lots of different things.

VPN to company is much more popular with businesses because of WFH and Covid.

consumer VPNs to random providers that advertise on podcasts are way up because of different countries having different video streaming service catalogs and because in the US consumer ISPs are increasingly privacy- and reliability-hostile. there's also a big marketing buzz because scaring people over these things was good for signups, so consumer VPN providers chose to advertise a lot.

Tailscale on the other hand is a way to re-create an actually flatly routable Internet, for myself, but with 2023 security levels.

Netflix. Their library varies significantly by country

Vpn hasn’t worked with them for years unless you get lucky for a bit.

True but Netflix is at total war against VPNs. Entire blocks of IPs that these VPNs use are completely blocked.

Privacy and tracking prevention. It can get you access to stuff that's not in your country, depending on the service you're trying to get.

A lot is driven by torrenting. Exposing your real IP will get you sued or banned by your ISP.

Private trackers are the solution to this problem

States attempting to pass age-verification laws, and large streamers trying to fuck over customers by locking their account access to their home IP.

For me the fact is there are really easy to use user interfaces for VPNs now. They are very performant and low latency as well, so they're practical for everyday browsing on the modern web and even for gaming and streaming.

Also, geographical blocks on content such as Netflix and BBC etc

VPNs of the Mullvad type (not them specifically): Mostly marketing to the ignorant, but also people in police states and people who are getting annoying letters about their torrenting.

VPNs of the Tailscale type: Mostly people who self host apps and want them to be available across their devices without opening them up to the internet, or be able to access their NAS from Starbucks.

The VPN market has had considerable growth year-to-year since at least 2009. It's just that in the last few years that growth has added up to big absolute numbers.

Here's how I think about customer segments:

* Those interested in online privacy

* Those interested in circumventing censorship

* Those interested in a secure network channel from their machine to "The Internet", by which I mean secure from their local ISP eavesdropping on them.

* Those interested in circumventing geographical restrictions.

Due to the nature of the Internet and how its most important protocol (IP) works, changing your IP address is a necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, step in protecting your privacy online. This fact says something about the long term relevance of VPNs, Tor, and similar technologies.

Source: I'm one of the co-founders of Mullvad VPN.

In the age of wifi the man in the middle included someone sitting in the same coffee shop as you. ISPs turning into jerks came on the heels of that. Depending on where you got your news, it might have seemed like you heard about ISPs and hackers around the same time, but from my perspective the ISPs learned how to be bad from security experts explaining how much mischief a person could get up to and deciding that sounded like a swell idea.

> ISPs turning into jerks came on the heels of that.

> ISPs learned how to be bad from security experts explaining how much mischief a person could get up to and deciding that sounded like a swell idea

Telecommunications companies have played a central role in government surveillance schemes for at least 50 years, well before the advent of WiFi. ECHELON was fairly extensively reported on in the late 90's.

> it might have seemed like you heard about ISPs and hackers around the same time

I connected to the Internet around 1993, but my interest in computer security didn't start until around 1996. I'm not sure if that qualifies.

Yeah I wasn't talking about surveillance, I was talking about adulterating internet traffic.

From the surveillance standpoint, we now have devices we take with us and leave unattended. We are all waiting for a proverbial woodpecker to destroy civilization.

Generally it's to guard against ISP spying. In the case of your personal devices that you walk around with at work, the "ISP" is "your employer". Employer IT pride themselves on being far more nosy than your run-of-the-mill ISP.

* fud from youtube sponsorships

* circumvention of geoblocking

I use a VPN anytime I leave my house (although it's not a commercial "service"), because network-based telemetry is on the rise and companies that offer free WiFi as well as our telcos are basically out to get us. See https://www.wired.com/story/verizon-user-privacy-settings/ as one example.

I don't want to "opt-out" and hope companies actually follow their policies, or assume their policies are sufficient when I "opt-out". So I ensure all of my network traffic is routed through my home no matter where I'm at or which device I'm using, and then from my home I ensure all my network traffic is routed through a business-grade connection that is offered under standard contract terms that preclude the type of fuckery that every ISP in America seems to think is acceptable to do to consumers.

That's why I use a VPN, and I'm pretty sure a lot of people who use a commercial VPN service do it for very similar reasons and don't have the technical know-how or wherewithal to set something like I have up for themselves.

I think a primary reason is "more privacy" (Mainstream VPNs actually reduce privacy) closely followed by bypassing regional restrictions (like blackouts during sports games, using Pornhub in Utah or Alabama, or looking up clinics that perform abortions in Texas) followed by bypassing ISP restrictions.

>Mainstream VPNs actually reduce privacy

They help to mitigate IP based tracking.

Aside from "Privacy VPN" usage, there are other reasons to have VPN server (including tailscaled) at home. Some home network connection doesn't offer public IPv4. People want to avoid exposing any port to the internet.