Since services like tor exist and that are free and open source, and why do you think people still fall for the VPN ads
- There aren’t any ads for Tor, while there are a lot of VPN services competing for attention and paying affiliates.
- The Tor concept is weird and complicated : nodes, dark web, onion addresses…
- Tor is associated with criminal activity.
- Quite a number of sites don’t work well (or at all) with Tor.
- Tor is slower.
- The Tor community has that geeky and high-priests-of-Linux whiff which discourages a lot of normal people.
- Tor is not appropriate for BitTorrent.
Some people actually need VPNs and not TOR. VPNs and TOR do different things. If speed matters at all to you, you should probably use a VPN rather than TOR.
VPN ads are deceptive on purpose, they wouldn’t do that if it wasn’t successful. People believe what they hear, and if you don’t research it further then you don’t know any better. As for Tor vs VPN, yes they both hide your IP, but they’re not comparable, they are two very very different services that serve two very very different purposes.
Careful shilling, VPN companies are controlled opposition, they astroturf into the privacy community to convince those who don’t know better. They literally sell a worse, paid version of proper anonymity networks, so of course they need to use malicious marketing and scare tactics before promising their “one-click solution” to protect you.
Does TOR allow selecting a specific location for VPN?
Does tor in Android allow uploading files to any website? No, you need a standard browser for that.
Tor and VPN are different tools with different purposes.
As for why people get scammed by VPN providers: marketing. This is nothing special to VPNs even though VPNs are a prime example, there are lots of companies that make up problems to sell their products. Ads are full of lies and laws against false advertising are either not effective or not enforced.
The slowness of Tor is probably the only reason. And the best reason.
I am still going through the documentation I am fairly new to tor TBH. Thanks for your answer
Tor has nothing todo with the browser. Yeah there is the tor browser from the people that maintain tor, but that’s not “tor” as the onion network. These are, more or less, two different types of software even if they play together.
The slowness is mostly due to a weird entry node.
Theoretically you can say you want an entry node which is fast (look on metrics) and also select a country as exit node. Through Tor you can easily get 20-30Mbit/s in Europe. However this clearly will make you less anonymous and isn’t good for every thread model, it basically can be seen as regular VPN then without the additional benefits of Tor.
I know. Still do you know a way to access onions from clearnet?
You can only access onion sites by using the Tor network.
No because it’s by design that onion addresses aren’t available via clearnet. You have to understand that tor is just the technology and the network and tor browser is just a modified version of Firefox. You can host a tor proxy yourself and point your browser at it with ease. You won’t get most if the mitigations that the tor browser has but now you are using “a normal browser”.