Can someone please explain the differences, and what they are good for, in layman’s terms. I’m having a hard time understanding this.
I heard it said once that basically Tor hides your internet activity, while a VPN hides your identity/ IP address. Is this correct?
P.s… from my very basic understanding, I’m kind of wondering why a person would use a proxy over a vpn at all. Don’t they do the same thing kind of?
TOR is effectively a special type of VPN with it’s own quirks, such as routing all traffic through a minimum of 3 intermediate nodes before being handed off to the client/destination.
VPN is literally just an encrypted tunnel. That’s it, the tunnel happens to come out on a server located elsewhere.
Proxies download data for its clients and cache it locally so if someone else requested the exact same data it wouldn’t go and download it again. No encryption is necessarily implied with a proxy. In theory if someone was packet sniffing the data between you and the proxy they could see everything. The solution to that is use a VPN to connect to the proxy.
Tor is basically like a series of VPN’s combined with other extensive security measures. VPN’s let you hide your real IP and location via routing through the VPN’s server. Proxies is just an intermediary server between your PC and the internet, basically just a worst version of a VPN when it comes to practical home-user security.