Howdy Comrades! I spent the morning working with the new Tor VPN that’s still in beta testing on the play store. However, I could not get it above 5 Mbps. I get 100 MBPS split tunneling VPN on Mullvad. I tried the built in bridges, personal bridges it gives you, no bridges and yeah. Nothing helped. Only 5 Mbps with 200 ping.
Tor is not a VPN, so something calling itself “Tor VPN” is ringing alarm bells. Is it official? Who developed it?
edit: Yes, it’s official - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/vpn/
I was confused since I didn’t understand the difference between it and Orbot, and misunderstood its name.
it’s official.
This is standard for tor, you have to jump through several nodes to get to whatever server you are accessing. There isn’t that many end points and many of them are controlled by feds which mean your data has to also pass through monitoring software which is essentially a slow software router to bottleneck everyone’s traffic. However with tor you get pretty close to real anonymity with your connection, however using Tor as a VPN completely defeats this purpose because all your software and stuff is going to be pinging servers of companies and leaking your personally identifiable information.
Even with just using a browser in a sandbox, it’s hard to actually stay anonymous on Tor because if your browser leaks any information or runs any compromised script which can fingerprint your machine, you lost your anonymity. The only real anonymity you can get for the most part is not using the Internet for stuff that you don’t want to be traced back to you. For hacking type stuff, you could try proxying behind several machines with memory only programs that delete themselves after you finished, while carefully controlling each and every packet being sent to make sure it’s completely anonymous. You can almost guarantee that some corporation some where research’s exploits in tor and common computer hardware to dox you to governments and criminal groups. I wouldn’t put anything on the internet you don’t want the governments, corporations and criminal mafias and cartels of the world knowing.
Remember Tor was created by the D.O.D, just like the in internet was created by Darpa and Google was seeded by the CIAs venture capital firm. The technology and plans for mass surveillance were already being established in the 70s and 80s, and Google was created expressly for the purpose of facilitating mass surveillance which is why they were the first company to destroy the internet.
Tor not being the solution to other problems in the space doesnt mean its not great at what it does
Not disagreeing with almost anything you actaully said though. Just dont want people who are reducing the amount of survelince and censorship to feel like its worthless. Tor is better than any comercial vpns imho for its goal, but you 100% that network traffic along isnt everything.
Tha m you for taking the time to write all of this for is! It was very helpful and appreciated.
Yeah, I mean, that’s just TOR. That’s why it’s annoying when people say “just use TOR”. It’s nearly useless unless you TRULY need the highest levels of privacy.
It’s nearly useless unless you TRULY need the highest levels of privacy.
Absolutely not. My main adversary is simply commercial surveillance capitalism tracking and I daily drive Tor Browser. Most of the time, it’s fast enough for my browsing and video watching.
That’s why it’s annoying when people say “just use TOR”
I’m more annoyed when such people treat it as a panacea. See: https://medium.com/@thegrugq/tor-and-its-discontents-ef5164845908
What’s a panacea? It sound delicious.
That’s normal. What could you possibly be doing over tor that five million bits per second isn’t fast enough?
Unrelated: does split tunneling reduce VPN speed?
No. It doesn’t affect the VPN itself, it only controls which traffic uses the VPN and which goes direct to the Internet. If anything it’ll seem faster since not all the traffic uses the VPN.
