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Comment by hifier | Hacker News Reader

If you are running this from your own AWS account doesn't it have the problem of not anonymizing the traffic - since it can all be tied to your identity?

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A VPN isn't always about anonymity. For instance: encrypting traffic in a coffee shop where any and all of your traffic can be sniffed.

Another popular use-case is streaming (paid-for/ad-supported) content from a different region of the globe that is blacked out in your region (and the rights-holders wonder why people still torrent).

> where any and all of your traffic can be sniffed

*all non-SSL traffic, no?

Even when you're using SSL/TLS the traffic can still be seen on the network. The difference is that a sniffer will see cipher text rather than plain text.

It's more like all non-HSTS traffic, unless you're paying extremely close attention. Otherwise a man in the middle attacker can just pretend the server doesn't support HTTPS and serve the page via HTTP.

And even when you're using HTTPS you're still leaking DNS queries etc.

If you work with AWS infrastructure in a VPC, sometimes it makes sense to use a VPN to access/manage VPC instances that don't have a public IP (e.g., app servers behind an ELB). Of course, one could also just tunnel through an exposed SSH server in the VPC, but a VPN server can offer a little more convenience and flexibility.

Wont pretty much all VPNs have this same problem? If you need anonymity, you want something like tor.

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