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Comment by ohaideredevs | Hacker News Reader

Can you recommend some sort of introduction/book to VPNs? I get the idea, I have read the wikipedia page, but my understanding boils down to "one server encrypts and sends small packets, the other decrypts". The packets still go through the public internet / your ISP, but they are encrypted?

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You can consider a VPN service as sitting between you and any server or site you access. The traffic still has to go through your ISP and the public Internet (for this scenario). The VPN service does encrypt the traffic from your device to the VPN server (and back). This allows you to hide your browsing history from your ISP and anyone snooping on your ISP. They’d just see encrypted packets going to the VPN servers.

But the traffic from the VPN server to the site/server you want to reach may or may not be encrypted, depending on whether it would or would not be encrypted if you were to access it directly.

As far as the end site/server is concerned, it gets requests from the VPN server, and so it cannot (easily) know that the request is really coming from your device’s IP address. This is how circumventing geographic restrictions works. If you want to access, say Netflix US, you’d use a VPN server with a US IP address, while you may be in some other country altogether. There are content providers who detect VPN usage and try to block them.

P.S.: There’s a lot of simplification in the above descriptions.

Edit: This page [1] has a good explanation on VPNs.

[1]: https://thebestvpn.com/what-is-vpn-beginners-guide/

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