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Comment by dastx | Hacker News Reader

But the client is all that matters. If the client doesn't send them your IP address, there is no way for them to track you in any way, shape or form. Their servers would implode if they tried. It's impossible. Your system is private. Now be quiet and keep paying them.

In case it needs to be said, that's all sarcasm.

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If your IP was never sent wouldn't it be impossible for them to send you back the information you requested?

edit :: I think I replied to comment that has been edited between when I hit "reply" and when my comment appeared.

Yes. This is why IP spoofing is useless for most anything two-way.

Blockchain could probably solve that problem..

You is correct, he was being sarcastic I guess

There's an easy technical solution to that, you can just use a VPN service to hide your IP.... when you connect to your VPN service.

It's VPN's all the way down...

I'm mostly joking, but if you purchase the second VPN anonymously (gift card paid with cash, bitcoin, etc) this would do a pretty good job of ensuring your anonymity against most casual snooping. It's not going to hide you from the FBI, but it would prevent either VPN provider from tying your browsing activity back to you (unless they cooperate with each other).

If only there was some kind of service where everyone routed each others traffic like a VPN with multiple hops by wrapping every message in layers of encryption like on onion.

If it doesn't exist yet, we create this. I vote to call it TOR.

Admittedly, I haven't used TOR in a long time, but last time I used it, it didn't work well for video, and I assumed most people using VPN's do it to hide their porn habits.

I used to use a VPN to hide my browsing activity from my ISP (Comcast), but now I have an ISP that I trust more, so pretty much only use VPN on public Wifi to help protect my traffic.

Surely with the right kind of encryption you can just read the client code and not need to "trust" the server?

Not really. The server is a termination point for the crypto.

No matter what the client code says / does, they decrypt once you hit their server, the code in the client matters very little. Don't forget, this isn't end-to-end encryption, a la Signal.

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