Comment by Matt3o12_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Matt3o12_ | Hacker News Reader

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I can't agree with many facts in that article:

> "[VPNs are] used by around 20 per cent of European internet users they encrypt users’"

I think it is more like 2%. I don't know anyone but me who uses a VPN. I'd even say that if I picked 100 people I know, less then 20% know what a VPN is.

Furthermore, the article makes IPv6 sound bad. If I didn't know what IPv6 and VPNs are, I might think it IPv6 is bad, too. I'm also interested in knowing which VPN softwares they tested. While I'm certain that old VPN Softwares leak IPv6 IPs, I can't say that for all VPN softwares I use: OpenVPN (on Linux and Tunnelblick on Mac) and Mac's built-in VPN software (which supports L2TP over IPsec and PPTP). It is really a shame, though, that my VPN provider does not support IPv6, yet.

The only thing that really leaks my real IP is WebRTC. Thanks to WebRTC, everyone can see my real IP address and I can't disable in google chrome. If you want to check what information your VPN is leaking, checkout: https://ipleak.net/

> I'd even say that if I picked 100 people I know, less then 20% know what a VPN is.

I think you significantly underestimate VPN usage. Many jobs, including large public service employers, require connection to a VPN.

That's to access corporate resources, the article was specifically talking about general purpose VPN providers which people use to avoid various restrictions.

So yeah the chance that 20% of internet users in the EU use some sort of a privacy oriented VPN service is nill.

IPv6 has always had many issues, it's entire auto discovery mechanism is a big big security gap.

See http://www.statista.com/statistics/301212/vpn-proxy-usage-ag... and http://digiday.com/publishers/vpn-hide-ip-address-distort-an...

Be surprised. http://digiday.com/publishers/vpn-hide-ip-address-distort-an... http://www.statista.com/statistics/301212/vpn-proxy-usage-ag...

The second article fails to mention the country of origin. It wouldn't surprise me if more then 20% percent of Chinese use a VPN, however, but I still don't think many in Europe use it because we don't have censorship. In some countries, a few YouTube videos (that contain copyrighted music) are blocked, however, people don't use a proxy to watch them. They have a browser plug in that uses a proxy to load the blocked videos (and only the blocked ones). You can't really say that someone is hiding their IP if the only use a proxy to watch a YouTube video without really knowing nor explicitly selecting one.

The first one does, though, and many European countries are above 20% there. I think that given that data, it's not unreasonable to accept that 20% of Europeans overall who use the internet use a vpn, especially when that is explicitly claimed elsewhere (in OP).

As for your plugin claim, if they don't know what's going on, they wouldn't answer yes to the question about VPNs.

> I think that given that data, it's not unreasonable...especially when that is explicitly claimed elsewhere (in OP).

Both the OP and the first link use data from the same source: http://www.globalwebindex.net/.

You have a point ... I didn't check the source of OP.

Lot's of Europeans I know use US VPNs to get hulu and avoid dreaded geoIP blocking on youtube "This media is unavailable in your region"

Europeans normally don't use a VPN to watch blocked YouTube videos. They use a browser plug in that uses a proxy for the blocked videos (and only the blocked ones). Hulu (or netflix to be precise) is one of the reasons I use a VPN but again not many people do that. I can only observe that people who frequently have contact with Americans are more likely to want to watch their shows in English and thus use a VPN. Most people I know just stream series that don't pay the they want to watch, which is not illegal in Germany and Austria[1].

[1] although cooperations try to sue people for streaming from sites that don't pay the IP owner, they don't have a lot of success since the video is not saved to disk nor is it redistributed. Only distribution of illegal in Germany and Austria

For what definition of normal? European VPN user asking.

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