• herrvogel@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    How is the term “proxy” more appropriate though? It’s also the technical name for a concept that already exists. VPNs are by definition broader in scope than proxies, they work at a lower level of the networking stack and have different capabilities even if most people don’t take full advantage of it. Anyway the point is that it’s not a more appropriate term.

    • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
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      9 months ago

      AFAIK the only thing VPN providers let you do, like SurfShark, ExpressVPN, NordVPN, ProtonVPN etc., is to route all of your outgoing traffic through their servers. They don’t allow you e.g. to be in the the same fake LAN as a friend, which is what a VPN does.

      Quote from Wikipedia:

      A proxy server that passes unmodified requests and responses is usually called a gateway or sometimes a tunneling proxy.

      That’s pretty much what those commercial “VPN” providers offer.

      • herrvogel@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        They don’t allow you e.g. to be in the the same fake LAN as a friend, which is what a VPN does.

        That’s not what a VPN does, that’s what a VPN can do, if desired. What a VPN does is set up an encrypted tunnel between you and some remote network. That’s it. How that remote network is laid out, how the traffic (and also what kind of traffic) is routed into/through/out of that network, and what the clients are allowed to do within are entirely up to the wishes of the network’s owner. It might very well choose to isolate you from all the other clients on the network; that’s not just a possibility, it’s actually one of VPN’s most important, most useful features.

        That’s pretty much what those commercial “VPN” providers offer.

        Those commercial VPN providers offer you a fully encrypted tunnel that you can route all your network traffic through if you wish. It’s just that people don’t generally use it as anything more than just a proxy. Still, the connection is a textbook VPN connection, it’s there, and it’s capable of things a regular proxy is not, if you choose to make use of them.