I honestly don’t believe I will have any legal trouble because I don’t do anything like cp or worse, I just pirate media I like, not even porn. But across users of communities, or on public trackers, is IP exposure something to be concerned about?

  • dan@upvote.au
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    7 months ago

    A proxy is no less secure than a VPN, assuming it’s using encryption like TLS. It’s not as good for torrents since you can’t port forward, but fundamentally people that use commercial VPNs are using then just like a proxy. Some providers like NordVPN do offer HTTPS proxies in addition to their VPN service.

    • Rivalarrival
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      7 months ago

      A proxy operates on the application level; a VPN on the OS level. Both the VPN and the proxy are susceptible to OS-level threats. The proxy is also susceptible to application-level threats that the VPN is not. A misconfigured or exploited torrent client, for example, could ignore the proxy and expose your public IP. With a properly functioning VPN, that faulty application can only expose the public-facing end of the VPN tunnel.

      • dan@upvote.au
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        7 months ago

        A VPN can also have a faulty config. Everything depends on correct configs :)

      • N0x0n@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        The proxy is also susceptible to application-level threats that the VPN is not.

        You sure about that? I mean, to use a VPN your need some kind of application that could potentially be vulnerable or have some zero day exploits.

        In contrary, a proxy is as simple as to forward your traffic to another computer through a SSH tunnel which doesn’t specially need some kind of application but only relies on lower level package.

        Maybe I misunderstood your comment but If I’m wrong I’m agear to learn something new.