this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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Recommend a VPN with residential exit IPs (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Some friends have safety concerns that mean they need to appear digitally as if they're inside the USA while being elsewhere physically. Standard commercial VPNs are easy to detect (else I'd recommend Mullvad), so they need an option that looks like a residential connection.

They could potentially DIY it by leaving a VPN server at a relative's house, but I'm asking here for subscription services. It's best if they have a Mac OS app that's foolproof, with a clear visual indication that it's in use, and a feature to block traffic if the VPN is disconnected.

tl;dr: what's the closest residential VPN to Mullvad?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Not the first time I've read that, and I don't doubt it, but why is Tor better? Is it because the VPNN is a single point of failure?

Let's say someone uses a strongly secured and sandboxed browser alongside a trustworthy VPN, what specifically would make Tor better?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

TOR is designed to resist surveillance and censorship by ISPs or national governments. Communications are encrypted in transit, and there's no way for a node to tell whether it's talking to another relay node or the end user.

It's fairly easy for a website to detect that a user is accessing it via TOR; there are lists of exit nodes like this one which a firewall or intrusion detection system can update programmatically. Many websites block or limit access via TOR using such lists, making it unsuitable for use cases such as the one I'm discussing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

The Tor browser is designed to appear identical to web sites so it is harder to fingerprint. Combine that with the three hop routing and it is very hard to pin point a user. Tor also has strong anticensorship tools that can be activated with a single click. It also has Onion sites which are extremely hard to track and do not pass over the clearnet.

VPNs are not and have never been particularly useful from a privacy perspective. You would need to trust the VPN provider which is faulty due to the fact that you have no way of knowing what the VPN provider is doing. Also your traffic still passes over the internet after it leaves the VPN provider so there still are ISPs involved. VPNs are really useful for changing your IP address and bypassing censorship. There is no other use case despite all the marketing.

The real way to get better privacy on the internet is to use https only and to setup encrypted DNS.