ELI5: What are VPNs and why are they used?
When you send a message through the internet, you send it to and from an address (very much like sending physical mail). You, at IP 62.153.87.129, have a massive fetish for overly simplified explanations, so you navigate to www.explainlikeimover18.com to watch some dirty, dirty explanations of why the air is colder high in the atmosphere even though heat rises. This sends a request to the server hosting that website for the information on it (say, the content of a video).
The problem with this is that if I own that website, I have to know where you are in order to send you a reply. That means that I can infer some things about you - perhaps I can connect the same IP to some other usage, perhaps you’ve visited my site before, perhaps I just want to know your general geographic area so I can put the authorities onto your illicit browsing. The same goes for your internet provider: the message has to go through them, and therefore you have to tell them where it came from and where it’s going, which means they can track your behavior as you browse. (They can’t read the content of your messages, since most sites encrypt communications by default these days, but they can see who is messaging who.)
A VPN is a provider that acts as a middleman. So rather than sending a reply to, or getting a reply from, www.explainlikeimover18.com, you send messages to the VPN to send on to the site and have the site reply to them instead (and they’ll pass the reply to you). The only thing the site (or your internet provider) can see is that you’re communicating with the VPN - not who the VPN is relaying info too. The VPN’s provider can see they’re relaying information, but they don’t know on behalf of whom. And so unless the VPN itself is tracking you, your browsing is significantly harder to track.
The physical mail analogy would be having a friend relay a message for you if you don’t want to reveal where your messages are going to or coming from, say, by putting your message in a larger envelope addressed to your friend and having them mail whatever’s inside.
A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is tool primarily used to create a secure connection to a remote network.
It allows workers to work from home or while traveling while still being able to securely access work resources like programs and files.
It works by encrypting or scrambling communication between your computer and the endpoint/office so that hackers can’t listen in and steal your information. Depending on the configuration it can also mask your location by making it appear to the internet that your traffic is originating from somewhere else, namely the Office’s IP address.
In the past few years there’s been a trend of VPN services being made available to hide your identity using this method. They work using the same technology but instead of connecting to work they allow you to operate more anonymously on the web and to protect your communication from being listened into while on insecure internet connections like in a hotel or at a coffee shop.
These type of VPNs disguise your origin point by making it look to the internet that your source IP is in a different location.
These kind of VPNs are actually a tad dubious, because despite their identity protection gimmick in reality they don’t stop things like Cookies and other identity tracking mechanisms, nor do they protect against malware and hackers.
There actual main purpose is to hide you from the authorities while performing illicit activities like getting around GEO IP blocking so you can access information and websites that are locked out of your country or to download BitTorrent etc while making it more difficult to get caught.
These types of VPNs are beneficial for people in nations that have strict censorship and monitoring on the Internet as it can allow you to get around it.
There’s also a conspiracy theory that VPN services are actually owned and operated by hacker groups who use such technologies and their own customers legit traffic to hide their illicit activities. They could also be easily monitoring all traffic coming in and out of their VPN network meaning that you could be using a VPN to hide your information while actually handing it to a hacker group on a silver platter.
You want to send a package to a friend, but you don’t want the mailman to know that you were the one that sent it. So instead, you send it to a company that specializes in receiving packages from people and send them to their correct destination, so the mailman only knows that you send it to that company, and that the company sent a package to your friend, without knowing that the package’s content is the same. If you continuously send, your friend continuously receives (not necessarily yours), and the company continuously sends and receives packages, then there’s really hard to know that you sent it to your friend unless there’s some CSI-like investigation about you or your friend personally.
VPNs are Virtual Private Networks and they have become a staple in internet communiction.
Here is the 1mio Dollar question: how do you keep your connection safe, so that no one can eavesdrop on your adult communication or your secret world domination data.
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You can create a private network with your own hardware, cable etc. The military and government does that partially, but as you can imagine it is like building a second set of roads and bridges: can be done, is very expensive and you usually do that only for very special applications.
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You use the internet. Where your message (regardless if it is a request for a porn site or a plan for the revolution) goes tot he servers of your internet service providers, then through the servers of the backend carriers (basically the background internet providers for the internet providers) then to the internet providers of your recipient … and then everything goes back. And everybody knows now that JRatMain16 went the Reddit/ELI5 because he does not know what a VPN is, because that data is shared with everyone who transfers your request.
In your case it is of course no problem. But imagine that you are an exec and you need a line to your companies computer for some complicated negotiations. Now, you can encrypt of course your data, but in the end: a lot of people can listen to hat.
VPNs are a special software tool which starts an encrypted connection to a very specific server via the Internet, and only from there the system administrator can decide what should happen with that connection. They are used to create virtual private networks inside the internet, so enable secure and trustworthy connection between different points. This enables the handling of sensible data via the internet, with vastly reduced chances that the data gets compromised.
Example:
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I worked with financial software remote from home during the pandemic. The data basically included what you would except from a bank. Name, age, addresses, financial status, bank account data, credit card data, fraud checks etc. To have this data compromised would be a disaster for my company and the customer
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So besides a special laptop my company set up a VPN. From my special laptop at home I would connect normally to the Internet via my internet provider, then start the VPN software, and the VPN software would connect to the internet, create a special encrypted connection and this connection would only allow me to actually server at the HQ of my company. And only with that I could actually access the customer data software and work on the customers request for financial handling.
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Everyone who would try to compromise my connection would only see “a connection between the laptop and the server X of company Y”. Nothing else. If I sent data out (for example to the customer) everyone would see only "a connection from the server at my company to the customer, they would not see me.
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It goes further. When I want to check the news (lets say BBC, Reddit or CNN) I would, inside my VPN, open the webbrowser normally and then attempt to go to that webpage. First: the administrators of my company would check if the webpage is on the list of approved webpages (BBC and CNN are, Reddit is not) and then they would forward this request. But this request would noo come from me, it would from from the VPN server. Everyone who would attempt to compromise that would only see “VPN server requests news from BBC/CNN” and not “Skolloc753 has requested news from BBC/CNN”.
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That does not sound dramatic, but imagine that you live in a dictatorship and every single webpage you request is checked, and if you visit subversive webpages the secret police knocks on your door at 4am in the morning. But with a VPN all they see is “Skolloc753 has connected to a VPN server” … but as long as they do not compromise the VPN server they would not see which kind of webpages I am looking at. There is for example a constant battle going on for China and Iran to provide VPN servers so that people can get uncensored (well … less censored) news via VPNs with the government attempting to shut them down or disrupt access.
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The last application it re-routing. Every connection takes a specific route. Some routes are pretty bad. Long delays, lags, interruptions. VPNs can circumvent standard routes, like a GPS circumventing a traffic jam by guiding you around the bad highway. Especially when connecting for online game from the Middle East to Europe the standard routes are usually very bad. But VPNs reroute the traffic through other countries, and suddenly you have an acceptable connection in your favorite multiplayer game.
SYL
Are VPNs actually safe? Who are the people running VPNs for little cost?
Also does VPN mess up your location, for example
If I was search on an app for closest restaurants I click use my location, would this then be inaccurate?
VPN = Virtual Private Network
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A network is a connection between computers, that allows communication. This is a pretty broad definition, not a lot of specifics on the form of communication. The Internet is a network, and it’s based on a form of electronic communication called the Internet Protocol (IP), a set of rules that are built into the electronics and the programming of all the devices on the internet. The “network” allows communication between the devices, but we think of the internet more as the data that we see, youtube, tiktok, reddit, etc. But it IS a network, all computers are connected, whether it’s through wireless, cable, satellite uplink, fiber-optic, etc.
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Private means that the communication is encrypted, so that “the pubic” can’t see it. In general, the computers that link up to communicate with each other, will have a “handshake” phase at the beginning, where they agree on how to encrypt the data. Then they encrypt it so, and other computers can’t decrypt it because they don’t know the passwords.
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Virtual means that it’s all in software. You can have a computer, and on this computer you run a program that simulates “a computer”. For example, on your windows machine you can have a simulator of the old “DOS box” so you can run one of the old games from the 1990’s that only understands that environment and doesn’t understand Windows. A “virtual network” means that you use programs to link up to different computers on the “real” internet network, and all of these computers then pretend that they’re in a network of their own, as if they had electronic parts inside and physical wires connecting them together.
So VPNs allow businesses or private individuals, to connect their computers together, with encryption and privacy, THROUGH the internet, as if they had physical wires connecting them together. Computers in England can behave as if they were in the same building and physically hooked into computers in Australia, on the other side of the world.
For businesses, VPNs link the various offices together, so that business data can be sent back and forth in privacy.
For consumers, VPN links can be used to connect to servers in other countries, so that your requests to see Internet information appear to come from that country, instead of from where you actually are.
That’s explaining one aspect of a VPN, the relaying part, also called a proxy. The other portion that’s much more important is that data traffic on the VPN is encrypted and cannot been seen by the internet provider. However, the provider can see the fact that you’re connected to the VPN, but not much else other than you’re sending data. Well. Maybe the amount of data you’re sending
The most ELI5 answer so far lol
Can I ask , would you call it drop shipping?
Very important add on!
For what I understand, drop shipping would be like asking the company to send a certain package to your friend (not necessarily you send first the package itself), while in my analogy you have to send the package to the company.