Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: UndergroundNoble on January 03, 2013, 11:02 pm
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So I was wondering if I should purchase a VPN and use that to connect to Tor and then chain it to a Socks5 Proxy? I'm kind of confused at this point what a Socks5 Proxy is... could someone help me out? Also, does anybody know any VPN providers that don't store logs, so if law enforcement were to provide a subpoena, they would have nothing to give? Thanks! :)
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A forum search would provide more information because you're not going to get many helpful replies
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there's many who argue against the security provided by a VPN. in all reality, you are putting entire faith on a business who advertises they will turn a blind eye to your activities on their servers, for a fee, despite laws and police contact.
lookup the big "shadowcrew bust" and research how LE brought down a large criminal fraud communitiy's top players by advertising a VPN service that promised protection from law enforcement. if you insist however...checkout mullvad. they're one of the only providers that accept bitcoin, and seem to take privacy seriously. i still doubt how much it may assist you.
a socks5 proxy is mostly used as an end proxy to make the user appear as if their connection came from that location. however, it is not encrypted by any means and should not be used as a personal security measure, as it really doesn't do much at all compared to services like the tor network.
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Yeah, good luck with the search function. :)
You've heard of an HTTP proxy right? It proxies... HTTP connections. SOCKS is just a different protocol that can proxy HTTP and other types of connections (IRC, SMTP, SSH, etc). Tor provides a SOCKS proxy on port 9050, so you can configure any application that supports SOCKS proxies to run over Tor. Actually, the browser bundle picks a random port, but you can force it to use 9050 too.
None of that matters, though, because you can run your Tor client over a VPN. The only reason you would need to "chain" it is if you were connecting to a remote Tor client.
As for VPN providers that don't log, how can you be ever be sure they don't, even if they say they do?