What’s the attitude towards the war over there?
A VPN combined with a TOR browser provides a lot of anonymity, though I have found many websites won’t allow you full access if they detect you are using a TOR browser.
My guy, most VPNs are used to log into a corporate network for work.
Determining who is and isn’t a paying customer is not done by checking IPs—your IP can change constantly if you have a dynamic IP or if you’re logged in on a different device.
You have a login and password.
They don’t care what your IP is. Most VPNs verify you by username and password. Your IP address is changing all the time. Take your laptop to a coffee shop, you have a new IP address.
They authenticate users through a norm username: password type situation
Most home user IPs change randomly every now and then, the way they know you’re a paying costumer is through a login, not an IP.
It goes through an application. So you have your computer and it sends all the requests through the application which sends it to the VPN servers and everyone else monitoring internet traffic just sees the VPN servers talking to the website but don’t know who requested the website. Between the application and the servers are heavy encryption so no one can see or read that traffic.
So think of it like this. You are hiding in your house and never leave. A friend is going between you and the outside world. The outside world sees your friend and the front door, but they don’t know who is in the house telling your friend what to do when he leaves the house. And then your friend comes back, and gives/tells you what you asked for and is hit with amnesia.
You use a username and password to connect to the server. You don’t connect with your IP address.
They don’t and that’s kind of the point. a lot of companies only allow a certain amount of connections at any given time though
No, it doesn’t always get stored one way or another. In fact storing data costs money and most network services store as little as possible to save money.
Yea tell that to the Swiss courts who couldn’t get data because it wasn’t recorded
Heavily depends on a socioeconomic group. Young educated people & highly skilled professionals of all ages oppose the war and Putin’s regime. Old generation and less educated people watch TV and believe propaganda narrative about genocide of Russian speaking people in Ukraine, hence, they think this war is for a good cause.
Since I’m in academia, I don’t know anyone who supports the war (except my grandparents). Most normal people have left the country or are trying to leave, the brain drain is insane. All of my talented peers left, same for me (I moved to Austria this summer). Sadly, I think pretty soon there will be no rational people left in Russia and no one to oppose the regime 
Best rule of thumb is to make yourself as hard to de-anonymize as possible while not badly impacting your own experience, as you can always be de-anonymized—it’s just a matter of making it more trouble than it’s worth. In that sense, a VPN is good for most people for most purposes.
Additionally, if it checked IPs, anyone on your network could use the VPN. Also, if you go on another network, your IP will be changed.
You have two possibilities. Either the network is entirely unsecured because they don’t know what’s going on, or they monitor it to at the very least keep it secure.
Most vpn providers just lie about what they store.
I didn’t mention the retention limit of the storage or who stored that data though.
I am very sorry friend, that sounds unfortunate.
I hope things improve, but God knows when that’ll happen.
Is leaving hard? It’s very difficult to get any accurate information on what life inside Russia is like because I can’t ever tell if what I’m hearing is true or Western propaganda. From the outside it sounds like a dystopian authoritarian state where you have to constantly be conscious of what you say and who you associate with. Is that true?
Pretty sure that isn’t “someone who randomly got access to the system” having a key/ login isn’t randomly
This is pure nonsense, they can run tools to scan data and then delete it if it doesn’t get flagged.