I made a comparison of Tor and VPNs
This is… quite misleading.
Anyone who’s running the Tor exit nodes can see everything about your traffic that the person running the VPN can except for the source IP address. Except you can know who runs your VPN, you have no idea who’s providing your exit nodes.
For example, the US government runs a lot of exit nodes. WikiLeaks got its start originally by running an exit node and sniffing for documents and emails. A few years back a kid managed to snag the login credentials of some swedish politicians by setting up an exit node and sniffing traffic. Etc.
This is exactly what a lot of folks need! Thanks for that!
Isn’t a big problem with Tor still having to trust the exit nodes?
Nice!!
Only comment is that when you talk about tor your talking about two things, tor and tor browser. Without tor browser, tor and a vpn are really quite similar with the exception that tor removes removes the single point of failure issue, adds a longer routing path, but it also adds an untrusted exit node.
So yes… very much like your graphic though.
Just be aware that your device can/will still communicate the known SSIDs around it or the SDK in your device can/will still report your actual location.
Problem is that there are a lot of webs that detect and ban tor users. I don’t know if that happens with vpns
It literally hurts my eyes to try to read the Tor side of the graphic. The red font against that purple background literally made my eyes water. Please use a black glow effect on all fonts, and lighten the purple background. Then lighten the fonts a little, especially that awful red.
The one caveat to tor now- is that you DO NOT want your ISP knowing there is TOR traffic going through the network- that’s he issue
And i’m going to say it- combining a VPN and tor is useful, if you’re an advanced user per the TOR guide itself- and it actually is kinda easy (mainly tor over vpn as the other isn’t as easy to setup)
Regarding the rapidly increasing threat of TOR traffic being spotted since its’s a big giveaway that something’s going on where VPN traffic isn’t like this , especially 443 traffic - someone will inevitably mention tor bridges- I hope Tor can be scaled up for extremely widespread usage of bridges, because right now everyone is going to need that with monitoring going on… and it can hurt you if it’s known Tor traffic is going over the line, and be used for correlation attacks- VPN’s and bridges protect from that…
The other thing is, VPN’s will be preferable for those looking to torrent, and do anything that needs serious bandwidth
Beware, a lot of the graphic is actually talking about the tor browser, not just tor, lol. That’s important for those who use distros that default to tor
Exit nodes are just as dangerous as VPN servers…
I just wish Tor didn’t break a lot of websites 
This is great! There are some good ways to use color to differentiate between the two other than colored text on colored backgrounds. That makes it hard to read and conflates the meaning when both lists have red text.
Try using colored text only on headers - and only against a white background. But make sure the headers have large enough font that the text is still clear and legible
You don’t need to have a solid color for both columns to make a point and to clearly delineate which is which. Especially when you sacrifice legibility of the text. (The text is the most important part so it’s important people can easily read it)
Alternatively you can try headers with a solid color background and reversed out white text instead.
List seems biased against VPNs:
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VPN protects traffic against other devices in LAN, and the router, and the ISP. So does Tor.
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“Single point of failure” for VPN is mostly wrong. You need to be able to connect successfully to one of the provider’s many servers. If you mean “one single company knows your home IP address and sees your (probably HTTPS) traffic and (if you allow it) knows your ID”, true.
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It’s fairly easy to give all anonymous info to the VPN company, so “user has to fully trust the VPN provider” is mostly nonsense. Even if you give your real ID to the VPN, if you use HTTPS, all the VPN sees is what IP addresses (domains) you’re accessing. Using a VPN is a huge gain over just using your ISP, but not quite as good as using Tor.
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A major advantage of VPN over Tor Browser is that VPN handles traffic from all apps and services in your system, not just browser app. Your system is full of updaters, cron jobs, other background services that do network traffic; you want to keep that traffic from leaking your IP address.
So if we use tor browser over a VPN, am I right in thinking that’s pretty safe?
What about decentralised/distributed VPNs, other mix networks (like I2P) and Proxies?
It didn’t hurt my eyes like it did for the other guy but maybe in the future a salmon color might prevent that.
Good idea but badly executed. Visually it really sucks because of the low resolution and terrible color contrast. It is misleading, it claims that it is only possible to spy on traffic on a VPN, when using TOR is just as dangerous and over the years has caused many more problems. The optional browser is also added to a service comparison.
This is great! This will be very helpful
One thing I do have to critique is that at least in my experience, VPNs are hit or miss when it comes to getting around geofenced copyright content. Not sure if that has to do with my selection in VPNs or if I’m somehow doing it wrong.
Nice explanation.
Although my questions are:
Would using Tor over VPN (as connecting to a VPN and then using Tor) be a wise or secure thing to do? (considering you’re using a trustful VPN with no logs and away from the 14eyes and you’re using it through openvpn/wireguard config files)
And, would doing something like, using a VPN on my PC (trustful no logs vpn, and let’s go even further, a VPN that allows you to create a multi-hop cascade with 4 servers, and each hop re-encrypts your traffic and assigns you a new IP) and on your PC you create a Virtual Machine (on KVM/QEMU if you will) with Tails/Whonix on it and use this VM to browse Tor, how private would this be?