Question 1

What is the difference between a proxy and a VPN?

Accepted Answer

A **proxy** intercepts traffic for a specific application; a **VPN** captures traffic from the whole device and encrypts it. The practical difference is scope and encryption, and confusing the two leads people to assume protection they do not have.

**A proxy** sits between one application and the internet. Your browser is configured to send requests to it, and it fetches on your behalf. The destination sees the proxy's address rather than yours.

**What it does not do:** it does not usually encrypt anything beyond what the application already encrypts; it applies only to applications configured to use it, so everything else on your device goes direct; and a plain HTTP proxy can read and modify unencrypted traffic passing through it.

**A VPN** creates an encrypted tunnel at the operating system level. **All** traffic from the device is wrapped and sent to the VPN server, which decrypts it and forwards it on. Your internet provider sees only an encrypted connection to the VPN.

**What the two share:** both change the apparent origin of your traffic, which is why both are used for geographic restrictions, and both mean **you are trusting the operator** with whatever they can see.

**The trust point is the one that matters.** A VPN does not make you anonymous; it moves your traffic's visibility from your internet provider to the VPN operator. A free VPN is a business, and the product is frequently the traffic — several have been found logging, injecting advertising or selling bandwidth.

**Where each is appropriate:**

**A proxy** — routing one application, corporate content filtering, caching, and scraping or testing from different regions.

**A VPN** — connecting securely to a workplace network, which is its original purpose; protecting all traffic on an untrusted network; and hiding browsing from your internet provider.

**Neither protects against:** the website identifying you through login, cookies or fingerprinting; malware; phishing; or a compromised device. **A VPN changes who can see your traffic, not what you do with it.**

Question 2

How is internet filtering and censorship actually implemented?

Accepted Answer

Through several techniques operating at different layers, each with different costs, different accuracy and different ease of circumvention — and most real systems combine them. The techniques, in

Question 3

How do VPN protocols differ?

Accepted Answer

They differ in how they establish encryption, how much code they contain, how fast they are, and how well they cope with changing networks — and the differences are large enough that protocol choice

Question 4

What is the difference between a reverse proxy and a load balancer?

Accepted Answer

Considerable overlap, and a real distinction: a reverse proxy sits in front of servers and handles requests on their behalf; a load balancer distributes requests across several servers. Most modern

Question 5

What is DNS over HTTPS, and should I use it?

Accepted Answer

DNS over HTTPS (DoH) encrypts your DNS queries so that whoever carries your traffic cannot read which sites you are looking up. It closes a genuine privacy gap and shifts trust rather than

Question 6

What is actually inside a network packet?

Accepted Answer

Layers of headers wrapped around your data, each added by a different part of the networking stack and each read by a different piece of equipment along the way. Why layers exist. Each layer solves

Question 7

Why does my WiFi say connected but there is no internet?

Accepted Answer

The message is telling you something precise and useful: your device successfully joined the local wireless network, but traffic is not reaching the wider internet. That splits the problem cleanly in

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