3 ms·
Fair, it does seem that "privacy" VPNs are a lot older than I thought and possibly as old as the "VPN" moniker. (Assuming that your project was in the 90s, whic
by anyfoo 4y ago
Fair, it does seem that "privacy" VPNs are a lot older than I thought and possibly as old as the "VPN" moniker. (Assuming that your project was in the 90s, which it sounds like.)
At this point it just seems like arguing for arguing's sake, but I was rejecting the notion that VPNs were always intended for privacy (along with saying others are wrong for suggesting otherwise). It still seems to me that VPNs did not always imply "privacy", and I think in my sibling comment to this, an RFC from 1999 seems to support that (focusing on "intranets" and "extranets" in the definition of a VPN, and only mentioning encryption once as an optional component, with possibly only authentication instead, or even none).
- autoexec 4y agoI agree, VPNs were absolutely not always used to hide internet activity, but sometimes they were. Early on they were certainly most often used by companies to connect networks or to connect to resources on their intranet, the need (and the money) was primarily there, but I'm not surprised that using VPNs for privacy reasons got more popular as time went on. Even back then I thought it was pretty cool/useful tech and I had no LAN to speak of.
- anyfoo 4y agoI agree with all of that, too! And yeah, I think by now the meaning of "VPN" has well shifted, likely because of the privacy enhancement getting to popular (and I think I've also noticed that terms like "Intranet" and "Extranet" have somewhat fallen out of favor, too, but maybe that's just in my environments).