UK P2P Lending Wiki (no censorship)

Soon web browsers will come with anonymous IP VPNs as standard.

Tor is a tool that allows you to anonymise your web use, by passing all your traffic through various other layers - multiple servers that are controlled by people who cannot/will not release their logs to allow back-tracking, even when requested by the law.

"The dark web" is a media bogeyman, for the most part, as ever with a grain of truth behind it... Basically, it's websites you won't find on google, and which require a little bit of work or specific software to get at, usually because of nefarious content.


Seems all perfectly consistent.

The (perfectly logical) bar on identifying borrowers has ALWAYS forbidden directly linking to other information that identifies the borrower, unless it's a link to the platform itself.

If it didn't, it'd be easy to say "Well, I'm not going to identify the borrower, but here's a link to Companies House" (or wherever), and the bar would be meaningless.

When the "alternative forum" has been set up solely to get around the identification bar, then... well, you do the maths.

No goalpost moving whatsoever. The forum rules have always been to avoid posting links to websites / newspaper reports / etc that name a borrower.

So who would you suggest as an endpoint for that VPN?

A VPN is a point-to-point encrypted connection between your machine (or router) and an endpoint. So, yes, the provider are the people providing that endpoint - then they just route the traffic out to the internet via their connection.

So you're just putting all your internet traffic through a third party whose entire business model is based on providing obfuscation for those who want to work around the law - as is able demonstrated by the fact that list is on a Torrent website, aimed solely at people who want to evade the consequences of breaching copyright law. I hope you trust the provider...

I'm sure you're not - I've not suggested you are. I'm merely stating that the vast majority of anonymous-routing VPN users are. It's the primary reason for using them. What many may view as paranoia is just a secondary reason.



Yes, they do - I've set them up many times - to provide a secure non-public entrypoint to internal networks for their own internal and external user base. NOT as an anonymous in-and-out for general internet use by Joe Public.



Yes, they are - but, again, we come down to the majority of use. Wrap torrents in an anonymiser, and you're hanging around in dodgy company. Where businesses have arisen with the primary aim of catering to that dodgy community, I would be asking myself how much I trusted those businesses - more or less than those who you seek to use their services to avoid?



I'm sure. But just ask yourself why heavy torrent users are be so keen on anonymity, if not to minimise the risk of being legally associated with the content they're downloading?

My point is not that the tools are themselves illegitimate. My point is that the use of them often is. There are legitimate uses for many things which are routinely abused by a majority of users.



May I respectfully suggest investing in the makers of bacofoil headgear?

Look, I have no idea what your InfoSec credentials are. I'm certainly not posing as any kind of specialist, I'm just a reasonably clued-up generic techie. In the context of the heavily regulated world of financial products, where money-laundering regulations (amongst many others) insist on thorough identification of any account holder, anonymity is NEVER going to happen. Some kind of SSL breach via a man-in-the-middle attack, or other kind of account credential breach, is not made less likely by passing through any third-party anonymisation. If I'm missing something about sound, logical reasons for passing P2P traffic through an anonymous VPN, then please educate me instead of just having snide digs at me. As far as generic traffic goes, then it really is a case of there being absolutely zero point whatsoever.