 A couple of weeks ago, Network Chuck posted this video to his channel titled How To Access The Dark Web in 2023 Three Layers. And this is already one of the more popular videos that he's uploaded this year, at least by view count. And of course, Network Chuck has one of the most popular tech tutorial channels on the whole platform. I mean, his hacking of the YouTube algorithm has been way more impressive than most other channels in this space, and his production quality is actually way better as well. But anyway, this How To Access The Dark Web video, it really stood out to me because the first layer is pretty basic, right? You're connecting to the Tor browser on Windows. That's pretty normal. But then for layer two, we're involving a VPN. We're first connecting to a VPN and then to the Tor browser. Now whether or not you should use a VPN with Tor is actually one of the most common questions asked about Tor in recent years. In fact, if you Google that question, you're going to get like 20 million results. And when you look at results from the official Tor forums and from the Tor subreddit, most of the time the people there are going to tell you, no, don't do this. It's not necessary. And it's possibly even a bad idea. So why is it that our boy Chuck is recommending that we involve a VPN for layer two and layer three dark web activity is he purposefully trying to get people that want to visit the dark web to do so in an unsafe way or people want to increase their security? Is he trying to make them unsafe? Probably not. But I'm going to go over the details of using a VPN with Tor so that you can make an informed decision for yourself if you want to use a configuration that even the Tor devs don't recommend. So Tor and VPNs do the same thing in terms of encrypting traffic and changing your IP address. But Tor does this three times over because you're going through three different hops, three different servers with three different layers of encryption. So Tor is kind of like chaining three different VPN servers together, except it's even better than that because of the decentralized hosting. Anybody with an internet connection and a computer can run a tour relay. I've done so myself. So if you connect to Tor, one hop might belong to an FBI controlled server. The second hop might be my server and the third might be a KGB controlled server. But the odds of us three getting together and comparing our traffic logs on our servers in order to de-anonymize you is very, very slim. And even if it did happen, Tor establishes new circuits every 10 minutes, meaning every 10 minutes or so your traffic is going through three completely different servers. So Tor is clearly much, much better at keeping your traffic private and anonymous than using one or many VPNs chained together. But what if you wanted to hide the fact that you are using Tor in the first place from your ISP? If you connect to Tor, then your ISP can see that you're doing that and maybe that's an issue that a VPN can mitigate. Well first let's establish what our threat model here is because the way I see it, there's really only two kinds of people who should be concerned with hiding the fact that they're using Tor from their ISP and that is people that are actually doing crime or organizing protests on Tor or anything that might actually cause a global entity like Interpol to come after you or if you're in a country like Iran or China where they block connections to Tor and so you have to go through some kind of bridge to get to Tor in the first place. Well for the folks in countries like Iran and China, Tor actually has obfuscated bridges that serve that very purpose. There are servers that put a great deal of effort into trying to hide the fact that they're associated with the Tor network. They're not on a list that you can look up. Their traffic doesn't really look like Tor traffic. So blocking those is pretty difficult but it is possible to identify these obfuscated bridges with very aggressive scanning and deep packet inspection and this is actually something that China has had a great deal of success with doing in blocking Tor with the Great Firewall. But they've also had a tremendous amount of success with blocking VPN connections because those are just as easy to identify as a Tor bridge. There's no special technology that makes it harder to identify a VPN user than a Tor user. And so the result is only VPNs or the only VPNs that you can use in China are ones where the government has approved them which should make you ask some questions like hey are they keeping logs on Chinese citizens or not or you know are these servers that the Chinese government just has direct access to themselves. So the only other ones that you're able to connect to VPN-wise are ones that they haven't identified yet ones that they haven't identified as an unsanctioned VPN but they're going to be just as difficult or just as easy to identify as new obfuscated Tor bridges. So I don't really think you're gaining anything by using a VPN if your country censors Tor. Now let's talk about people that are using Tor who are likely to get targeted by Interpol or their government right people who are criminals or whatever. Would a VPN protect them? Probably not. In fact we actually have a lot of data available to answer this question because criminals on the dark web when they get persecuted the techniques that law enforcement used to catch them come out on court records. And 99% of the time people get caught through very simple obfuscate mistakes that had nothing to do with Tor. Like Dred Pirate Roberts the founder of Silk Road he got caught because he signed up to a clear web drug user forum with his personal Gmail account and he used it to advertise his hidden service there. And I think he also used that same Gmail account on Stack Overflow to solicit help with building the hidden service. Pom Pom Perrin so he also revealed his real Gmail account and private messages that he had with I think it was omnipotent you know another hacker several years ago. So when the FBI seized that other hackers website they got the DMs and then they were able to find that real email associated with Pom. And there's been dozens of other cases like this where people left traces behind of their dark web activity. They didn't keep their clear web activity completely separate from their dark web activity. So your ISP knowing that you connect to Tor sometimes that's not going to be the piece of evidence that gets you caught or makes you seem more suspicious. In fact a VPN that's connecting to Tor is going to stand out way more than just you know a regular home connection going directly to Tor. And if your adversary is a global one like Interpol then they can monitor the edge traffic of every Tor node and every VPN and every ISP. And I can tell you right now the most interesting traffic is going to be those connections going from a VPN to Tor because whoever is on the other end of that traffic is very paranoid and really doesn't want you to see what they're doing. So if I was a federal agent observing all this edge traffic the VPN to Tor packets are going to be the first ones that I'm going to try to break with a quantum computer or better yet just send some of our agents over to your VPN provider. Tell them that I think they're routing traffic for a terrorist into the dark web and your VPN provider is going to comply. They're going to give us access to all the information that they have on you which is going to be your home IP address at the very least. And if you use Nord VPN like Network Chuck here I'm probably also going to get your email address your full name and the credit card that you use to sign up with Nord VPN with since Nord enforces KYC. So my conclusion with this mixing VPNs with Tor idea is that it's a bad one especially the way that Network Chuck did it with using Nord VPN which you know they're very hard to get an anonymous subscription from you can't pay them with cash or Monero and they force you to create an account with your email address and he's also using the proprietary Nord VPN app to connect to Nord instead of putting their server info into open VPN and connecting that way. So this is definitely not the way that I would recommend to use a VPN with Tor really I wouldn't recommend doing that at all but if you're really really wanted to for some reason I would say use a VPN like Mulvad that accepts Monero and doesn't require you to give them an email address in order to create an account and even then I don't really like using VPN apps because of the added bloat that you know they add to it but Mulvads app is at least GPL licensed and earlier this year they added support for quantum resistant tunnels in the app so at least with this you can avoid revealing sensitive information like your name and email to get Mulvad and then at least the bridge that you're getting into the Tor network is going to be quantum resistant and you know won't be broken with a quantum computer but you're still going to stick out like a sore thumb because millions of people are connecting directly to the Tor network every single day while you can probably count the people that are going into Tor through a quantum resistant tunnel on your fingers and toes and those people they're going to be at the very tip top of the feds list of connections to crack or they might just use the $5 wrench method you know nobody even Mulvad is going to take a smack with a wrench for you so don't use VPNs to connect to Tor it's unnecessary and it's probably going to make you stick out like a sore thumb and you know instead of using VPNs if you know someone who is using a VPN to connect to Tor or just uses a VPN to hide their IP from services that don't block Tor recommend them to just use Tor like a normal person so that their traffic can be mixed with the millions of other people that are using Tor normally every single day which is a big part of what actually makes this network work. Everyone's connection looks the same so you can't point anyone out and also that $5 a month that you're going to pay for an average VPN connection could easily go towards you running your own Tor relay on a cheap VPS which helps everybody that's using the Tor network since it further reduces the likelihood of all three hops being government controlled servers for the cost of one spooky VPN subscription you could be routing a couple terabytes of traffic every single month for other privacy enthusiasts like you. You enjoyed this video please like it and share it in order to hack the algorithm follow me on Odyssey and get yourself the come and find it hoodie it's starting to get cold I've actually been wearing it every single day on the farm for the past couple of weeks so get the hoodie so that you can keep yourself warm and support my channel by getting it on base.win and you also get 10% off store wide when you use Monero XMR at checkout. Have a great day!