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How do these anonymous VPNs work? They say you can browse the web using a different IP address than your own. How does this work?

I understand the Virtual Private Network model, I am just confused on how I browse the web with a different IP?

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Once connected to the VPN (assuming you use an option like "Use default gateway on remote network" or "Send all traffic over VPN connection"), all your requests are routed through the remote VPN server. So, your IP address for the rest of the world is the IP address of that VPN server (or any server through which the outgoing traffic is routed), not your own IP address.

You connect to that server (yes, using the internet), and that server connects to the rest of the internet. It's just like some web server would not know your local IP address from your own internal network either (like 10.x.x.x, 192.168.x.x or similar).

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  • So how does my machine know to route its outgoing packets etc using the VPN connection ?
    – Oliver Bayes-Shelton
    Nov 9, 2009 at 9:22
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    He, you wrote you understood the VPN model. ;-) Your OS "simply" tells all applications it's part of the other private network, and (assuming the settings I mentioned) not of your local network anymore. (As such, a VPN is totally different from just mapping network drives, or using SSH to access some other network.)
    – Arjan
    Nov 9, 2009 at 9:28
  • Cool Cool sounds good , Is there any chance we could chat in more details over gmail of something got a few more questions to ask
    – Oliver Bayes-Shelton
    Nov 9, 2009 at 10:16
  • He, you're at a Question & Answer site!
    – Arjan
    Nov 9, 2009 at 10:34
  • Cool thanks , If I made a VPN connection to a server then used a PHP Proxy solution to view a page would that be pretty good at being anonymous ?
    – Oliver Bayes-Shelton
    Nov 9, 2009 at 10:48

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