Reference
Glossary
Jargon is the barrier, not the concepts. Anything a lesson uses is defined here, and marked inline where it first appears so you never have to leave the page to find out what a word means.
- Threat model
- Four honest answers: what you are protecting, from whom, what happens if it fails, and how much trouble you will go to.Threat modelling is the step almost everyone skips, and skipping it is why people buy tools they do not need and ignore the ones they do. It is not a technical exercise. Writing down who you are actually worried about — an advertiser, an abusive ex, an employer, a government — changes the answer to every question that follows, because those adversaries have wildly different budgets, powers and levels of interest in you specifically.
- VPN
- A tunnel that moves your traffic’s exit point. It shifts trust from your ISP to the VPN company — it does not make you anonymous.A VPN is a genuinely useful tool for a narrow set of problems: hostile local networks, an ISP that sells browsing records, and geographic restrictions. It is not an anonymity tool. Your traffic still leaves somewhere, that somewhere is a company with servers and a jurisdiction, and you have chosen to trust it instead of your ISP. Whether that is an upgrade depends entirely on which of the two you were worried about.