I have a VPN and appreciate the idea of the service, but it all comes down to how much you trust the service you use and/or what the governing bodies require that service to do anyway. But what if you used a VPN to tunnel into another VPN. Does that make you nearly completely anonymous? I know pretty much anything is crackable these days, but would it keep the VPN services from techincally being able to monitor you?
The way I envision it is that you have an encrypted tunnel to provider 1. While provider 1 can see what your doing, you connect to provide 2, who would only see your encrypted tunnel and then provide 2 would encrypt your traffic, which would conceal you from provide 1. Is that accurate? I'm not trying to do anything illegal, just mostly a thought experiment.
this is pointless and would not give you any more privacy than with only one.
You can't assume privacy on the internet, it just wasn't designed that way. you can minimise your footprint with things like tails on a USB and using something like proxychains, but other than that (assuming you have all data leaking features disabled in your browser) there isn't much else you can do.
But to keep your traffic hidden from your ISP, 1 VPN will suffice.
But it wouldn't show your host machine would it? Just some clean random machine? I agree that being 100% anonymous is impossible, it's about not being the lowest hanging fruit on the tree.
1.) That machine resides physically on your harddisk. is the .vmdk encrypted? 2.) still using the same IP on the WAN, and you're NAT'd behind your router.
Doesn't do anything for you really.
I believe you really need to think about what or who you're trying to keep your traffic anonymous from, then start thinking of ways to accomplish that. No one or two solutions is going to a "be all - end all" solution to hide from everyone. Focus on what's important to yu and work from there. And like I stated, you can make it harder to track you, but it isn't 100%
But, I WILL suggest QubesOS for day to day privacy conscious people. I use it myself.
Just separate the things you do into different VM's (one strictly for banking and nothing else, one strictly for facebook and nothing else, you get the idea.) Qubes OS also allows you to choose which VM's to route all traffic through tor and which ones to route normally, etc.
You will need a slightly beefy system to run it, (at least quad core, 8GB ram, SSD)
there's a small learning curve to it, but the video lays out all of it pretty easily.
It's a good idea if implimented properly, but if op does everything in a vm, that op would normally do on his/her laptop/desktop, then what's the difference? Might as well ditch the VM and just use the host machine with more power.
My only goal with the VM+VPN is to hide from advertisers (cookies/ads) and prying eyes. I do keep things separate like you suggested. I'll definitely take a look at that OS!
Yes, that was my point, which is why I put "better" in quotes, to draw the connection between using two proxies for better protection with the misconception that using two condoms will offer better protection: Neither actually results in better protection.