if I understand you correctly, these are my takeaways from your words: a VPN is a “swiss army knife” for remote networking, and can be used in a variety of configurations. The configuration may reveal clients to reach other, and may allow tunneling general internet traffic through it. Okay, I accept that correction. I’ll note that Nord/Express/Proton/etcVPN only offer one configuration, so they don’t live up to the broad capabilities of a VPN, they only offer one very specific option. This is not a complaint about the services, just about terminology.
Those commercial VPN providers offer you a fully encrypted tunnel that you can route all your network traffic through if you wish.
Isn’t this the definition of a tunneling proxy that I quoted?
It’s just that people don’t generally use it as anything more than just a proxy.
From the previous sentence, they use it as a proxy because that’s literally the only thing it can be used as. And I do mean literally.
if I understand you correctly, these are my takeaways from your words: a VPN is a “swiss army knife” for remote networking, and can be used in a variety of configurations. The configuration may reveal clients to reach other, and may allow tunneling general internet traffic through it. Okay, I accept that correction. I’ll note that Nord/Express/Proton/etcVPN only offer one configuration, so they don’t live up to the broad capabilities of a VPN, they only offer one very specific option. This is not a complaint about the services, just about terminology.
Isn’t this the definition of a tunneling proxy that I quoted?
From the previous sentence, they use it as a proxy because that’s literally the only thing it can be used as. And I do mean literally.