[technion]

I think this ship has sailed. Services like nord or mullad are described as VPN products yet they are the products people are buying to route traffic into pornhub.

[Dalewyn]

Seeing as Hacker News is ostensibly composed largely of people in-the-know, we could certainly use appropriate terminology unlike the commons.

[fenomas]

Usages exist inside contexts, and the context of the post you replied to was unambiguous. Changing it like s/VPNs/services advertised as VPNs/ would not clarify anything to anyone, and changing it like s/VPNs/proxies/ would be less clear (since the author was likely referring to commercial services, not servers in a network).

[justanorherhack]

This is correct. This entire conversation demonstrates how bad technical people are at understanding people.

[Avicebron]

A lot of people live exclusively on layer 7, which is fine.

[numpad0]

"VPN" services do in fact use VPN, they're not HTTP based. It is technically appropriate to call them as such, as awkward as it is.

[0xcde4c3db]

Yeah; it's not strictly accurate, but in a similar sense that it's not strictly accurate to call the typical copper Ethernet connector "RJ45", to say that a UDP "connection" occurred, or to say that a modem connects to a "DB-9" serial port.

I suspect the root of the problem is that over time, "proxy" has become strongly associated with application-layer protocols like HTTP, and after that shift it wasn't obvious what to use for something lower-level that encompassed a wider range of protocols/endpoints/conversations. In principle, "tunnel" would probably have been better (and a legible metaphor to boot), but that's just not how things shook out in practice.