[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.