Can someone explain the differences between these three “programs”?
I have all three on my phone, should I have all of these?
I2P is a dark net
A VPN is like a proxy with traffic encryption client-side (on your device)
Orbot is an app that routes traffic from your device through the TOR network
I2p is a p2p based decentralized network. It is mostly used to bypass government censors to access banned text based media, the network being too slow to realistically host thing’s like video.
VPN is a generic term to describe an encrypted connection between two devices such that one device can interact with the other’s network as though it were connected to said network. This is mostly used to change geolocation to bypass content blocks (i.e. Netflix has different shows in different countries.)
Orbot is a service that allows all traffic from a phone to be routed through the Tor network using a VPN hosted by the app or by another method if your phone is rooted. The Tor network is a collection of relays used to obfuscate network traffic to make of very difficult to determine where from and to data is traveling on the network. Unlike I2P Tor can be used to access the normal Internet, and is fast enough to use for multi-media consumption. It is often use to bypass government censors and to reduce exposure of personal details to government monitors and advertisers. Despite what fear mongerers say the vast majority of Tor traffic is clear web and 100% legal, but tor does enable access to onion domains which only accept Tor connections, a small percent of onion domains do contain illegal content.
As for should you have them on your phone, that’s a personal quotation, there is nothing illegal about having them. If you’re going to use them keep them, if you’re not going to use them then don’t waste space on your phone and delete them.
They’re different tools for different purposes.
Orbot is a Tor implementation wrapped in a Java app which uses Android’s VPNService API to act as a semi-transparent Tor Proxy. It’s capable of torifying the client traffic created by apps on your cell phone by making it appear that your network provider is the VPN provided by the Orbot app. It cannot handle UDP traffic and cannot proxy anything app which VPNService can’t. It will be slow, and the anonymity it provides can sometimes be brittle because it may not be able to tell which app is making Tor connections, so an attacker that controls many services may be able to correlate your client across those services. Tor Browser largely exists to mitigate this problem for the browsing case, which is an especially complicated version of the problem.
A VPN is a general term that is used for things that provide virtual network interfaces and virtual network connectivity. It’s commonly used to refer to so-called “Privacy” VPN’s which have appeal because they can handle UDP, but the privacy they provide is in many ways somewhat brittle, because these services don’t use multiple hops to hide the origin of traffic and most rely on encryption only, and do not take further steps to obfuscate information about the traffic contents, in addition to suffering the same “everything on the same path” problem as Orbot.
I2P is primarily designed to be used in-network and enforces a concept one one tunnel one application. For browsing you use an HTTP proxy, for email you use a streaming tunnel terminated at an SMTP server. It has no “VPN-like” functionality in part to avoid the aforementioned correlation problem. However, that means you need to connect the applications you want to use to I2P.
Whether you “should” have these things on your phone depends on whether you want to use them, we can’t answer that.
I2p is also often used for torrenting. It is much slower than torrenting over the clearnet, but it anonymizes you.
The speed thing is not very accurate anymore, there’s definitely a little buffer time still but we’re maybe 15-20x faster than we were about 5 years ago, people are hosting and watching videos on I2P now, even some light gaming is possible on short tunnels. Things should be continuing to improve too.
I’ve gotten 1MB down when I’ve set it to 1 jump, so its not to bad
For sure, it’s definitely a lot faster for a lot of people, but it’s definitely not consistent yet, you’re rolling the dice to get good tunnels. Especially if you’re in the sorts of places where Internet censorship is a major issue getting good tunnels is a struggle.