But if that's the extent of the approach you'd still be giving the same information to your VPN provider.
Most people would be better off just making sure all of their traffic uses TLS. If you also need to obscure your address from your destination's host, then combine the two protections.
Agreed. I've made a day trip to the neighboring state to buy a used car from a CL listing, but I probably wouldn't travel to the other side of the country for it.
Similarly, for many things I wouldn't travel more than an hour to get them.
The distance radius really needs to be adjustable per search to be useful outside of densely populated areas.
It seems like on CL the city labels are mostly for human readable convenience and behind the scenes it's by distance. You can set a distance from any point:
One thing I would find valuable is mechanisms to dissuade the listings with obviously false prices. So many things on CL that aren't really free or $1.
My use of eBay is closer to my use of Craigslist instead of being like an auction. I don't like to wait for the long bidding windows used online. I also don't like haggling on prices. In this case, people post what they're selling, and if I decide to buy it a third party payment platform is used to transfer funds.
The differences are that CL is usually items I pick up personally instead of being shipped (but not always), and some CL sellers only accept cash. I have also picked up eBay purchases locally.
Someone makes a good product and then sells it in a store. Even if they do nothing else and buy no ads, a marketing wank somewhere would apparently want to take credit for the maker's work.
Thanks for the pointer! I took the opportunity to learn a bit about more recent NNTP by reading the standard: RFC 3977. It looks like nntp v2 circa 2006 added MIME encoding, so I would guess that may be how a service provider would differentiate.
I haven't used Usenet since the turn of the century. Back then it was all text (including every article under alt.binaries), and even pirated media needed to be split into a multi-part format (often rar) then each part uuencoded so it could be included in an article.
VPN isn't the only or best solution for this. Alternatives include TOR, proxies, etc.