Personal security

Hello Everyone!
So I am as new as they come and I would like to learn what I can and maybe help others do the same so I wanted to create this thread in order to start with the first utmost important thing. We all have aspirations and dreams and hopefully we can all achieve them with whatever means we take upon. These are some basics to help people get started maybe.

This thread is for Topics that I have questions about and perhaps many other new or existing members do as well so I will post up a question hopefully as often as i get them and you guys should do the same so we can look for those answers together.
We can all try to fill in the gaps but kindly be mindful that not everyone is as knowledgeable as you and if they cannot just google and find definitions of how you are explaining then kindly put it in layman's terms so we can all keep up.

From what I gather everyone varies in what measures they take and that choice will be yours to make as an individual but it does not hurt to learn those measures to be better acquainted in case we change our minds. So this should serve as somewhat of a helpful guide in what to look for


anyways lets start so far i have come across and briefly what i know

VPN-
provides a shared IP for you that A LOT of other ppl have access to and so it is somewhat useless because it is probably blacklisted in most places but it doesnt hurt to have it if you have nothing else going


RDP
this is when someone allocates a portion of their computer hardware ( RAM, CPU, storage etc) and partitions it off as a seperate operating entity, this is a physical machine that you can access remotely


VM
this is a virtual environment u create in order to safely test out whatever u want, a small scale example can be sandboxie. this way u do whatever u want and then delete the entire "operating system" without it having traces on ur actual device

VPS
very similar to RDP but this is not someone's personal computer being partitioned but rather a "cloud networking" so the way i think about this is, this is where big company rigs are set up and they have these giant machines set up at a place and all that is connected online to be accessed like RDP or for hosting websites and such. these are affordable and easily customizable because these companies have such giant machines so you can alway buy more specs to add

now people do integrate many of these things
e.g
start a VPN then connct to RDP or VPS then in there creat a VM and then start working

private IP
these are "residential" IP's over what VPN's offer which are shared so these are usually not blacklisted becasue they are dedicated to be used only by you and becasue of that a bit pricy-ish

DNS leak tests
these are offered by sites to check if the IP that you have set up is actually covering your entire work station and ur orginal IP is not being released to others


Question that i have trouble with right now if you can help with is
how would i go about setting a private ip, i see many sites offering to sell them and those are a bit pricy like average $1 per ip but can i just use any open source vpn to set that ip up and then do some leak tests? so i can make sure its a perfect environment. my guess is this has to be done in the final environment whether a person is directly connecting their machine to do work or in the RDP or VM because each environment has their own allocated IP
lets say for this example im trying to create a proxy paypal

question 2
why rdp over vps? some ppl seem to favor them

question 3
i found routers that you can set VPN's directly on them so that way you dont individually have to set up on each machine, any thoughts on these? is it worth the investment?

I am not posting links in this thread becasue idk if that will get this deleted or not so ya playing it safe but i think u can google most things i mentioned
lmk if this is helpful and i should share more topics that i come across if anything this can be like a public diary at the end of the day haha


who this thread is not for
- who knows what they are doing with opsec and such
- who is impatient to explain and responds with "learn some opsec!" to which "yes we are trying "
- who is not trying to help or learn

PS- i can absolutely be wrong in this info as i am learning so kindly correct where u see errors and for others do ur due diligence in fact checking and such also feel free to ask and whatever i know i will share as much as time allows