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Why was SOCKS5 discontinued?
Igor MechtcheriakovNov 29, 2022
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As of April 30, 2022 Windscribe discontinued support/use of SOCKS5 servers. This is because SOCKS5 is an insecure protocol that does not support encryption, and should not be used for anything sensitive. We are also a VPN provider, not a proxy provider, and many people would use our SOCKS proxies for abuse against other websites/services.

There are far better alternatives that are more secure. These include:

Split Tunneling:
Our Windows, Android and MacOS 10.12 - 10.15 apps support split tunneling, so you can route a specific process/application or domain/IP to go over the secure VPN tunnel, without interfering with your regular connection. You can access your split tunneling settings in Preferences > Connection > Split Tunneling. You can click here to learn how to use this feature. 

Proxy Gateway:
Our desktop apps support the Proxy Gateway feature, which allows you to setup your own SOCKS5 server, right on your machine that's running Windscribe. Go to Preferences > Connection > Proxy Gateway to use this feature. 

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