Comment by pierat

3 years ago

To be fair, I use subscribed ProtonVPN. Same exact issues.

Cloudflare gives me captchahell with infinite "click on fire hydrants or vans or bicycles or stoplights".

Amazon just pretends to "site error".

Numerous sites like Tiktok, JLwaters, my state's data portal, and others just give me a 403 forbidden.

Other sites just load a <html></html> blank document on my VPN.

And Proton is actually kind of hard to get port forwarding turned on. You can do it by adding a suffix to the OpenVPN name, or by generating a wireguard with port forwarding on.

But again, I don't think it's anything to do with port forwarding per se. The current web demands deanonymization. And naturally "abuse" is blamed, even when attached to legit accounts with legit historical purchases etc.

15 comments

pierat

Reply
dublinben  3 years ago

Even without a VPN, the built-in tracking protection in Firefox trips Cloudflare’s bot detection every time. It’s a not-so-subtle FU for taking any steps to protect your privacy online.

  • judge2020  3 years ago

    The goal is privacy, but the side effect is that you appear exactly as any spam/scraping bot out there. So website owners block this scenario and are fine that it'll likely exclude a minority of visitors who try to browse the web with maximum privacy.

    • raxxorraxor  3 years ago

      True, but it still is a flaw with services like cloudflare and I don't believe their users know how many people actually get blocked. There are quite a few people that are familiar with these issues and it isn't only the technically affine.

      2 replies →

VWWHFSfQ  3 years ago

> The current web demands deanonymization. And naturally "abuse" is blamed

I used to work at a smallish mom-and-pop website host (do those even exist anymore?) that also offered email services. Our PF firewall just straight-up blocked huge swaths of IPv4 CIDRs because it was 99% email spam and exploit scanners. We had no ability whatsoever to fight it any other way. I don't recall even a single complaint from any of our customers.

Wowfunhappy  3 years ago

> And Proton is actually kind of hard to get port forwarding turned on. You can do it by adding a suffix to the OpenVPN name, or by generating a wireguard with port forwarding on.

Regrettably, I suspect this does nothing for abusers, who are motivated, and instead impacts only "legitimate" customers.

KomoD  3 years ago

ProtonVPN supports port forwarding? Had no clue!

  • pierat  3 years ago

    Sure does. And it's easier with Wireguard than OVPN.

    I never successfully got an OpenVPN set up with proper port forwarding. It would appear to, and then just up and fail.

    With Wireguard, I set the port automatically with UPnP (Soulseek and torrents). Have it set up there, and works like a champ.

    You'll have to log in, go to Wireguard configs, set port forwarding and a P2P VPN, and download. Then do the usual with /etc/Wireguard and start it up. That's it.