Comment by vitus

4 days ago

> No, wouldn't connecting to a slow 3g tower affect ping times to all global servers proportionately?

Yep. Per the article (last point under "How it works"):

> Users with a high latency to all servers can be excluded from polls, as this is a strong indicator of a VPN/proxy usage

Something seems off about how they're measuring latency (which seems to be "fetch various AWS Lambda endpoints"), since their system seems to think that I have hundreds of milliseconds of latency even to the nearest AWS region (even though in practice it should be an order of magnitude lower), and multiple seconds to the other side of the world.

edit: well, if the slowness is just on last-mile delivery, then it should be a fixed amount of overhead added to each connection (rather than a multiplier). For instance, I have about 8ms of latency added by my ISP just by the first hop into their network. But it's that same 8ms overhead whether I'm connecting to a server on the other side of town, or on the other side of the world.