Comment by kelsey98765431
8 days ago
This is just a cat a mouse game. VPN services will start to offer residential endpoints when enough websites start blocking them enough to damage the value proposition. There is no way on the current internet to verify an ip address means anything at all other than it's an ip address.
There is no way to offer “residential endpoints” at scale with sufficient bandwidth for anything other than simple browsing of text websites. As shown by the very effective Netflix strategy of blocking VPN addresses, it’s been very hard to slip through for a good four or five years now.
It is absolutely possible and multiple providers already do it, just search for “residential ip vpn”. The legit ones pay people $20 a month or so to plug a mysterious box into their network which the provider will route traffic through. The shadier ones will just route your traffic straight through a botnet.
If there is enough demand then IPSs themselves could offer this service to foreign customers.
Netflix blocking just wasn't a big enough of a motivator to solve that problem. But messing with people's porn access would be. The internet was built on porn distribution.
> There is no way to offer “residential endpoints” at scale with sufficient bandwidth for anything other than simple browsing of text websites
They can, it’s just a lot more expensive than a $10 a month VPN. They’re typically metered and you pay by the byte.
As someone totally uninformed, are you saying that all those YouTube ads about e.g. Private Internet Access (et al), which specifically cite getting around geo restrictions in the ad copy, are BS?
Which sounds like a silly question ("of course the marketing is BS") but why even bother marketing if the core value proposition of your billed-monthly service doesn't work? Seems like a waste of money since you'll at most get people for one month when they cancel after realizing they can't watch Canadian Netflix from Florida, or whatever.
> As someone totally uninformed, are you saying that all those YouTube ads about e.g. Private Internet Access (et al), which specifically cite getting around geo restrictions in the ad copy, are BS?
Yep, they are all lying to you, but with a wiggle room for a workaround or to point the blame at Netflix. Once you get in, you'll notice that Netflix, Prime Video, Steam, some of YouTube, and pretty much any legitimate service with geo-fencing not working. You then email support complaining that this is not working for you. The answer varies depending on the company. For example:
- Private Internet Access will try to up sell you for your own static IP. That hopefully remains undiscovered by Netflix et al for a bit. (Obviously you're trading anonymity and privacy aspects of a VPN if it's a static ip attached to you, but I don't think people trying to stream Netflix from Italy or where ever care about that)
- Mullvad will tell you: yeah that doesn't work. We never advertised that. Don't renew next month.
- Proton will keep asking you to try endpoints manually (each country has hundreds of endpoints and their app picks a random one. Just keep trying different ones manually. They might give your account access to some "new endpoints" (if they have them) that are not blocked yet. Hopefully once the refund period has passed, they will tell you "sorry we're having trouble with Netflix currently. we're working on it"
Some of them will suggest using "another streaming service??" because "Netflix is having issues in [INSERT_COUNTRY]"
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I can confirm that PIA does not reliably get around geo restrictions. There's only so many IPs in the pool, and the content providers will block them.
There are alternatives like Hola VPN, a "free" peer to peer VPN except non-paying users have traffic routed through them. But performance of peer to peer VPNs are not as good.
Apart from the first month don't forget those that subscribe and forget about it or subscribe for Netflix and use it for something else on top of those that cancel after the first period.
The 1 month period is also usually priced much higher anways. E.g. PIA is currently $11.95/m for 1 month, $39.96 for 1 year, and $79.17 for 3.25 years (instead of half a year @ monthly). With a curve that steep it's obvious they have severe retention issues at short intervals.
considering PIA also still has their sponsors spill the usual "don't connect to a public wifi without a VPN! or else hackers can see everything!!" (SSL/TLS solved this problem a long time ago) yeah I would take anything they and many others claim in ads.
Streaming services don't have any incentive to ban traffic from non-residential addresses right now. But they might with enough legislative pressure.
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I have a residential fibre connection that’s 3Gbps symmetrical, unmetered. If there was something in it for me (and I was legally shielded) I would consider renting some of that out. And there’s definitely other people out there who would change that “consider” to “definitely.” It’s possible to even get a residential 8Gbps symmetrical connection here for not a ton of money; that can support a lot of video traffic.
Your terms of service with the ISP almost certainly forbid any form of reselling, or sharing the connection outside of your household.
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> As shown by the very effective Netflix strategy of blocking VPN addresses, it’s been very hard to slip through for a good four or five years now.
And is_vpn(ip_address) is a service that's offered by a variety of vendors already.
> There is no way to offer “residential endpoints” at scale
Bot nets.
Netflix was blocking by endpoint IP? That is just a cat and mouse game. They should have been blocking if the MTU was not 1500 bytes.
Lots of real ISPs use tunnels.
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Hola, eso suficiente.
I mean, it’s more of a bot network really, but there is a massive amount of bandwidth there.
This cat and mouse game applies to OP's first category of sites that want to comply for fear of the British government, but not the second category of sites that actively don't want to comply. Let's refer to the second category as deliberately non-compliant.
The UK instructs ISPs to block access to deliberately non-compliant sites, however users want to make connections to the sites and those sites want to receive connections to those users. VPNs will be effective in allowing access to non-compliant sites as long as ISPs can't identify the VPN traffic.
Of course, the British ISPs can initiate the tactics used by China to identify and block illegal traffic. However there are limits to this. Unlike Chinese users, British internet users regularly make connections to international servers so various bridging techniques are possible. Like VPNs, proxies or even Remote Desktop.