So they are blocking by blacklisting foreign ISPs? What happens in tor network?
Netflix hammers cross-border watchers and there may be no way out
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Re: Netflix hammers cross-border watchers and there may be no way out
#12I just tried it from a commercial VPN provider. Tried New York, Miami, Los Angeles and Atlanta.
Worked just fine. I was able to watch a show that's only on American Netflix.
I also have a VPS in Texas that I use with openvpn. It works fine too.
Are they just blocking the "watch American Netflix" services?
Re: Netflix hammers cross-border watchers and there may be no way out
#13Any ideas on what technical means Netflix is using to tip the scales in their favor?
I can't speak on this with any authority, but I feel like it would be fairly easy to detect. If you suddenly see 500 different accounts all connecting from the same small block of IP addresses and most of them use out-of-country credit cards, blocking that IP range would be a logical conclusion. This could be managed automatically (or at least alerted to a human to check) with not much effort.
Actually, it's even easier than this: they just make a list of accounts that have connected via a border-hopping service, then block that service, and then see where the listed accounts connect through. Since the accounts themselves can be flagged, Netflix will always have the advantage in detecting new workarounds.
Re: Netflix hammers cross-border watchers and there may be no way out
#14[deleted]
Re: Netflix hammers cross-border watchers and there may be no way out
#15I doubt anyone on HN would pay for a service like UFlix when the DIY alternative is much more efficient.
For less cost we use our own US-based vps, running something like the shadowsocks proxy. It's the same rig we found to work the best in China against the great firewall.
With its own dedicated IP, it would likely be cost-inefficient for Netflix to detect without blocking an entire range of legitimate IP addresses.
Re: Netflix hammers cross-border watchers and there may be no way out
#16Netflix has been messing with settings in their system that are breaking the experience for users in the middle of the US too. For the last two weekends I've been getting strange experiences accessing their site from my house.
My PC works fine and can access content. My cell phone, connected to the same home wireless randomly gets messages "You are using a proxy and cannot access this content". Testing both units on whatismyip.com and my own web server show that requests are coming from the same IP. A day or two later it will start working just fine. Stop breaking things or I'll just stick with Amazon and drop your service.
Re: Netflix hammers cross-border watchers and there may be no way out
#17There's so much content on Canadian Netflix these days (Star Wars!), why would anyone bother with it?
As an aside, when I was in Paris, a hotel I was staying at routed their free WiFi through a US VPN (presumably so the Americans wouldn't be offended by having Google return results in French or some shit), and I couldn't even watch French Netflix in France! So annoying.
Re: Netflix hammers cross-border watchers and there may be no way out
#18My solution to this was to pay a friend in the states to share his residential connection. I'd like to see them try and block Comcast's residential blocks. There's potential here for a middleman to write software/develop hardware that can share residential connections whilst filtering destination IPs (e.g. allowing AWS addresses) to try and minimize the potential for abuse with the goal of discouraging traffic other…
This won't work longer term if you also watch shows from your home region. A former Netflix engineer and I were talking about enforcing this sort of thing and people who "hop regions" always watch shows from different regions at different times. That flags your account, and your "home region" is known from your billing address and the "other" regions will get locked out.
From what I understood they were still working on the "driller" problem where people who live in Canada but work in the US as oil drillers/exploration folks during the week in the northern part of the state, and go home for weekends. But the thing you can't change are watching shows from two different regions on the same account.
Re: Netflix hammers cross-border watchers and there may be no way out
#19I know that it's not Netflix's fault per se and they're under pressure from the dinosaurs running the media companies. However really well done - you're now leaving people with no choice but to torrent again.
Re: Netflix hammers cross-border watchers and there may be no way out
#20ugh. Hollywood should just release content globally at the same time so this won't be an issue.