Did this with policy based routing in my opnsense (pfsense) router a couple of weeks ago. egress via a specific tailscale exit node for a list of domains including Imgur.
Also browsing Minecraft mods/shaders was my motivation ha.
Imgur geo-blocked the UK, so I geo-unblocked my network
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Re: Imgur geo-blocked the UK, so I geo-unblocked my network
#162Imgur is one of the more annoying UK geoblocks because they persist it with cookies, so if you want to view something you can’t just switch to VPN for a second without also changing browser sessions. Reddit is worse… you can’t even view someone’s profile if they’ve ever submitted a post labeled NSFW.
Why would they do that? (Not a rhetorical question, just curious). It would suffice to block UK IPs for compliance, if visitors use a VPN to circumvent that Imgur would get more traffic and more ad revenue. No reason to put extra work into blocking those users.
vindictiveness
Re: Imgur geo-blocked the UK, so I geo-unblocked my network
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
This also seems like an easy way for VPN providers to differentiate themselves with their apps. The fact that it hasn’t happened makes me think that it’s impossible with unrooted iOS
It's tricky to do for large public websites, because routing happens at the IP level while users want to input a domain name. That domain could constantly resolve to different IPs, requiring updates to the routing rules, and those IPs could be shared with many other domain names that the user didn't list (for example Cloudflare IPs). So the mapping isn't clean and you're likely to miss some IPs some of the time or in…
VPN app can still solve it by locally resolving configured domain into special local IP, which get VPNed into real IP on their side. You'll need to encode original DNS name into protocol somehow, so that remote side knows which real IP to access, but it is certainly doable.
Re: Imgur geo-blocked the UK, so I geo-unblocked my network
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
And in the end, 90% of people will throw it in the trash with everything else. I'm actually in the other 10%, but I live in the middle of a big city where I have electronic waste container like 300m away. Btw, that's an awful website. I like simple minimalistic websites, but some people confuse "simple" with "give literally 0 fucks about the reader" and then I have 50-word long lines to read on my 32" monitor. Just p…
You’re lucky. For people without cars anything other than curbside recycling is usually a nightmare. Ironically.
Yeah, that was my point, it's easy for me, but that's not the case for most people in the country. And I guess that most people living near me don't think about putting electronics in the dedicated container anyway, even if that container is near them.
Re: Imgur geo-blocked the UK, so I geo-unblocked my network
#165Imagine having to install a vpn to browse the internet in a first world country.
Imagine deciding to pull out of a country because you refuse to comply with protecting the personal data of actual children.
> Imagine deciding to pull out of a country because you refuse to comply with protecting the personal data of actual children.
Haha. You mean like Meta, Google, Apple and Microsoft ? If EU really cared about children, those companies would not be doing business in the EU.
Re: Imgur geo-blocked the UK, so I geo-unblocked my network
#166> Second, even if I installed a VPN on my main machine, what about my phone? My laptop? My desktop? Every device would need the VPN running, and I’d have to remember to connect it before browsing. It’s messy. This is what routers are for. My router (a cheap fanless box with several network ports running linux) is the only thing on my network that knows there's a VPN. I can selectively route whatever I want through it…
> a cheap fanless box with several network ports running linux Do you remember the name of the product?
Not the poster you're responding to, but...
I'm running OPNSense on a GMKtec G9 (a N150-based NUC with dual 2.5Gbps NICs), and a cheap managed switch. All-in, you can get it today for well under $300. Even that is rather overpowered for running my house.
The toughest component to pin down was a mesh wifi system that supports tagging VLAN segments. That's almost exclusively enterprise territory, so it's hard to find something affordable.
Re: Imgur geo-blocked the UK, so I geo-unblocked my network
#167Next-gen VPN: content-aware routing. Just as NAT keeps track of who is talking to what, VPNs will one day actively detect that traffic is hitting blocks and re-route that through exits not subject to blocks. Bypassing local restrictions on an ad-hoc basis will become seemless.
Re: Imgur geo-blocked the UK, so I geo-unblocked my network
#168That's a lot of steps for something that would be a simple route rule or mangle + mark routing on mikrotik. The route rule would route out a VPN instead of the main route. If the domain name resolves to many IPs you can keep an address list up to date using a simple script.
> That's a lot of steps for something that would be a simple route rule or mangle + mark routing on mikrotik.
I'm sorry but suggesting buying and setting up hardware as an easier and more accessible alternative to a purely software-based solution that will take at most a couple of hours to install is simply ridiculous.
Re: Imgur geo-blocked the UK, so I geo-unblocked my network
#169> Second, even if I installed a VPN on my main machine, what about my phone? My laptop? My desktop? Every device would need the VPN running, and I’d have to remember to connect it before browsing. It’s messy. This is what routers are for. My router (a cheap fanless box with several network ports running linux) is the only thing on my network that knows there's a VPN. I can selectively route whatever I want through it…
You can do it like this, or (easier IMO if your router doesn't support it) you can just setup a raspberry pi as a VPN router then set you dhcp server on your router to hand out the RPIs address. You can then switch on to the normal connection at any point you need by just changing your default gateway back to .1
2GB Pi5 maxes out the 1Gb port.
Re: Imgur geo-blocked the UK, so I geo-unblocked my network
#170> Second, even if I installed a VPN on my main machine, what about my phone? My laptop? My desktop? Every device would need the VPN running, and I’d have to remember to connect it before browsing. It’s messy. This is what routers are for. My router (a cheap fanless box with several network ports running linux) is the only thing on my network that knows there's a VPN. I can selectively route whatever I want through it…
> This is what routers are for.
Useless in modern days though. IP addresses with anything backed by any cloud/CDN can vanish whenever they want, you'll always need to keep track of the upstream DNS responses.
That's extra fun if you do site-to-site-VPNs with a major customer. Won't name names, but they do have a habit of going through IP renumbering sprees every year or two and it's a true pain to keep the routing table, Zerotrust provider config and firewall rulesets in sync.