161–170 of 333 posts
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They purchase residential traffic exit from botnets.
Any proof or articles you could link to backup that claim seems unlikely given their size/reputation also would be surprised they’d get blocked this often using botnet traffic
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Do you know anyone in that country who will let you stick an rPI behind their modem?
AppleTV has a Tailscale client that you can use an exit node. That's what I do to VPN back to home when I'm traveling.
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Apple, for better or worse, has been able to use their size to pressure sites into accepting connections from their Private Relay service. If VPN usage becomes the norm, sites will have to give in eventually.
It’s better than most VPNs, but the amount of Cloudflare challenges I get is really annoying. It’s a little weird because Apple has device attestation which is run via Cloudflare and Fastly. You’d think that would get you around the challenges, but that doesn’t seem to happen.
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Does this really work? I would think the ping time would not be dominated by speed of light, but by number of hops, and connection quality. As a hypothetical example, an IP in a New York City data center is likely to have a shorted ping to a London data center, than a rural New York IP address.
The speed of light sets a minimum bound even if you don't account for that, and these are coming up less than the minimum bound. It also reminds me of this old story: https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
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Back when I was doing that uber-shady business of torrenting, and this kind of VPN was much less-common than it is today, I paid for VPN access with crypto. I'd gather a small amount of that up (however I did that), keep it in an offline wallet, and spend it on VPN service every now and then. It just seemed like the right way to go about things. (And then I lost that wallet, because of course I did, with about $14 wo…
Enough to buy like 512MB of DDR5 RAM maybe
(I'm sure that browsers like lynx still work just like they did in 2001, and that pine can still read mail. Shouldn't be a problem, right?)
Interesting to learn you can identify the real country/area of origin using probe latency. Though could this be simulated? Like what if the VPN IP just added 100ms-300ms of latency to all of its outgoing traffic? Ideally vary the latency based on the requesting IP's location. And also just ignore typical probe requests like ICMP (ping). And ideally all the IPs near the end of the traceroute would do all this too. To…
The VPN provider only controls their network, not their upstream.
So you can set minimum latency on your responses. But your upstream networks won't be doing this.
I'm a big VPN user since I am the citizen of one country and the resident of another. Even for government services I have to use a VPN. I tried to access the bureau of statistics of my home country through my foreign residential IP and got 404s on all pages. Enabled VPN and everything magically started working. For watching the election result video stream I also had to VPN but at least that one gave me a clear messa…
Do you have friends or family in your home country that will run an AppleTV box with Tailscale for you as an exit node? I can't get into work from a non-US IP, but I can Tailscale back to my house and it works just fine. I even gave my in-laws (who live several states away) an AppleTV box running TS just to have another endpoint if for some reason the power goes out at my house while I'm gone (rare, but happens).
I tried to use ProtonVPN when I switched over to ProtonMail a year ago. But so much of the web does not work when you're on a VPN. For example even HackerNews has VPN restrictions. More and more sites know where VPN endpoints originate. How will VPNs prevent this in the future without them just become easy to block?
Even worse is the Reddit approach, where leaving your VPN on will get your account shadow banned permanently. But you are not notified of that, so if you are wondering why nobody is replying to your comments, check in a private session if you can visit your profile page.
Interesting to learn you can identify the real country/area of origin using probe latency. Though could this be simulated? Like what if the VPN IP just added 100ms-300ms of latency to all of its outgoing traffic? Ideally vary the latency based on the requesting IP's location. And also just ignore typical probe requests like ICMP (ping). And ideally all the IPs near the end of the traceroute would do all this too. To…
If you 300ms latency then yes, you defeat this detection mechanism.
Find the ASN(s) advertising that network and figure out their location.
Even within the ASN there may still be multiple hops, and those IPs may be owned by others (eg the hosting facility) who are not playing the same latency games.
To highlight virtual routing: it’s useful in scenarios where a country blocks VPNs but you still need an IP from that country to browse local websites. In such cases, virtual routing comes in handy. For example, when India required all VPN servers in the country to log user traffic, Proton moved its Indian server to Singapore and used virtual networking tricks to continue offering an Indian IP address.