31–40 of 65 posts
How can they know all VPN? Can I setup a private VPN somewhere?
I 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.
Tried that... I think by now, Netflix has banned pretty much all VPS providers, most likely as all the unblocking sites went from one to another
I 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?
Likely commercial VPNs aren't heavily used and may have more of a legitimate use... If Netflix sees a lot traffic from specific methods of access they will look into it...
They have been expanding the blocking efforts since last year. The list continues to grow of failed methods... Wasn't a hard cutover.
Likely this initiative is cause 3rd parties are making money, and content providers werent
How can they know all VPN? Can I setup a private VPN somewhere?
Netflix also tracks which region you're accessing data from, which means that if you live in Croatia and your billing info states that you're in Croatia but you're consistently switching back and forth between accessing US Netflix and Croatian Netflix, they can still tell that you're circumventing the region system despite using a private VPN.
(to avoid that particular method that Neflix is using)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Huh? If you have US billing, you can only watch the US catalog, and you need a US IP, right? But that's fine with the OP, that's why he is using his friends broadband anyway. The US catalog is what you want.
But the question for the OP is, is that enough? As far as I can tell Netflix doesn't care at all about people who only stream from one region but they do care about people who stream from multiple regions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Huh? If you have US billing, you can only watch the US catalog, and you need a US IP, right? But that's fine with the OP, that's why he is using his friends broadband anyway. The US catalog is what you want.
From what I understand you get to watch the content of the region you are in at the moment. So on holiday you lose access to your home catalogue, but actually gain access to the catalogue of the country you are in at that moment. This seems to be part of how these region limited contracts with the content owners work.
The two alternatives are not being able to use Netflix at all when you are abroad, or having access only to the catalogue of the country you are paying the bills from, regardless of where you physically are.
Netflix appears to be heavily focusing on their own content to prevent this whole problem, but that does mean that the option of being able to pick whatever you want (legally) from a large back-catalogue is now blocked.
> UFlix Maybe they should not call it UFlix but something like "VPN for your business needs, and for avoiding corrupt and oppressive governments".
You may or may not be joking but it's true they really should've. There's no way Netflix can justify to content owners that they are trying seriously when they neglect to block something so obvious.
How can they know all VPN? Can I setup a private VPN somewhere?
Netflix also tracks which region you're accessing data from, which means that if you live in Croatia and your billing info states that you're in Croatia but you're consistently switching back and forth between accessing US Netflix and Croatian Netflix, they can still tell that you're circumventing the region system despite using a private VPN.
Netflix 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…
It's probably not Netflix's fault though. I'd wager it's the media companies who own the rights to the movies.
How can they know all VPN? Can I setup a private VPN somewhere?
https://medium.com/@ValdikSS/detecting-vpn-and-its-configura...