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VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits

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Re: VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits

#61

Post by ramity »

Pyrolol wrote: post #45
ramity wrote: post #31

Contrasting take: RTT and a service providing black box knowledge is not equivalent to knowledge of the backbone. To assume traffic is always efficiently routed seems dubious when considering a global scale. The supporting infrastructure of telecom is likely shaped by volume/size of traffic and not shortest paths. I'll confess my evaluation here might be overlooking some details. I'm curious on others' thoughts on th…

The speed of light provides a limit on distance for a given RTT, and taking the examples in the article which are less than 0.5ms and considering the speed of light (300km/ms) the measured exit countries must be accurate. The speed of light in fiber which probably covers most of the distance is also even slower due to refraction (about 2/3).

Thanks for your informative reply. I see now I was approaching this incorrectly. I was considering drawing conclusions from a high RTT rather than a RTT so small it would be impossible to have gone the distance.

Re: VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits

#62

Post by AndroTux »

crazygringo wrote: post #46

Is there any real-life situation in which this matters, though? If you're picking a country so you can access a Netflix show that geolimits to that country, but Netflix is also using this same faulty list... then you still get to watch your show. If you're picking a country for latency reasons, you're still getting a real location "close enough". Plus latency is affected by tons of things such as VPN server saturatio…

Yes. Let’s take an extreme example: you think you exit in Japan, but you’re actually exiting in China. This means your traffic will be analyzed and censored by China.

The routers don’t care about where the provider says the IP comes from. If the packet travels through the router, it gets processed. So it very much matters if you do things that are legal in one country, but might not be in another. You know, one of the main reasons for using VPNs.

Re: VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits

#63

Post by gspr »

flumpcakes wrote: post #24
illusive4080 wrote: post #8

Mullvad is the only VPN I will ever trust. Yet again they ace the test.

I also use Mullvad VPN exclusively for my VPN needs. The fact I can get 6 months of access with a scratch card bought from a store & my account is just a random integer number is an example of privacy by design: no email, no phone numbers, no credit cards. I don't even do anything illegal, I'd just rather have a (what I feel) trusted option when I want to browse the Internet anonymously.

You can even just randomly generate such an ID number, write it on a piece of paper and enclose it with cash in one of several currencies, and post it to them.

Re: VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits

#64

Post by rynn »

bgbntty2 wrote: post #20
barfoure wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same issue exists with Tor exit nodes. It’s anonymous in that you have a hoodie on with a giant spotlight right on you.

A better metaphor would be that Tor and VPNs are like wearing a mask in public. It's obvious that you're trying to be anonymous, but you're still wearing a mask, so no one knows who you are. You may be denied entry to certain establishments, but some of the bouncers don't block all masks and if you're persistent with changing your mask (Tor or VPN exit node), there's a good chance you'll get in. CTRL+SHIFT+L works on…

Do you use Tor for everything? How do you deal with the latency?

Re: VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits

#65

Post by ascorbic »

aerostable_slug wrote: post #35
eek2121 wrote: post #22

This was a dumb study, and if they'd asked the VPN providers, I'm sure someone would tell them why. All the VPN providers I've used let you select the endpoint from a dropdown menu. I'm not using a VPN to make it appear I'm in Russia, I'm using it as one of many tools to help further my browsing privacy. My endpoint is one of 2 major cities that are close to me. Could I pick some random 3rd world country? Sure! That…

Re: random countries, sometimes with PIA the Panama exit has a crazily low ping time (I'm physically in California). I wonder what leads to it? Hawaii I can understand, there's a cable landing not far from my physical location, but Panama is a mystery to me.

If you look at the list in the PIA menu, you'll see Panama has the "geo-located region" icon, which means that it's a virtual one and isn't in Panama.

Re: VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits

#66

Post by crazygringo »

AndroTux wrote: post #62
crazygringo wrote: post #46

Is there any real-life situation in which this matters, though? If you're picking a country so you can access a Netflix show that geolimits to that country, but Netflix is also using this same faulty list... then you still get to watch your show. If you're picking a country for latency reasons, you're still getting a real location "close enough". Plus latency is affected by tons of things such as VPN server saturatio…

Yes. Let’s take an extreme example: you think you exit in Japan, but you’re actually exiting in China. This means your traffic will be analyzed and censored by China. The routers don’t care about where the provider says the IP comes from. If the packet travels through the router, it gets processed. So it very much matters if you do things that are legal in one country, but might not be in another. You know, one of th…

Are any VPN's getting China wrong? It would be pretty obvious. In fact, common VPN's I'm looking at don't even support China as an option. Obviously no VPN's are mixing countries up where it becomes clear from what you're allowed to browse.

But so "if you do things that are legal in one country, but might not be in another" is what I'm specifically asking about. Ultimately, legality is determined by the laws that apply to you, not the country your packets come out of. So I'm asking for a specific example.

And I already said, that if a site is attempting to determine permissions based on the country, it's doing so via the same list. E.g. when the country is actually Greenland, but you think it's the UK, and Netflix also thinks it's the UK. Which is why I'm saying, at the end of the day, is there any real consequence here? If both sender and receiver think it's the UK, what does it matter if it's actually Greenland?

Re: VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits

#67

Post by jopsen »

drnick1 wrote: post #28
illusive4080 wrote: post #8

Mullvad is the only VPN I will ever trust. Yet again they ace the test.

The best thing is that they accept crypto. I wouldn't want to pay for a VPN with a credit card in my name.

> I wouldn't want to pay for a VPN with a credit card in my name.

Wow, you must be using the VPN for some seriously shady stuff.

Re: VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits

#68

Post by wongarsu »

crazygringo wrote: post #46

Is there any real-life situation in which this matters, though? If you're picking a country so you can access a Netflix show that geolimits to that country, but Netflix is also using this same faulty list... then you still get to watch your show. If you're picking a country for latency reasons, you're still getting a real location "close enough". Plus latency is affected by tons of things such as VPN server saturatio…

Attempting to use a VPN location in Somalia and actually getting routed to an exit in Paris or London is not what I would consider "close enough". That's off by 3000 miles. That's like claiming to be in the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil while being in Montreal, Canada. And apparently 28% of locations are off by at least this much

And if I do it for privacy, the actual exit location seems very relevant. Even if I trust the VPN provider to keep my data safe (which for the record I wouldn't with the majority of this list), I still have to consider what happens to the data on either end of the VPN connection. I'm willing to bet money that any VPN data exiting in London is monitored by GCHQ, while an exit in Russia probably wouldn't be in direct view of NSA and GCHQ

Re: VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits

#69

Post by ramity »

seszett wrote: post #51
ramity wrote: post #31

Contrasting take: RTT and a service providing black box knowledge is not equivalent to knowledge of the backbone. To assume traffic is always efficiently routed seems dubious when considering a global scale. The supporting infrastructure of telecom is likely shaped by volume/size of traffic and not shortest paths. I'll confess my evaluation here might be overlooking some details. I'm curious on others' thoughts on th…

They don't have to assume that traffic is efficiently routed, on the contrary if they can have a It just can't be outside England, just one 0.4ms RTT as seen here is enough to be certain that the server is less then 120 km away from London (or wherever their probe was, they don't actually say, just the UK). RTT from a known vantage point gives an absolute maximum distance, and if that maximum distance is too short th…

I see I was mistaken, but I'm tempted to continue poking holes. Trying a different angle, though it may be a stretch, but could a caching layer within the VPN provider cause these sort of "too fast" RTTs?

Let's say you're a global VPN provider and you want to reduce as much traffic as possible. A user accesses the entry point of your service to access a website that's blocked in their country. For the benefit of this thought experiment, let's say the content is static/easily cacheable or because the user is testing multiple times, that dynamic content becomes cached. Could this play into the results presented in this article? Again, I know I'm moving goalposts here, but I'm just trying to be critical of how the author arrived at their conclusion.

Re: VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits

#70

Post by devilbunny »

systemtest wrote: post #43

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).

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