Netflix VPN detection - actual engineer needed

Sun Jun 5 21:59:27 UTC 2016

> On Jun 5, 2016, at 14:18 , Damian Menscher <menscher at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jun 3, 2016 at 4:43 PM, Baldur Norddahl <baldur.norddahl at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> Den 4. jun. 2016 01.26 skrev "Cryptographrix" <cryptographrix at gmail.com>:
>>> 
>>> The information I'm getting from Netflix support now is explicitly
>> telling
>>> me to turn off IPv6 - someone might want to stop them before they
>>> completely kill US IPv6 adoption.
>> 
>> Not allowing he.net tunnels is not killing ipv6. You just need need native
>> ipv6.
>> 
> 
> This entire thread confuses me.  Are there normal home users who are being
> blocked from Netflix because their ISP forces them through a HE VPN?  Or is
> this massive thread just about a handful of geeks who think IPv6 is cool
> and insist they be allowed to use it despite not having it natively?  I
> could certainly understand ISP concerns that they are receiving user
> complaints because they failed to provide native IPv6 (why not?), but
> whining that you've managed to create a non-standard network setup doesn't
> work with some providers seems a bit silly.
> 
> Damian

What is non-standard about an HE tunnel? It conforms to the relevant RFCs and
is a very common configuration widely deployed to many thousands of locations
around the internet.

It’s not that Netflix happens to not work with these tunnels, the problem is
that they are taking deliberate active steps to specifically block them.

Most likely, these steps are being taken at the behest of their content providers,
but to the best of my knowledge, that is merely speculation so far as I don’t
believe Netflix themselves have confirmed this. (It’s not unlikely that they are
unable to do so due to those same content providers likely insisting on these
requirements being considered proprietary information subject to NDA.)

So… I don’t know how many “normal users” use HE tunnels vs. “geeks” or how one
would go about defining the difference. I can tell you that there are an awful
lot of people using HE tunnels, and based on what I saw while working at HE,
I don’t believe they are all geeks. While I would say that geeks are a larger
fraction of the HE Tunnel using populace than of the general population, I’m
not sure to what extent. Probably a lot less than you think based on the
tone of your message.

I think that a provider that has specifically claimed to be an early adopter
supporting IPv6 and is now having their support department tell customers to
turn off IPv6 altogether is certainly noteworthy and not in a good way.

Further, if that provider is actively taking steps to damage previously working
IPv6 network configurations, that is also worthy of substantial negative
publicity.

I’m confused as to why you would think otherwise.

Owen