Netflix VPN detection - actual engineer needed

Sun Jun 5 22:38:53 UTC 2016

On 2016-06-05 21:18, Damian Menscher wrote:
> 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

I think this thread is specifically about bashing Netflix for blocking 
HE, but the root of the problem is in trying to use the apparent source 
address of a packet to determine where a person might be located.

In this case Netflix is deliberately trying to fight VPNs and the users 
understand what's going on.  Usually a blocked user can't even load the 
website they are blocked from, so they can't even complain, unless they 
happen to notice that works from some other ISP (at home/work perhaps).  
In these situations people blame the network/ISP and that's the part 
that ticks off the admins of those networks.  Try explaining to a 
complaining user that it's the website's fault while it works from their 
friend's connection.

For another example, some CDN hosts offer their customers the ability to 
block requests based on GeoIP country - this is a terrible idea for 
obvious reasons but that doesn't stop CDNs from offering it, and of 
course website owners fall for it and enable it.  Then what happens is 
there are a bunch of users who can't access the site at all.  It makes 
no sense because they are not 'bad guys' and they're not from the wrong 
country, so what gives?  Well it's just collateral damage, they can move 
to a major city and use a major national ISP that's in the database.  
Maybe they're on a HE tunnel, maybe they're on a new ISP who just got 
their netblocks.. in the end they are blacklisted and to those users it 
just looks like the website operator went out of business.  How 
widespread is this problem?  For me, the websites of the local public 
school system and a major local grocery store block based on GeoIP and I 
can't access them because my numbers aren't in their db.  There are city 
services sites that I can't access without jumping through hoops with 
proxies or VPNs.  I've personally tried to complain to several of these 
website operators and even after escalations the best I can get is "did 
you try clearing your cookies".  It's not good.

-Laszlo