Netflix VPN detection - actual engineer needed
Laszlo Hanyecz
laszlo at heliacal.net
Sun Jun 5 23:33:52 UTC 2016
On 2016-06-05 22:48, Damian Menscher wrote:
>
> What *is* standard about them? My earliest training as a sysadmin taught
> me that any time you switch away from a default setting, you're venturing
> into the unknown. Your config is no longer well-tested; you may experience
> strange errors; nobody else will have seen the same bugs.
>
> That's exactly what's happening here -- people are setting up IPv6 tunnel
> broker connections, then complaining that there are unexpected side
> effects.
>
>
Damian,
If we were talking about some device that is outputting incorrect
packets and they are failing to work with Netflix I would agree with
you, but in this case the packets are standard and everything works
fine. Netflix went out of their way to try to find a way to make it not
work. The users and geeks aren't just breaking stuff and expecting
others to work around their broken setup, but this is actually what
Netflix is doing. All Netflix can look at is the content of the packet
and so they're using the source address to discriminate. It is true
that some users might be able to work around it if they can get on an
ISP that gives them an allowed address, but that isn't a good solution
for an open internet.
There are a lot of non technical Netflix users who are being told to
turn off IPv6, switch ISPs, get a new VPN, etc. because Netflix has a
broken system. Those users don't care what IPv6 is, they just learn
that it's bad because it breaks Netflix. Most users have no way to
change these things and they just aren't going to be able to use Netflix
anymore. That's a very selfish way to operate, a huge step backwards,
and it's a kick in the balls to everyone who works to make technological
progress on the internet. The simple truth is that Netflix is trying
to figure out where people are located, but this is not possible to do
reliably with current internet technology. Instead they did something
that is unreliable, and many customers become collateral damage through
no fault of their own. All the breakage is on the Netflix side.
-Laszlo
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