The great Netflix vpn debacle! (geofeeds)

Tue Aug 31 23:32:06 UTC 2021

On 2021-09-01 01:13, Owen DeLong via NANOG wrote:
> You just broke 99% of the smart television sets in people’s homes, unfortunately.

If only everybody would not get a separate box, be that a AppleTV, a 
Playstation, a XBox, Chromecast, ... or many other options.

Fun part being that it is hard to get a Dumb TV... though that is 
primarily simply because of all the tracking non-sense in them that 
makes them 'cheaper'... (still wonder how well that tracking stuff 
complies with GDPR, I am thinking it does not ... Schrems anyone? :) )

> That will resolve itself over time, of course, as sets are replaced, but anyone with
> a set that is more than ~3 years old is mostly unlikely to have IPv6 support in it and
> the vendors are ALL universally terrible about updating firmware.

Quite a bit of Android TV out there too.... and we all know how well 
that supports DHCPv6... ;)

Btw, geofeeds are getting fetched by some entities.

I've seen at least Dataprovider.com and DB-IP, others that fetch the CSV 
don't bother to set UA to something unique, thus one sees curl + axios 
coming by for instance, which does not tell much; but apparently we have 
to give up on UAs anyway, even though they are great for things like 
bots where one can have a wee bit of contact details in the line.

For instance DB-IP does regular updates of their code (rXXXX) and 
fetches quite often:

2a00:18a8:6:40:dcad:beff:feef:100 - - [23/Aug/2021:09:32:09 +0000] "GET 
/geofeed.csv HTTP/1.0" 200 827 "-" "db-ip geofeed updater r6499"
2a00:18a8:6:40:dcad:beff:feef:100 - - [23/Aug/2021:09:02:14 +0000] "GET 
/geofeed.csv HTTP/1.0" 200 827 "-" "db-ip geofeed updater r6499"
2a00:18a8:6:40:dcad:beff:feef:100 - - [24/Aug/2021:09:11:11 +0000] "GET 
/geofeed.csv HTTP/1.0" 200 827 "-" "db-ip geofeed updater r6500"
2a00:18a8:6:40:dcad:beff:feef:100 - - [24/Aug/2021:09:42:15 +0000] "GET 
/geofeed.csv HTTP/1.0" 200 827 "-" "db-ip geofeed updater r6500"
2a00:18a8:6:40:dcad:beff:feef:100 - - [24/Aug/2021:21:59:46 +0000] "GET 
/geofeed.csv HTTP/1.0" 200 827 "-" "db-ip geofeed updater r6501"
2a00:18a8:6:40:dcad:beff:feef:100 - - [25/Aug/2021:01:24:28 +0000] "GET 
/geofeed.csv HTTP/1.0" 200 827 "-" "db-ip geofeed updater r6501"
2a00:18a8:6:40:dcad:beff:feef:100 - - [25/Aug/2021:04:43:01 +0000] "GET 
/geofeed.csv HTTP/1.0" 200 827 "-" "db-ip geofeed updater r6501"
2a00:18a8:6:40:dcad:beff:feef:100 - - [25/Aug/2021:05:11:05 +0000] "GET 
/geofeed.csv HTTP/1.0" 200 827 "-" "db-ip geofeed updater r6501"
2a00:18a8:6:40:dcad:beff:feef:100 - - [26/Aug/2021:05:23:18 +0000] "GET 
/geofeed.csv HTTP/1.0" 200 827 "-" "db-ip geofeed updater r6502"
2a00:18a8:6:40:dcad:beff:feef:100 - - [26/Aug/2021:02:49:59 +0000] "GET 
/geofeed.csv HTTP/1.0" 200 827 "-" "db-ip geofeed updater r6502"
2a00:18a8:6:40:dcad:beff:feef:100 - - [27/Aug/2021:03:22:23 +0000] "GET 
/geofeed.csv HTTP/1.0" 200 827 "-" "db-ip geofeed updater r6504"
2a00:18a8:6:40:dcad:beff:feef:100 - - [27/Aug/2021:03:55:04 +0000] "GET 
/geofeed.csv HTTP/1.0" 200 827 "-" "db-ip geofeed updater r6504"
2a00:18a8:6:40:dcad:beff:feef:100 - - [28/Aug/2021:03:21:26 +0000] "GET 
/geofeed.csv HTTP/1.0" 200 827 "-" "db-ip geofeed updater r6507"
2a00:18a8:6:40:dcad:beff:feef:100 - - [28/Aug/2021:03:51:20 +0000] "GET 
/geofeed.csv HTTP/1.0" 200 827 "-" "db-ip geofeed updater r6507"

and looking up the IPs in DB-IP.com indeed nicely shows the locations 
configured in the geofeed, thus that is succesful.

But I am fairly sure that they will mark things as VPN if they get a 
sniff of that; though "VPN" seems to mean "Virtual Public Network", not 
the Private of days gone...

Greets,
  Jeroen