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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

They don't need to know. They can show you the content that corresponds to the country matching your billing information, regardless of your IP address. It doesn't say they're going to block proxies, only that you won't be able to use proxies to watch content not available in your country.

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That would be better; then I could just get a US netflix account using US billing information (easy to get) and then watch all the US content I want.

How will you literally pay? That's the hard part.

I've done what you're describing here, entering a made up address is easy, it is getting payment to them without triggering fraud systems that is hard.

Many years ago US iTunes added PayPal but didn't verify that the address on the PayPal account was the same as the address on the iTunes account, so you could pay using your local billing address, but have payment go to a US iTunes fictional address. They have unfortunately closed that loophole.

Some fraud systems (like the ones at Hulu) work by verifying the Zip Code. There are algorithms for transforming foreign postal codes into an American zip code. These algorithms were designed to be used at places like gas stations in the States which often ask you to enter your zip code for verification. So to subscribe to Hulu, I transformed my postal code into a zip code, looked up an address at that zip code and used that as my billing address with my Canadian credit card.

> So to subscribe to Hulu, I transformed my postal code into a zip code, looked up an address at that zip code and used that as my billing address with my Canadian credit card.

I literally don't know what you're talking about with "transferring zip codes." But I was talking about your financial institution blocking the payment, not Hulu/NetFlix/whatever.

They should reject the transaction as soon as it comes in.

For example, the "zip code" for a Canadian Postal Code of K8Q 5T6 is 856XX, where the last two digits can be anything. So make a valid address for zip 85601, enter it into Hulu as the address for your Canadian credit card, and both Hulu and the bank will accept it as valid. (Or at least some banks will, the first card I tried didn't work. The second one did).

The first six digits of your credit card identify the issuing country, which is what sites that care about blocking foreign customers use.

You can look one up here: https://www.bindb.com/bin-database.html

Or see a list here: https://web.archive.org/web/20130827121726/http://en.wikiped...

On an unrelated note, do you know why that page was removed from wikipedia?

In this exact case, I would pay someone I know in the US and have them open the account for me.

If only that's how it worked, I'd be very happy. I'm a US resident and all my billing info is in the US, but I travel frequently.

It's infuriating that I can't continue watching a TV show or movie just because I happened to cross a national border. For now, I use a proxy to always have access to US content, but if Netflix starts blocking that I'm going to cancel my account.

I don't believe the content distribution rights operate that way. I think what you can see depends on where you are physically located. Not where you are from.

The iTunes store currently works based on your billing information.

Spotify is also based on billing address

They could just only play video when the IP address location and billing country match. You wouldn't catch every proxy user, but it would prevent the widespread usage.

This would not work either legally or technically, afaik (IANAL though). You don't get a copyright pass going into another country to use content you could at home, the restrictions are on distribution to you wherever you are.

But even if that weren't true, technically it wouldn't work because people would just share their accounts with people across the border, leading to a different form of the same outcome.

The only way this would work is if you were forbidden from using your netflix account outside your home country. This would piss off a lot of travellers (like me) who consider it literally a feature that their netflix account works in other countries, and are currently using the service in a legitimate way (as we see the local content wherever we are).

Are accounts transferrable? What if if I travel to the US and use my account there? Would I still be discriminated against, on the basis of my billing country?

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