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Comment by deanclatworthy | Hacker News Reader

PIA changed their business model at the turn of the year to not support the circumvention of geo restrictions [1]. Given this was a core selling point prior to this point, I'd say it's pretty clear they have succumbed to the legal problems associated with it and can no longer be trusted. BBC iPlayer has now been broken for months.

[1] https://support.privateinternetaccess.com/Knowledgebase/Arti...

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The wording in that article is pretty telling, but why do you imply they can no longer be trusted? A business that was profitable before became unprofitable due to legal pressure, so they exited it. It doesn't look like they've betrayed anybody's trust in the process.

They have betrayed my trust.

They actively marketed their product up until recently as being able to circumvent geo-restrictions, and actively helped users who had problems. That for me was the big sell.

Whilst I understand that it's a cat and mouse game now between content providers and VPN providers, they have built up a large customer base - based upon this premise.

How is it betrayal when I am certain they would prefer to not be your geo circumvent VPN. Betrayal would be they actively made the bait and switch when they certainly know their business model is falling all around them for legal reasons beyond their control?

Except they sold it as this. They did make the bait, I have been a customer for two years, and at least twice that I remember they have circumvented services that have blocked their IP ranges.

And now they switch that they have customers and don't want to play this expensive game anymore.

Just to be clear here. It's bait-and-switch because they sold you a subscription product 2 years ago, and they are now changing the terms of the product (and presumably are not going to penalize you for discontinuing your subscription)?

Do you feel that they are obligated to never change the terms or discontinue certain policies once implemented for the lifetime of the company? What company would ever want to operate in such an environment where they had to make all decisions up-front and those decisions were set in stone until the end of time? Is the price also set in stone until the end of time?

Most PIA users pay yearly, so it's completely understandable to feel ripped off I think. However, this is really just a matter of a few big providers implementing stricter geofiltering, blocking datacenter IPs, etc. Nothing PIA could do about it though, it's a risk you take if you understand how these things work.

Many of these same providers have just blocked VPN IPs and you can still use a cheap VPS to circumvent though. Some nice docker openvpn containers around...

> it's a cat and mouse game now between content providers and VPN providers

It's not the content providers but the movie studios, music labels and rights holders and so forth. Netflix doesn't really care about users circumventing geo restrictions, otherwise it wouldn't be so easy

Since January or so, Netflix has started to crack down on these services[0].

0 - http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/business/netflix-crackdown-unblo...

True, but the point is that this is almost certainly due to contractual obligations with and/or pressure from studios and other rightsholders. Netflix has negative interest in limiting their catalog on a regional basis -- it's against their customers' interests and harmful to Netflix's business.

Although I agree with you, it's Netflix's problem, even if it's not their fault. They, and their customers are the ones suffering

They have to comply with the new laws -- it's not betrayal when they don't have a choice in the matter.

Not complying means they would face severe enough penalties to sink the business (notwithstanding the risk of jail-time.)

PIA no longer trusted?

FBI would like to get more information about it.

https://torrentfreak.com/vpn-providers-no-logging-claims-tes...

The post says they are unable to offer assistance. That just makes sense to me - if I am running a service like this, I certainly wouldn't want to be responsible for being at one end of a cat and mouse game with content providers, as it's a never ending battle.

That is a hard problem for VPN services, generally.

At least for IPv4, without constantly buying and selling IP addresses and/or also acting as a larger internet service entity (e.g., also as a local ISP), I'm not sure how they would prevent getting quickly blocked from region-specific services. Perhaps setting up your own VPN on VPS or using random VPNs at VPN Gate would work better?

That post says they won't support you, but if you use a VPN endpoint that's in another country, (and make sure to use WebRTC blockers and prevent DNS leaks), then I see no reason why you cannot still watch region locked content.

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