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Comment by zo1 | Hacker News Reader

Netflix blocks you from accessing all content if you are behind any sort of proxy or VPN.

How do they detect that you are using a VPN?

They have a list of VPN providers.

Probably they also have some heuristics that look closely at people who geoip in a different country than their billing records, and whose IP address seems to be in a colo rather than a DSL subscriber block.

This is why I would love to see a Visa card that anonymises you to corporations, but not necessarily the government - and available to those overseas. Don't suppose such a thing exists?

Edit: Scratch that. What I'd like is a high speed consumer cable account that I could proxy into.

What you need is a friend abroad and a raspberry pi.

I have a raspberry pi attached to the wall of a home which is not my own. It's in a country where I occasionally want to be (in a geoip sense of "be"). The rpi maintains a VPN connection to me, so I can reach it even though it's behind a NAT middlebox that knows nothing about it.

You realise that you could have just given HN a new startup?

I'd gladly pay someone to access a portion of their bandwidth - at least enough that I could stream content.

See illuminati vpn network.

That's great.

Potential founders should consider the costs of providing tech support for a tunnel that crosses two NATboxes, both controlled by strangers.

If you can remotely login to the box, it wouldn't be that bad. And if you can lock down the box physically then it would be pretty tamper proof.

Anyway, it was just a thought. It's possible it's impractical :-)

"AirVPN"!

A danger is that stranger will abuse your connection to send spam or even worse things. And you might have a visit from police. Also, I'm sure, reselling your home connection is forbidden by your provider. So it's kind of grey zone.

It could be restricted to a set of domains and only allow HTTP and DNS traffic.

Just buy a Visa or Amex gift card with cash. It's a normal credit card number you can use online and some of them can be reloaded. Sometimes not reloading is best, so your subscriptions won't auto-renew and you can cut your paper trail by opening a new account with a new credit (gift) card.

Just discovered Netflix gift cards, delivered through email. Awesome!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00YD563L8/gcrnsts

>Probably they also have some heuristics that look closely at people who geoip in a different country than their billing records

I have paid for American Netflix for years and years but I'm forced now to watch Dutch Netflix because I live there. It's not based on where you pay but where you are.

I am running a VPN on my own server to access content, and the server is on the same timezone.

I stopped my Netflix subscription a month ago because they started blocking me.

I would say the IP checking against datacenter block is the most plausible, but I also remember seeing a link on HN showing how to detect VPN usage through MTU size, so that could be a possibly more involved solution ... It would probably be way too much work to implement on top of their infrastructure though, when IP block checking must be good enough.

your browser timezone isn't going to change just coz you're using a VPN

On Firefox you can use Random Agent Spoofer:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-agent-...

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