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Comment by cylinder | Hacker News Reader

How does that blocking even work? How does nflx know I'm using a VPN?

Many users on the same IP, IP is registered to a cloud hosting company, etc. They'll never have perfect detection but you can do pretty well without much effort.

are there VPN out there where you can purchase a static IP of your own for it?

You can run your own VPN server on a VPS, but Netflix is (rumored to be) blocking the IP address ranges of DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS, etc.

I tried running OpenVPN on DigitalOcean and AWS and had no luck with Netflix on either host.

I tried proxying through a server in Germany (in a big, well known hosting provider) and I got the same message, both with ssh -D and pptpd.

So they're either reading signatures left on the packets by various VPN / proxy technologies (fragmentation and other obscure metrics), or they're blocking the IP ranges of major hosting providers, or both.

They don't use anything sophisticated, it's just IP range blacklist. Hint: try different VPS provider, there's plenty out there...

I used to run OpenVPN on Linode, but that was blocked a while back.

Startup idea, airbnb of VPNs. Normal people distributing a limited number of other peoples, VPNs for a small fare.

better yet, lets record netflix to VHS and mail the copies around the world. Block that Neflix! /s

Good idea, except most consumer internet connections don't have sufficiently fast upstream performance.

won't work. Netflix does not simply blocks IP, I'm pretty sure they detect behavior from account, and then locks them when the behavior looks like a VPN user (country hopping, etc.)

That is pretty much how Hola works. Except that most Hola users don't even know that they contribute their bandwidth.

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