ViperDNS closed down | Hacker News Reader

ViperDNS closed down

viperdns.com

21 pointsch0wn12 comments

I trial:ed them. It actually worked.

However, the monthly cost was so low that I got paranoid about their business model. They could do all kinds of MITM things with people who used their DNS rewrite+proxy service, in addition to enabling Netflix...

Would love to know more details about what Netflix is actually doing behind the scenes, and why they:

> have to replace servers every 24-48 hours with lots of downtime

Which part causes lots of downtime?

Presumably they have to change servers so often because that's how quickly Netflix detects them.

It's extremely unlikely Netflix will publish how they perform the detection, because that would make it easier for people to get around. My guess is that they know where your account should be located based on payment information or previous detection of region-switching services, and they use these flagged accounts to uncover new region switchers.

Spinning up servers these days is relatively quick, do you think it's ip addresses that are the issue?

There are a finite number of instant-provisioning VM/VPS hosts that such an organization can use, in terms of ASNs and IP blocks which are easily identified by netflix. Once Netflix has blocked a /22 or /20 belonging to a colo/VPS/VM hosting ISP, it's worthless bringing up a new VM with the same host. Repeat 30 times, you've run out of hosting companies to work with.

It's definitely the IPs.

I would guess they have to get 'clean' IPs too. Simply moving the IP to a different server likely is not sufficient. Netflix also filters the common ASes, so you need to shuffle between exotic/new blocks

Even the TTL on a.dns.whatever is set to 1min, a lot of clients ignore the TTL and use the cached value for minutes to days after TTL expiration.

It would be nice to see some stats from more vpn providers since Netflix started blocking efficiently.

Humans, we like to build fences.

They talk as if the only concern of someone using a VPN is to pirate Netflix.

I agree, DNS as a service is still a relevant business model when targeting other use cases. But I disagree with the use of term 'pirate' here.

It's not even VPN, it's a DNS service that masks your location, similar to unlocator.com

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