Hacker News Reader

Comment by elagost | Hacker News Reader

Browser fingerprinting works much better than checking IPs. With multiple devices being behind the same IP, it's necessary to distinguish between users.

I'm not saying VPNs are worthless - I'm on one right now for work. Commercial VPNs, for most people who purchase them, are completely worthless.

And I very much doubt that tunneling your connection through a VPN can improve ping.

View on HN

Just for a moment close your eyes and imagine a world where you have to fill-in a mildly complicated form before you visit a website (or blindly sign away whatever rights you might have had).

A world where every second funny video you might have found on Reddit leaves you with a cryptic message that some "rights holder" doesn't permit you to see it (and denies you from joining the fun everyone else seems to be having in the thread).

A world where you cannot buy half of the cool stuff you want (and everyone else seems to be having) because you cannot even see the online store where it is sold.

A world where you're even denied access to old and seemingly public domain e-books.

Open your eyes. This is the world most of us live in.

We're not on commercial VPNs because we love to, but because often there is no other way. They are in a sense invaluable when it comes to geo-restrictions, even though I agree with you that they are worthless for many of the reasons they claim to exist.

Ok. Use a proxy, or set up your own Proxy/VPN on a VPS? Then you also have a VPS - you can host your own website there, use it to download stuff and rsync it back to your local machine, deploy nextcloud, etc., all for less than the cost of ExpressVPN. And bonus points, you can use unlimited devices.

Less of the cost sure but you are saving a couple bucks a month tops and replacing that with work on setup and maintenance instead. Moreover that way you get a single IP rather than the 40 different countries with multiple IPs my provider gives me.

By analogy with CDN VPN in that role is "Content Receival Network".

90% of the average population doesnt know the first thing about command lines.

Geoblocking, and a practical way around it, could be a great motivation for them to change that!

Set up your own Proxy/VPN on a VPS, is bad for fingerprint perspective. You get static IP in rare IP range for consumers. Pirating is also meaningless unless you use special hosting provider.

Browser fingerprinting does not work for geofencing. Browser fingerprinting and IP geotags work, but fingerprinting just tells you if a user is the same person, on a different IP address. I run a website to monitor bot traffic, and really all something like a Picasso fingerprint can get you is visibility into who's spoofing their IP.

You get a hash value that's roughly unique to the browser-device configuration. You don't know from that hash where the user is located. You have to pair the hash up with geolocation services to get that info. Once you do that though, you get a decent idea of if the person is changing their IP, but there's still no way to tell what the 'real' IP is. You just end up with a unique ID that's associated with a handful of different IP addresses.

As a frequent international traveler, using VPNs as a method to change routing absolutely can improve the results. Routing is not always done to get your specific packets someplace as fast as possible, particularly when submarine cables are involved.

Yup, I was going to say the same thing. I’m also a frequent international traveler (tho not in the last 20 months, alas, but before pandemic I averaged 2 international trips a month) and one of the benefits, security or not, of a commercial VPN service is the access to different nodes that can drastically improve speeds vs whatever routes the network you’re on is using. It’s not a guarantee but I’ve had it come in handy quite a few times.

> And I very much doubt that tunneling your connection through a VPN can improve ping.

Yea... as someone who used to play a lot of online games, this was always a surefire way to increase ping time lol. "Crap, my VPN is still on... brb"

This is actually a thing outside of the US mostly. For example in many Asian countries routing is utterly fucked if it's not incumbent to incumbent.

> And I very much doubt that tunneling your connection through a VPN can improve ping.

Surprisingly this can be the case as long as the combined link to VPN + target is better than the direct link to target. Keep in mind that the target might be geo distributed.

Like driving, going over 2 highways might be fasted than going over a direct dirt road, or a longer road might be faster because the direct road is congested.

One case where I saw this was a friend who for some reason was being routed to game servers around the world when trying to connect to an Overwatch game, and a much closer server with the VPN.

Was this a bug in Overwatch? Almost certainly, but the VPN was an effective workaround.

> Surprisingly this can be the case as long as the combined link to VPN + target is better than the direct link to target

Is that surprising? I think that's what you would expect, and it's what the above commenter is suggesting (quite reasonably IMO) is very unlikely.

I think the issue is that you're implying the road to the target is a dirt road, but the road to the VPN is a highway, which seems a bit questionable.

I've seen it happen. Blizzard is quite notorious for having some weird network links, where a VPN is known to be a workaround. Example [1], and I've heard the same from WoW players.

[1] https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/lower-ping-whe...

Most of the time the end user equipment is the bottleneck rather than the internet backbone

It can improve bandwidth too! Network operators LOVE to mess with traffic based on service type: prioritize it, throttle it, cap it, the games don't end.

"Turn on VPN, network performance improves" is a regular occurrence these days.

What about using a VPN inside a VM? (or even a separate computer) Presumably all of your browser fingerprints would be different, yes?

Yeah, but unless you are blowing the VM away all the time (and maybe you are, but that takes a certain amount of effort, even if you try to automate it), you’re still going to have a fingerprint tied to that VM and browser(s). Will it be linked with your other devices? Maybe not, but depending on what accounts you are signed into (Google, Facebook, etc), there could still be a more robust profile associated with your various locations and devices, even if the fingerprints are different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com