I hear there's a dirty secret that more and more companies are doing this to make things like Netflix that block VPNs "just work" though their services. Not sure how true this is or how widespread, though.
I assume someone was detecting if you were using a VPN and testing and it somehow made it into production. I emailed them and never heard back.
Granted ... I get why a retailer with financial activity going on might want to know if a VPN was used to possibly apply extra scrutiny to the purchase.
I used to work for a company that explicitly changed the prices on the site if the request traffic came from a competitor IP address.
Of course this was a hundred years ago in a land far away. I don’t know how much success you’d have even finding your competitors IP’s these days.
"Exit node" users and VPN customers don't need to be in the same set, though: It's entirely possible that the VPN operator buys residential IP forwarding volume and includes access to it as part of their product offering.
That doesn't make things much better for unwitting users sharing their internet connectivity with insufficient or no education, though...
Yes this is true even with NordVPN, which I bought specifically to be able to watch Netflix on when expressVPN didn’t work.
It’s not obvious at all. Netflix could be doing something as simple as checking the IPs or could be actually checking the use of VPN at a system level. Both are equally valid readings of the GP comment.
Any solution that requires me to reach behind my TV and plug in my laptop is already not easy.
With Netflix you just punch your password into your smart TV and you're watching content.
It even syncs progress across devices, works on all my devices (doesn't work in the Apple ecosystem).
If Nord VPN is really bouncing your traffic out of some other residential customer's connection, that would be a lot harder to detect. And a lot more ethically questionable if the other user doesn't realize they're doing it.
I dunno if SSL encrypts the entire HTTP payload or not but could you even figure out the URL’s being requested using a tool like wireshark?
Host names: Very likely, unless you're using SNI.
I keep thinking the "e" is for "enhanced" encryption, i.e. "eSNI 2.0", but what I'm thinking of is actually called ECH (for "encrypted client hello"): https://blog.cloudflare.com/encrypted-client-hello/
Using VPNs for Streaming is selling point #1 for tons of people.
I had whole home VPN configured and I couldn't access NFLX streaming content from the house. Getting Netflix traffic to bypass the VPN is incredibly difficult without hacking the client side code to have it update the bypass rules on-demand in response to the client side JSON payloads - or hook into DNS resolution and do VPN bypassing there based on a regeular expression of the origin and the returned records.
The way NFLX works under the hood, from the client's perspective, is that it makes an initial request to a service hosted in AWS. That service stitches together the list-of-lists on the home page. Then you select a film to watch, it again reaches out to a service hosted in AWS to ask to stream the content. This is really straightforward to get working with whole home VPN, you just bypass the VPN for those origins (using DNS queries to get the IP blocks) and you are golden. A little cron job could keep that IP bypass list fresh and it worked well enough to get through the UI.
But then the AWS service responds with a list of streams you are licensed to watch and URLs that point to their location. Those URLs point to Netflix's OpenConnect CDN hosts. Nearly every time I went to stream, I'd pull a different origin for the content and that would route back through the VPN. The list wasn't stable, so I couldn't compile a comprehensive list of origins to route around the VPN with.
So NFLX blocks VPNs to protect their licenses, which I understand. But their architecture made it impossible for me to allow their service to bypass my VPN. So any device I wanted/needed to use NFLX on had to have a direct connection to the internet.
Never had an issue, been signed up for years.
It’s possible to set up your own solution I believe but I don’t have the time for that currently.
Not affiliated or anything and I’d do your own research on them but I much prefer this as they only see that traffic from me.
Specifically to watch The Walking Dead if I am honest.