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Comment by enlyth | Hacker News Reader

I share a VPN subscription with my father, I use it for torrenting so my ISP can't snoop on me, and he uses it to bypass geo blocking to watch UK shows (things like BritBox, Netflix, BBC etc.) in another country. Unfortunately, there is no way to legally pay for most of these services and watch them from abroad.

I tried to get us to use Mullvad, as it was perfect for me, but for him it was constant problems with the services he used, whereas the sketchier providers like NordVPN and ExpressVPN always worked without issues.

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Problems with services are to be expected when using Mullvad. Their IPs are all recognised as originating from datacenters. You might be lucky, but often not.

Sketchier VPN providers use "home ips" and rotate them regularly in order to defeat Netflix or other services blocking them.

Why are the sketchy VPN providers capable of that, but not Mullvad?

Sketchier providers often use dubious methods to acquire their exit nodes.

Often they pay someone to include their code in a "free" software or browser extension (or malware) that allows them to route traffic through the host.

Oxylabs is one of the larger examples whose record is somewhat dubious.

IIRC the mylobot botnet is responsible for providing the vast majority of residential (home) IP addresses for residential VPN providers (who are then sold to expressvpn/nordvpn). The whole business is incredibly shady and nefarious and nordvpn/expressvpn must know from whom they contract their residential vpn services from.

BHProxies is the largest residential proxy provider on the internet and almost all of their proxies are acquired through the botnet above.

https://www.bitsight.com/blog/mylobot-investigating-proxy-bo...

Cool, I did not know about this one.

Whaaaaaaaaaat.

This needs to be on the front page of.... something.

Seconded. I refer to them as shady because I have no way of knowing what they do with your data. I didn't even consider that they'd have a whole botnet market going on too. This definitely needs to be more public.

Agreed - I assumed they had some way of getting IP addresses that don't come from an AWS/Azure/Google/whatever datacentre block but I just assumed they bought residential blocks from ISPs or something like that.

I totally agree. Somebody knowledgeable about how this works needs to write an expose about it.

Is there a source for expressvpn actually using BHProxies? I had no clue it was that sketchy. It is owned by a public company, so that's pretty substantial news if true.

I would be very skeptical of the claim, quite worrying to see multiple people accepting that as a fact without any kind of evidence to support the claim.

I'd be shocked if any of the major VPN providers were involved with illegal residential proxies. It just doesn't make sense, can you imagine just how unstable and slow those connections would be? Why would they risk being legally liable when there exists legal residential proxy providers that get their IP's from people that voluntarily share their connection (honeygain etc.)? I've never heard of any of the big VPN providers offering residential connections. As I understand the VPN providers that promise support for netflix and similar streaming services just acquire newer IP's from time to time but the connection still goes through a regular datacenter, definitely not from some random dude's home.

The proxy market is more so targeted towards developers who scrape data and criminals that do credential stuffing/other criminal activity.

I'm not saying I trust the above claim (I have no idea) but this

>can you imagine just how unstable and slow those connections would be

Yes, yes I can and they are. I tried them some time ago before I found out how shady they are and encrypted connections were like 2 Mbit while Mullvad gave me many many times faster bandwidth with higher encryption. Their support was completely useless.

They make use of residential IP:s without their consent/knowledge.

See https://github.com/d2phap/ImageGlass/issues/1252 for an example on how this might happen (spider.com).

It annoys me that the only way to access iPlayer from abroad is via a VPN. Surely opening it up and allowing international customers to pay some form of license fee could be a nice little revenue stream for the BBC? I'm guessing the reason is just "licensing issues" but if they're making the programmes then what's the problem? I'm sure there's an international market for watching the world class output from the BBC.

With the cultural capital that BBC had especially 7 to 10 years ago, I'm pretty sure they would have been at league with Netflix and the like if they had opened it up. Dr Who was huge back then in the US, and you had Sherlock and a few other shows. I think people were just pirating it (?) but lots of people I knew were huge fans.

Dr. Who was on Netflix for a long time, except maybe whatever recent season, and more recently HBO Max

There was something called Kangaroo [1] which was a partnership between BBC, ITV and C4 but it got blocked by the competition commission. Now it's run under Britbox I think!

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_(video_on_demand)

Absolutely.

Given a) they started experimenting with iPlayer pretty early in the streaming came, and b) they have a huge and valuable back catalogue, it's always amazed me that they didn't open up pay-per-view and subscription options for an ex-UK audience.

I've always suspected there's a good reason why not behind the scenes - maybe because a successful PPV operation would lend huge weight to people in the UK seeking to abolish the license fee?

Shows are often made by production companies on contract and licensed for domestic distribution. Licensing for international distribution might be significantly more expensive.

Yes but they would get more revenue from it too.

Maybe you should start shopping the business case for it around then.

They might get some revenue, but they would need to build and maintain a streaming service with payments, and that’s not free. They might also be limited by contracts with local broadcasters, which give them exclusive rights to online distribution within their country, even if they do not exercise them now.

Its not the only way.

Smart DNS providers like Getflix provide access to BBC Iplayer and a ton of other streaming services too.

Basically you use their DNS servers and they handle the geo-unblocking.

a few years ago I moved outside the UK and spent the best part of 3 months (on and off) trying to access BBC content, legally, still holding residency, paying domiciliary and employment taxes, and paying for a bladdy TV loicence

of course, I wanted to do this for as close to free as possible, since plugging an aerial into a tv at home also cost next to nothing

VPNs were already being detected and banned. I tried at least 4 extensively, including tcp, udp, socks, wg, obfuscated servers, etc. to no avail

dodgy residential/mobile proxies were too unreliable for live 720p m3u streams, not to mention expensive

I went through a few cheap linux VPSs with UK ip addresses, forwarding their web streams to my tv outside the UK, until I found one that seemed to work well. so much so I even invested in some fancy routing through intermediary countries for almost jitter-free stability

until a few weeks later, back to the same old shite -- everything 403 Unauthorised

after yet a few more weeks of furious head-scratching shame over the stable-now-vanished CBeebies and BritComs daily consumption, I concluded and confirmed the BBC had just started detecting and banning datacentre IPs more aggressively

it was at this ebb I discovered the wonderful world of illegal IPTV streams and adopted a fuck you too, BBC attitude

I used a small independent proxy company that I paid £50 a year annually through PayPal. I think they must've been small enough to fly under the radar of the detection algorithms. When I went onto google maps connected to the proxy, it always thought I was in Dubai, which gives you an idea of the clientele.

Maybe it was something to do with the fact that it was a Proxy and not a VPN, though I'm not sure if this makes it any less detectable. I even had a Firefox extension that automatically turned on the proxy when opening iPlayer tabs! It worked very well, though I wish I could've paid the license fee and just got access.

I dabbled with free and cheap paid-for proxies which were either injecting javascript or too flaky for live video. I saw a few of those smaller providers, but the initial outlay would have been too risky, because I am convinced the BBC throw a lot of money at residential geolocation, so if they haven't already their IP address blocks will be blacklisted at some point in the near future

interesting about Dubai though, makes me wonder if they have some sort of expat or economic deal with them. if Google thinks you're there, you can bet BBC do too. I discovered they use multiple CDNs and delivery mechanisms as fallback/best effort for the gamut of user agents, network health and device capabilities, which sometimes (but not always) sieved most (but not all) VPN and proxy locations in an indeterminate (yet authoritatively intentional) fashion, so perhaps Dubai is whitelisted on one of those. who knows. sometimes it's like rolling dice. inconsistency and implied mischief sure are strong deterrents. might investigate further at some point if I can swallow some bile first

Email is in my profile if you wanna find out more about the proxy service I used!

I also used some UK shell provider (via SOCKS proxy + Putty) in the past and it worked really well. My guess is that there’s some there’s kind of threshold/concurrent connection that iPlayer looks at per IP address.

It’s pretty silly though, I would absolutely pay for a TV license if given the opportunity. Dear BBC: Shut up and take my money!

how far in the past ago, during nascent video streaming pre-VPN days? with live tv as well as VOD? if there is a relatively cheap, concrete solution I did not uncover which has been stable for over a year I would buy that wizard a thimbleful of scumble

This was about 15 years ago, definitely before when VPNs got popular… Clarkson was still hosting Top Gear. I seem to recall getting so irked that BBC America was something like 6-12 months behind current Top Gear episodes that it lead me down this path of ‘stealing’ iPlayer. It actually opened the door for me to content that I would have otherwise seen or known about, like obscure comedy shows on Channel 4 or the much better UK version of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

The shell provider I used was Phurix, not if they are still around or not.

Perhaps roll your own VPN using a home router that can act as a VPN server? That way you can use your home internet connection...assuming its upload speed is fast enough.

A shame BBC can't accommodate its paying customers who happen to be abroad.

yes in hindsight, had I known the BBC would stoop, I could have set up something from an actual home IP. whether that be forwarding their web streams or forwarding a few OTA DVB-T2 streams. but even that could require physical presence for emergency debugs, reboots, retunes..

Can you or someone explain why so many Brits want to watch UK television from abroad?

I’m French living abroad and have never missed French TV. The quality of the content is just very sub-par compared to American shows. They just don’t have the budget to compete. Is the UK different because it’s English speaking and perhaps it has access to a wider market and thus more capital?

> Can you or someone explain why so many Brits want to watch UK television from abroad?

As an example, Doctor Who sometimes releases new episodes. BBC doesn't just have UK television — they have an "on-demand" offering that actually works, and isn't sparsely populated with 15% of the episodes like some other services (cough Xfinity cough).

Interesting. I'm British and I enjoy quite a lot of French TV: Engrenages (Spiral), Le Bureau des Légendes (The Bureau), Au service de la France (A Very Secret Service), etc.

for me it was for watching live BBC News (BBC World News didn't cut it), and a few weekly quizcoms. plus a couple of kids' channels. there is a vast difference between UK- and American-centric channels which didn't appeal

The BBC has some extremely good content... nature documentaries (David Attenborough), science shows (Horizon), archaeological/history (Digging for Britain), comedy (Ghosts), comedy/news/current affairs (Have I Got News For You). The US does big budget shows very well, but for a wide variety of content I really miss the BBC when I can't access it. I'm obviously biased though.

> … he uses it to bypass geo blocking to watch UK shows (things like BritBox, Netflix, BBC etc.) in another country. Unfortunately, there is no way to legally pay for most of these services and watch them from abroad.

Not that it's your point, but, at least in the US, you can pay for BritBox on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/storefront?contentType=subsc... .

This is good to know. I have been considering giving Mullvad a try, but getting around geo restrictions is my primary reason for using NordVPN.

>> I use it for torrenting so my ISP can't snoop on me

Would installing WireGuard server on a router directly solve this (like Gl-Inet travel routers)?

does it work to bypass geoblocking of Netflix? i cannot access the us catalog from Italy for instance

how are people supposed to react to this ? Those are two reasons why legal providers make life so difficult for innocent people. The response will be to enable more intrusive record keeping and more very-low bandwidth for me, because of you.

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