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Show HN: Easily connect to a VPN in a country of your choice
- simlevesque 10y ago> Automatically connect you to a random VPN in a country of your choice. Why would someone do such a thing?
- lbolla 10y agoTo watch Netflix for instance.
- pixelHD 10y agoi get your point, but connecting to a random country won't be of much help though.
- neipo13 10y ago> Automatically connect you to a random VPN in a country of your choice. Country wouldn't be random in this case
- edaemon 10y agoYou choose the country, it just selects a random VPN within that country.
- rodrigogs 10y agoYou can choose the country by passing -c argument. Example: easyvpn -c JP
- pixelHD 10y agooh, my bad, didn't notice that
- wale 10y agoNetflix is able to detect you're using a VPN, and advices to switch back to enjoy its services, I'm sure. At least I got that alert recently. So is there another bypass?
- FilterSweep 10y agoJust throwing it out there - are you sure there isn't a session cookie tied to your login still on your machine? Or, am I completely wrong and you're just limited to the country's offerings by your location on registration?
- phit_ 10y agothey block known vpn and vps ip spaces, it's been a cat and mouse game for the past few years between vpn providers and netflix currently working providers can be usually found on /r/NetflixByProxy/
- happy_spanners 10y agoYou're not limited by registration. I've travelled and found that I had a different library in different countries.
- zeroer 10y agoCan they detect I'm using bittorrent?
- dgfgfdagasdfgfa 10y agoI didn't realize people had ripped Netflix original content.
- zeroer 10y agoEverything on Netflix is available on Bittorrent.
- baby 10y agoyoutube videos being blocked based on your location.
- piker 10y agoTo research censorship in a country, as another example.
- tekklloneer 10y agoTest latency, get around geofencing, test your application in various regulatory environments.
- gravypod 10y agoTest firewall settings to see if you've correctly blocked things.
- johnward 10y agoNot wanting your ISP to know what your traffic looks like?
- kobayashi 10y ago...and wanting some other, probably less trustworthy org to know what the traffic looks like
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Mango_Diesel 10y agoOne major use case I can think of is testing SEO in different regions.
- zhan_eg 10y agoThe source of the VPN servers is vpngate.net - an academic research that started 2013, at Graduate School of University of Tsukuba, Japan. From their about [0] page: - You can get through the government's firewall to browse restricted web sites (e.g. YouTube). - You can disguise your IP address to hide your identity while surfing the Internet. - You can protect yourself by utilizing its strong encryption while using public Wi-Fi. The list of servers (on the main url) gives throughput and others stats and you can support them by creating a node [1]. They use SoftEther for VPN server - does someone have any experience with it? [0] http://www.vpngate.net/en/about_overview.aspx http://www.vpngate.net/en/about_overview.aspx [1] http://www.vpngate.net/en/join.aspx http://www.vpngate.net/en/join.aspx
- q3k 10y agoI've taken a cursory look at SoftEther a few months ago. It looks like a research project that was then unsuccessfully commercialized, and then released to the public somewhat hastily. The code quality leaves a lot to be desired (there is nothing offensive, but it still does not inspire confidence for there not being security bugs), and the code style is not great either. The amount of marketing copytext is disproportionately large to the amount of code comments and design documentation. It generally seems to go for a everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach in terms of features (which is not a bad thing per se, but an approach that I dislike). The SoftEther repository is 280k lines of C and headers, while OpenVPN is 80k.
- voltagex_ 10y agoBugger. I set up SoftEther because it was the only thing I could get working reliably (by that, I mean only 2 disconnections per hour).
- compuguy 10y agoYes, I've been using it for a couple of years. It has a decent UI to spinning up a variety of VPN configurations.
- the_watcher 10y agoThis would have been really useful a few years ago, when the international version of NBA League Pass was a far better experience due to the complete lack of blackouts, as well as being roughly 50% of the price for the much more limited US version. Instead of fixing the US version, they've simply doubled the price of the international version and made it worse, from what I understand.
- zlagen 10y agoSome people may use it as free proxies for web scraping.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kobayashi 10y agoIt's bad enough of an idea to connect to an open/untrusted WiFi network - now we're showing HN how to connect to random VPNs all over the world? My cursory opinion of this is that it's the worst idea ever I've ever seen make HN's front page.
- koolba 10y ago> My cursory opinion of this is that it's the worst idea ever I've ever seen make HN's front page. Not disputing that it's the worst but it could be even more worse. It's missing the key component: a curl | bash install and upgrade script running over HTTP (not HTTPS). In this case it'd be extra hilarious as upgrades would presumably go over your existing VPN connection which could then hijack the script and run arbitrary code on your machine.
- hrrsn 10y agoI gotchu' (/s) curl http://pastie.org/pastes/10992864/download http://pastie.org/pastes/10992864/download | bash
- stevekemp 10y agoThis looks like a node version of the previously submitted go tool `autovpn`, which I commented on previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13454960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13454960 This code also writes remote-content to a file, and then passes that to openvpn. Scary stuff.
- rodrigogs 10y agoThen make it better. It's opensource ;)
- kobayashi 10y agoThat's a common refrain. It's just that I don't think there's a good idea on which to build/improve. I commend you for putting (presumably) your work out here for all to see, and good on you for making your project FOSS, but this is not a project I will support.
- hathawsh 10y agoI guess this tool is intended for command line operation and scripting. If all you want to do is get around regional restrictions to watch videos, see http://hola.org/ http://hola.org/ . EDIT: Also, you should assume that any anonymous VPN service has a good chance of being spyware or even malware, so you should sandbox it in a virtual machine or similar.
- j_s 10y agoIf you do (don't!) be sure you pay: http://hola.org/faq#intro-cost http://hola.org/faq#intro-cost Hola VPN turns 10M users into exit nodes (2 years ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9614993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9614993 Hola VPN Already Exploited by “Bad Guys”, Security Firm Says (2 years ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9645050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9645050
- mrmondo 10y agoDon't _ever_ use Hola! It's a scam / malware designed to funnel traffic through your internet connection.
- K0nserv 10y agoVPNs are great. Free VPNs from god knows who, are not that great. A VPN is exactly the kind of thing you want to be paying a trustworthy entity for.
- walrus01 10y agoor run yourself, you can put openvpn on a $2.50/month debian or centos VPS.
- noonespecial 10y agoDo check that they have the tun/tap module included on the vps before signing up or open VPN won't work on that vps host.
- walrus01 10y agoYes, that's essential. Assuming use of a vps that is not really a real vm (xen pv, xen hvm or kvm), but more like a glorified jail, which is what most of the cheap ones are that use openvz or similar.
- hwdsl2 10y agoFor people seeking a more secure option: You can easily build your own IPsec VPN server using a one-liner [1], with support for both IPsec/L2TP and Cisco IPsec. Disclosure: I am the author of this repo. [1] https://github.com/hwdsl2/setup-ipsec-vpn https://github.com/hwdsl2/setup-ipsec-vpn
- whyagaindavid 10y agoI wonder if they are able to avoid misuse of regional content download by different people. Who pays for bandwidth? Just wondering...