4 ms·
This article doesn't really make a lot of sense as there's no hard proof, just speculations of the author
by NeaterPeter 7y ago
This article doesn't really make a lot of sense as there's no hard proof, just speculations of the author
- mikl 7y agoNo smoking gun, sure, but some very suspicious traffic patterns. How is NordVPN getting traffic routed through so many different ISPs who generally only serve residential customers? Hard to imagine that so many ISPs are agreeing to help NordVPN bypass geo-blocking. Pretty certain that there’s some kind of shenanigans going on.
- c256 7y agoI don’t have any experience with NordVPN, but off the top of my head, it’s not hard to imagine someone looking at an internet backbone map, doing some math, and just paying for a couple hundred residential broadband packages. (Napkin speculation: maybe 30 major markets, round up to 50. Most markets have only a couple serious residential broadband providers (sadly, in the U.S. the average is below 2), so multiply that by 3 (a big over-estimate, but in some places it’s probably worthwhile to double coverage). Sprinkle the remaining 50 around the smaller markets to make sure you have decent access into all of the major backbone loops. Ballpark it at $50/each and you could blanket the U.S. major population centers for $1k/month.)
- jsjohnst 7y agoThe ISP bill is only part of the overall cost, and a small piece of it at that. You also need a physical address for that connection to be installed at, power for equipment, and someone to respond when something inevitably goes wrong (admittedly the person could cover multiple cities potentially).
- mirimir 7y agoYears ago, I knew a guy who wanted to do that with devices in used trailers. Managed by locally recruited "fake" residents, working as consultants. Located in trailer parks around the US. Seemed way too iffy to me.
- ortekk 7y agoWell, I just verified this article's claims with this curl request: curl --head -H "Pragma: akamai-x-get-client-ip" "https://www.disneyplus.com" https://www.disneyplus.com" It returns different IPs for every request, and these IPs do look like residential ones.
- mirages 7y agoDoes it still works if you use DNS over HTTPS ? I'm curious to see if the traffic is redirected because they dectected disneyplus.com DNS request or if it's destination IP based
- kyledrake 7y agoIf it uses a new IP for each new request, that's a way to block this, is it not? Normal traffic will mostly keep the session on the same IP, not have a new one for each new request.
- banana_giraffe 7y agoInteresting. I tried the same thing and it always returns the same IP while I'm connected. I wonder if this is the client doing something? I've never installed the NordVPN client, I only use their OpenVPN config files.
- bscphil 7y ago> It returns different IPs for every request, That's the really bizarre thing... I came here to ask about it after getting confused when the article implied this (30 tests, 30 different residential IPs). It seems like this shouldn't work at all if connections to the Disney plus site involve any kind of state. Is this a content-unblocking exception, and normally everything is routed through the same NordVPN edge server? Assuming that's the case, this seems like a great way to get your account banned at Disney plus the moment they decide to crack down on this. Assuming you have a session ID cookie with the site, no legitimate user is going to be sending that cookie from a different IP address on every page load. This should be very easy for them to catch.
- EternalAugust 7y agoDo an nmap scan on the IP and check for open ports. If there are open ports it's very likely not actually a residence but a business.