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I thought Private Relay will not change the geo-region of users (e.g., proxy to IPs of the same country) in order to let online streaming companies (e.g,. Netfl

I thought Private Relay will not change the geo-region of users (e.g., proxy to IPs of the same country) in order to let online streaming companies (e.g,. Netflix) happy. This is different from what said in this post. Is it no longer the case or never the case?

ffo 5y ago
With the Developer Beta 2 it was more consistent in staying somewhat in the region. But still if you IP is consistently changing it is hard to adapt. Btw. Oftentimes Geo Databases are wrong as well.
matwood 5y ago
It's buggy, but I've noticed the location has settled down and has me located in my same city now. Initially my IP was showing up all over the US. My guess is they were working on the logic and adding more CDNs. So far I've seen Cloudflare and Fastly.
- r1ch 5y ago
  How on earth are they proxying through Fastly? I would expect Fastly only sends requests to their customers origins, yet Apple is proxying requests through them to arbitrary websites. I wonder if you could abuse this to bypass ACLs on Fastly customers that block direct origin traffic.
  - gregsadetsky 5y ago
    Is it possible that the proxying is done via Cloudflare and Fastly's edge computing platforms? It'd be interesting to see where are the Relay requests coming from (i.e. what is the destination server seeing -- who's connecting to it?) Great point about the ACL.
    - r1ch 5y ago
      In Cloudflare's case they already have a consumer-facing product that supports relaying over their network (WARP, with separate IP range versus their reverse proxy service) so Apple is likely using a variant of that. I was very surprised when I checked and saw Fastly on my iPad as I wasn't aware Fastly had any similar product, in my mind they are (were?) strictly a reverse proxy CDN.
      - ffo 5y ago
        Maybe the sell there leftover ingress bandwidth to apple :-)
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - matwood 5y ago
    > How on earth are they proxying through Fastly? Money solves a lot of problems. Fastly already has a geographically diverse set of servers, so I could see them building a feature like this just for Apple (at least initially).
    - fomine3 5y ago
      Possibly supporting own relay is cheaper option than just accepting traffic from other companies' relay, but it depends on how they agreed peering to Apple.
  - outloudvi 5y ago
    Well... Cloudflare Workers does enable you to bypass CAPTCHA walls. https://www.freebuf.com/articles/web/267964.html https://www.freebuf.com/articles/web/267964.html (Chinese)

ffo 5y ago

With the Developer Beta 2 it was more consistent in staying somewhat in the region. But still if you IP is consistently changing it is hard to adapt. Btw. Oftentimes Geo Databases are wrong as well.

matwood 5y ago

It's buggy, but I've noticed the location has settled down and has me located in my same city now. Initially my IP was showing up all over the US. My guess is they were working on the logic and adding more CDNs. So far I've seen Cloudflare and Fastly.

r1ch 5y ago
How on earth are they proxying through Fastly? I would expect Fastly only sends requests to their customers origins, yet Apple is proxying requests through them to arbitrary websites. I wonder if you could abuse this to bypass ACLs on Fastly customers that block direct origin traffic.
- gregsadetsky 5y ago
  Is it possible that the proxying is done via Cloudflare and Fastly's edge computing platforms? It'd be interesting to see where are the Relay requests coming from (i.e. what is the destination server seeing -- who's connecting to it?) Great point about the ACL.
  - r1ch 5y ago
    In Cloudflare's case they already have a consumer-facing product that supports relaying over their network (WARP, with separate IP range versus their reverse proxy service) so Apple is likely using a variant of that. I was very surprised when I checked and saw Fastly on my iPad as I wasn't aware Fastly had any similar product, in my mind they are (were?) strictly a reverse proxy CDN.
    - ffo 5y ago
      Maybe the sell there leftover ingress bandwidth to apple :-)
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- matwood 5y ago
  > How on earth are they proxying through Fastly? Money solves a lot of problems. Fastly already has a geographically diverse set of servers, so I could see them building a feature like this just for Apple (at least initially).
  - fomine3 5y ago
    Possibly supporting own relay is cheaper option than just accepting traffic from other companies' relay, but it depends on how they agreed peering to Apple.
- outloudvi 5y ago
  Well... Cloudflare Workers does enable you to bypass CAPTCHA walls. https://www.freebuf.com/articles/web/267964.html https://www.freebuf.com/articles/web/267964.html (Chinese)