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Netflix, like countless other online services, is not built for global citizens - people that work in different countries to their own. I am a British born exp

Netflix, like countless other online services, is not built for global citizens - people that work in different countries to their own. I am a British born expat, living in Qatar, so of course I want to watch the UK orientated Netflix programming and not the Arabic or Hindi. I have a UK TV license but of course, I can't watch UK TV from Qatar. Trying to pay for things online is frequently a nightmare as many companies won't take payment from a UK card unless it's from a UK IP. Same trying to pay tax on my US houses, also some websites don't even let you connect to them unless you use a US IP address! Google rightly defaults to Arabic if you're not logged in, that's fine, but even they don't provide a simple way to change the language to English! Similar with Spotify, same with Apple music. Whatsapp voice calls are blocked in Qatar. All of these problems and many more are bypassed with a good VPN. It amazes me how few services ever take into consideration that people don't always live and work in their country of origin. If VPN's are clamped down on it's going to make life difficult for tens of millions of people. VPN's are actually VITAL in many situations.

GrifMD 5y ago
I feel your pain. I'm an American living in Australia, so I'm not as significantly affected. Still my Google account and Apple accounts are all US based. My Apple account is tied into a family account I share with my US based family. I cannot download specific apps that are only on the Australian Apple App Store. My Sony Android TV cannot download some Australian television apps. I cannot purchase Audible audiobooks without VPN'ing back in to the US, even with credits I've accrued.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > I cannot download specific apps that are only on the Australian Apple App Store That's awesome for tourists. Go for a few weeks and you can't access the local apps. Brilliant.
  - koyote 5y ago
    Yep, and some of them are quite important for tourists such as the national weather app (which has alerts for storms, flooding etc.). Luckily these were easily side-loadable on an Android phone.
- int_19h 5y ago
  > I cannot download specific apps that are only on the Australian Apple App Store. I wonder if this includes COVID contact tracing apps? It could be a very juicy story if so.
  - lightsider2 5y ago
    It does. I live in Germany, but am American. I couldn't download the EU Digital Vaccine Certificate app until I switched my Apple account from US to Germany...
    - ryaninzion 5y ago
      Similar for me. My country of origin is the US, and my Apple account is connected to a US credit card. But I live in Israel and was vaccinated here. Since I am linked to the US App Store, I can't download the Israeli Vaccine Certification App ("Green Passport"). Nor can I easily switch my Apple account to Israel as I have several subscriptions that would need to be canceled.
    - rawbot 5y ago
      Same here, but at least you can switch back to your original region once it downloads.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      Have you considered going to the press with this story? It sounds like the kind of thing that could ultimately lead to a very critical piece in some major news media, which might push the tide back somewhat.
- occamschainsaw 5y ago
  I move between three countries but have to keep my account region to my family’s because of family sharing. I keep three accounts for the three regions, two dummy and one main. One inelegant solution I found is to sign out of the main account, sign in with a dummy account and install the apps I need from that region and signing back in with the main account.
- eloisius 5y ago
  The mobile apps for my US and Taiwanese banks are both region-locked to the US and Taiwan. Once I switched my region to Taiwan the Ally app stopped getting updates and eventually wouldn't let me sign into my account anymore.
chrisseaton 5y ago
> It amazes me how few services ever take into consideration that people don't always live and work in their country of origin. It's a niche requirement. Commercial services aren't built for niche requirements because it's not worth it. Shouldn't be amazing.
- Corinthian 5y ago
  The number of people working abroad globally is set to grow to over a hundred million in the next couple of years. I'd hardly call that niche, especially when that number looks set to continue climbing - especially when you also take into account the boom in remote work. I'd call it pretty short-sighted to not see that as an ever increasing problem. I'd also posit that a solution wouldn't take a colossal amount of resources to solve in most cases.
  - netflix_temp 5y ago
    It's not that they haven't thought about it. It's that it is not legally and economically viable (for them).
  - xyzelement 5y ago
    I understand where you are coming from but I think the post you're replying to is more pragmatic. Let's say Netflix has to chose between two problems to solve: secure distribution for desired content, and ensuring that you can view that content wherever you are. They likely see the tension between these things - the people who sell them media rights likely insist on tight region controls (or, would charge NF a lot more for "global" rights vs "US" rights.) If NF messes up securing quality content, they risk losing most of their 75 million users. On the other hand, they risk inconveniencing ... thousands? Tens of thousands? of users while they are traveling. I get their logic here.
    - Corinthian 5y ago
      I honestly don't think it is a complicated problem to solve when it comes to paid services. I'm making an assumption here, but I imagine as a matter of policy, every bank keeps on record if a bank account is local or foreign owned. And I'm also making an assumption that it wouldn't be a big reach for banks to share that information with payment services. Following that, if you're using a local UK bank account, you should be able to access UK structured services. Yes, I'm sure it's not as simple as that, but I can't see such a system requiring a radical overhaul of how services are distributed. Of course dual passport holders will be net winners, but no system is perfect, and I can't imagine many people going to the trouble of getting a US passport just to watch reruns of The Sopranos.
908B64B197 5y ago
I think back to the beginning of the Internet. The point was to connect computers together, and users, whatever their geographical location was. I'm still not certain why we allowed geographical restrictions to exist on these networks of tubes.
- dasil003 5y ago
  No one allowed it. There was a business need so someone stepped up to fill the void by geomapping IPs. Given legal compliance concerns this was inevitable, even completely ignoring the profit potential from even very coarse-grained (ie. country-level) differential pricing. Actively preventing this would have necessitated some pretty ugly tradeoffs which no one was incentivized to make.
- netflix_temp 5y ago
  Media licensing, The broadcast industry, and the lawyers firmly attached to it, pre-existed the Internet. So now we have laws and customs from the 1930s governing streaming tv on the Internet.
  - mannerheim 5y ago
    Don't worry, with new laws requiring x% of content has to be made in a country, we can ensure that geolocking is enshrined in both old and modern laws.
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      These laws are simply ridiculous. Good content simply sells. Just look at Parasites, Money Heist. International success from small local foreign studios.
javajosh 5y ago
Maybe there's a high-tech solution here, like asking a UK friend to use their Netflix when they're asleep (given the time difference). Your friend would run a VPN on their home PC for you. And honestly, I can't see Netflix caring enough to crack down on it. If anything, it mimics what N should do, which is offer people an account with a logical geography independent of physical geography.
- quintushoratius 5y ago
  This isn't a particularly good solution as it relies on another person's goodwill, which is neither reliable nor available to everyone. Assuming that the current geo-located situation continues, and realistically who sees that changing?, what's needed is a legal framework that explicitly allows people from different countries to access citizen-appropriate content in other parts of the world. Why should I have to jump through hoops to access a paid service like Netflix just because I happen to be located abroad for a week? VPNs were never more than a band-aid solution to relocation problems, and truly are a terrible solution. They don't actually offer anonymity, privacy, or convenience. Their original job - tying remote people into a private network - is the only thing they're truly good at.
  - netflix_temp 5y ago
    Right - the legal system didn't have this problem before. If you took a vacation in France, you could only watch what was on French TV or in their Cinemas. Times have changed, and we'll suffer while old industries catch up.
- saurik 5y ago
  FWIW, the "high-tech solution"--if we are already giving up any pretext that we are doing anything "by the book" (which simply isn't going to be allowed any way you slice it)--is to just scrape the movie someone wants out of Netflix and let them download it from you... it 100% "solves the problem" ;P.
- Hnrobert42 5y ago
  Haha. I like your thinking, but it’s sort of what caused this last wave of crackdowns. All those “free” VPN services work by letting you VPN to another locale in return for letting other users use your machine as an exit node into your locale. (I’m guessing) Netflix decided to enumerate the “exit node” IPs for some of the free VPNs, and ended up blocking the residential IPs. I could even see it ensnaring innocent apartment dwellers using a NATed IP or people getting IPs recycled through DHCP.
vrc 5y ago
For Google, you should type in Google.com/ncr . The NCR means no country redirect and you get standard google. I traveled a lot and learned this trick along the way. But your point is well made
- Corinthian 5y ago
  I was totally unaware of that, thank you, have an uptick!
- nvr219 5y ago
  I learned this the other day because Google thinks I want google.co.hk when I access from my VPN IP address (which is in a New Jersey data center). I filled out their "wrong country" form and of course haven't heard back and don't expect to. The /ncr workaround means I have to go to google.com/ncr before searching instead of searching from the browser search bar - annoying!
  - anthropodie 5y ago
    you could right click ncr search bar to add it as search engine. All you have to do then is switch the default search engine.
    - nvr219 5y ago
      How do I do this on iPhone/iPad?
- valenterry 5y ago
  Is there something like that as well to make the region match the preferred browser settings (in terms of language)?
- rsync 5y ago
  "For Google, you should type in Google.com/ncr . The NCR means no country redirect ..." Is there a similar trick that specifies I only want search results that contain the search terms I searched for ? Probably too much to ask ...
saurik 5y ago
What I find strange about this is that, given how Netflix accounts are all attached to a billing instrument, and how it is generally at least "very annoying" to get a bank account in a different country, it seems like Netflix should not care at all about VPN usage: they "should" just use the country from the billing address on your credit card to decide what content you have access to... it not only seems like it would be a lot less work for Netflix, but would also be a much tougher region wall to bypass. (And like, I do see the commentary about using a UK card with the wrong IP, but that's a different backing argument involving credit card fraud and clearly something you are already past due to how you have a Netflix account somehow.) I can only imagine that the underlying contracts with the content providers are "written stupid" in some way (in ways that are needlessly difficult to enforce), limiting the location of the viewer instead of the origin of the viewer. (FWIW: I am now seeing 7ewis mentioned this same idea in a different thread.)
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  Imagine that: - Netflix has a smaller/worse selection in the UK, than in the US, and - Netflix charges more in the UK than in the US, and - A UK person could easily get access to Netflix US by getting a friend in the US (or a US-based ebay seller) to set up their Netflix account It would be nearly impossible for Netflix to comply with their agreements with content owners. Limiting content based on billing address is easier to bypass than your post suggests.
  - krab 5y ago
    > A UK person could easily get access to Netflix US by getting a friend in the US (or a US-based ebay seller) to set up their Netflix account This can't be any random stranger if the UK person will be using the US person's means of payments. Therefore, not 100% but it could work in most cases.
    - saurik 5y ago
      Exactly... this simply isn't easy to pull off, and is certainly nowhere near as easy to pull off as changing your IP address, and is going to have way fewer false positives (in addition to fewer false negatives) than attempting to whack-a-mole VPNs over time with nothing more than limiting the number of Netflix accounts a person can pay for with a single credit card (such as to "1"). I'm literally mostly known for running a worldwide market with tens of millions of users--Cydia--and I'm telling you: it isn't some trivial restriction to bypass if you require someone's billing instrument to be located in a specific country (and the fact that such restrictions work so well is a big reason why blockchain has been so revolutionary to so many sectors... but isn't really going to affect Netflix's billing any time soon).
smashah 5y ago
As a Brit living in the middle East for most of the year, I resolved these issues by setting up Home Assistant in my house on UK with the wireguard add-on and upping my bandwidth so my local download speed matches the UK upload speed. This allows me to use all UK services perfectly. Including iPlayer. Good thing about wireguard is I can use it with my android TV also, making UK media consumption a breeze.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  Thanks for the tip. From a 30,000 perspective, it’s crazy that we have to go through the wasteful exercise of shipping gigabytes of video data up and down scarce residential fiber for no other reason than to tick a performative copyright box.
rahimnathwani 5y ago
If it's vital for you, then the best option is likely setting up a private VPN server at a friend's place in the relevant country.
danlugo92 5y ago
Even when logged in your google can sometimes roll back to arabic. Go to accounts.google.com and there's an option for lagnauges and in there there's a setting called something like "automatically add languages", disable that one.
- Corinthian 5y ago
  This is what I eventually had to do. Finding it was tough though, as the navigation was also in Arabic.
megablast 5y ago
Why would you pay for a yearly Uk license??
- tapland 5y ago
  To watch BBC content > The law says you need to be covered by a TV Licence to: watch or record programmes as they’re being shown on TV, on any channel watch or stream programmes live on an online TV service (such as ITV Hub, All 4, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Now TV, Sky Go, etc.) download or watch any BBC programmes on BBC iPlayer.
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    You are supposed to but a TV license if you watch YouTube or Amazon Prime Video???
    - aix1 5y ago
      > You are supposed to but a TV license if you watch YouTube or Amazon Prime Video??? This is not about those platforms in general; it is about the likes of BBC iPlayer app on those platforms. Only the latter require a TV licence. It is my understanding that, for example, watching BBC programmes on BritBox (a subscription-based streaming service from BBC and ITV) does not require a TV licence. [1] [1] https://www.cordbusters.co.uk/tv-licence-in-the-uk-do-i-need-to-pay/#Do_I_need_a_TV_Licence_to_watch_BBC_programmes_on_BritBox https://www.cordbusters.co.uk/tv-licence-in-the-uk-do-i-need...
    - SifJar 5y ago
      Specifically if you watch live broadcasts on YouTube or Amazon Prime (in the case of Prime, I believe that's mainly sports events). Watching regular YouTube videos or movies/shows on Prime does not require a TV license.
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    I’ve personally setup about 5 registered to Buckingham Palace. I wonder how many are registered to prominent UK addresses? I don’t live in the UK, but she is my head of state, so I have found a use for my queen.
gumby 5y ago
> Netflix, like countless other online services, is not built for global citizens Not a huge NF fan, but TBF Netflix is built for such a customer base — see how they don’t block their own material (as described in the article). It’s the legacy rentiers who have control over distribution of various titles in individual countries. Those assholes need to die off.
- geodel 5y ago
  Yeah, people who funded/ supported development of content need to die off because they like to recoup their investment in certain ways.
  - gumby 5y ago
    Yeah right, these are the people who got a license for their own geography years ago, won’t allow subtitling or control exposure absurdly. Whoever made the film has no say in this any more. Pathetic all around.
dn3500 5y ago
I'm registered to vote in Michigan. I live in Mexico. Michigan's web site for requesting absentee ballots blocks connections from Mexico. I checked with various vpn endpoints, they seem to be blocking the poorer countries like Ukraine, Poland, Mexico, while passing the richer ones like UK, Germany, Canada.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  What about running your own proxy or vpn on a vps?
  - Hnrobert42 5y ago
    I tried that on both AWS and on some super obscure (or so I thought), $2/mo Albanian VPS host. Both were blocked immediately.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      Have you considered paying someone in the states to plug a raspberri pi into their router?
      - Hnrobert42 5y ago
        Now I just use a commercial VPN provider that does a decent job getting me through the screens.
- awirth 5y ago
  I live in Japan and have the same problem with the Massachusetts department of state website (which contains voting information). I contacted my state representative (who does represent me, as I voted for him) and unfortunately he couldn't do much for me other than forward my inquiry.
- 8note 5y ago
Barrin92 5y ago
>. It amazes me how few services ever take into consideration that people don't always live and work in their country of origin I'm pretty sure they would take it into consideration, it's just that licensing of IP is a really tricky business. It's not a technical or business issue, it's a legal issue because bypassing geo-restrictions with a VPN is probably violating the terms of service of most content producers. In the entire UAE IIRC only licensed telecommunications providers can produce telecom. services, and that's why Whatsapp can't offer call
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  Yeah like, if the licensing wasn't an issue, Netflix would have a menu somewhere where you could simply select a country. They aren't doing this to be malicious, they just can't legally show certain content in certain countries.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  It's only a legal issue because it's allowed to be. The concept of "licensing territory" for IP is a 19th century relic. Licensing rights for streamed content could easily be made personal instead of national. Given the amount of expense and effort required to police specific IPs, it would be likely cheaper to handle this with a fine-grained approach than to keep refining the current mess with ever-more-complex content limiting epicycles.
  - unionpivo 5y ago
    > It's only a legal issue because it's allowed to be. That describes all legal issues. I agree with you that its a relic that we should get rid of. But its not simple to get rid of. There are tons of existing contracts. There are some companies that their whole business is being content "distributer" for countries/territories. They will do anything they can to make sure they stay in business. They might be equivalent of horse whip manufacturer, but that doesn't mean they will go down without a fight. For giant content owners like Disney, its probably easier to "contract renegotiation". Netfilx even if they were prepared to pay for worldwide distribution deal, it doesn't mean that content owners are willing or able to sell (if they have other exclusive agreements). This mess would take a while (and by that I mean years and possibly decades) even if there was somebody powerful pushing for it. And I am not sure if there is any such powerful entity pushing for it. Another way would be to have some kind of international deal-agreement but that's even harder to get. In short technical side is the easiest. And all IP/VPN blocking is peanuts compared to what it would cost(time and money) to renegotiate all the deals.
hilyen 5y ago
you could get a $5/mo vps and you can make your own vpn. it does not anonymize you, but it does give you an ip in the area you want and it won't be on any block lists since only you use it.
- julianz 5y ago
  Only if your VPS is not in a big data centre, as they already block most of those.
- csunbird 5y ago
  terrible advice. almost all vps provider ip ranges are blanket banned
0x38B 5y ago
Slightly related: the Capitol One Mobile app just… doesn’t work in Ukraine. Maybe they thought US citizens would never travel there. Thankfully, it works through a VPN.
- tapland 5y ago
  US banks and state services so often ban ips outside the US. Requesting records for anything is really hard when you can't even get the phone numbers from the website.
- briandear 5y ago
  Having dealt with significant cyber attacks from Ukraine, Lithuania, and Russia, I can’t blame them for blocking. They probably could do it more elegantly however.
w-ll 5y ago
If you have a house or family in the us or uk, could you make your own tunnel with a rasppi or nuc or something?
briandear 5y ago
> Google rightly defaults to Arabic It’s not “rightly.” If I go to google.com, I expect google.com not the country-specific version. If, for example, I wanted Mexican google, I’d explicitly type google.com.mx etc. It’s a royal pain that google doesn’t respect the user’s intent and instead infers a language based on geography.
- fistynuts 5y ago
  I'd say you are the exception here. Most people type google.com to get to Google, wherever they are.
smnrchrds 5y ago
Forget country of origin. It seems that most websites don't even acknowledge the existence of multilingual countries: You are in Switzerland, you must speak German; Belgium, here is some French; Canada, I guess that makes you Anglophone. It reminds me of a comment on an article about one of the giants (Google perhaps) who did not correctly handle capitalization rules for Dutch last names and capitalized "van", etc. Someone said something along the lines of "it's the height of corporate arrogance when a company treats your entire country and identity as an edge case." How useful or convenient tech services are tends to correlate strongly with how close to SF Bay area your life is. A UK person in Qatar is way too far. Even a Francophone in North America seems to be too far for most services.
- lancebeet 5y ago
  Until a couple of years ago, google's date picker for custom range search only worked if your locale was set to use the American date format. If your locale used any other other format, it would flip them around and give you a completely different time range. It always amused me how just a couple of clicks from their main product was a case they probably didn't even test for any non-US date formats, and cared so little about it that it took them years to fix it, despite bug reports. In that case, almost all of the non-US world was the edge case.
- manojlds 5y ago
  They do acknowledge multi lingual countries like India.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    When they're big enough, sure. But I've spent months of my life telling various US based employers all the ways their assumptions about languages were wrong, and it was often a weird level of blindness where they'd be aware of some exceptions but fail to realise the same pattern repeats lots of places. You'd see companies with separate Spanish versions of their US services still struggle to deal with the existence of Switzerland, for example.
    - 5y ago
nominated1 5y ago
IANAL but if you decided to pirate the content I could see a case for Fair Use [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  There is a reason you are not a lawyer.
tasogare 5y ago
I live abroad from some time and never had to use VPN, so vital is relative. The more annoying thing is phone numbers. More and more web services are using it as a security measure, and a lot aren't programmed to deal with international numbers. A bank in my country is especially idiotic in that respect, and I keep a monthly 5€ phone plan from there just to be sure I'll not lose access to a few websites.
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
> I have a UK TV license but of course, I can't watch UK TV from Qatar. Not from UK but isn't there any app from your Set-top box or DTH provider like Sky-TV app? I recently found in India that the apps of our set-top box providers are completely functional to watch any TV channel you subscribe, I don't watch TV so I didn't know this earlier but the app was the only way I could watch olympics as events were telecasted across multiple channels often simultaneously and so I had the app in several devices at the same time streaming different events.
rdevsrex 5y ago
Yeah, I hear you. I'm a US citizen, but live in South Africa. So I have to do extra auth steps to login to banking, when not on a VPN. And also, lots of places now are cracking down on VOIP phone. I very nearly couldn't login to my bank because they wanted a phone number with a physical address attached. Netflix is an annoyance, but its the general trend that is worrying.
- names_are_hard 5y ago
  I'm in a similar situation. Curious if you found a solution, perhaps a VOIP provider that accepts SMS shortcodes?
sleavey 5y ago
> Google rightly defaults to Arabic if you're not logged in How about Google uses the user agent's language setting sent in the header? This frustrates me to no end living in Germany using an English language browser.
- draw_down 5y ago
  Not super reliable, sadly
- praestigiare 5y ago
  Why no website can do this correctly baffles me. My browser literally tells you what languages I want.
Ballas 5y ago
Try: www.google.co.uk/?gl=GB That should give you the same google as if you were in the UK. Or, that is what I use if I want to have the "pages from the UK" option.
- rnhmjoj 5y ago
  Why do I have to tell each website the language I want in a website-specific way when there's been a standard HTTP header[1] to do exactly that for more than 20 years? I'm honestly asking: do web developers ignore know basic HTTP features or is there some specific reason?
  - mr_mitm 5y ago
    I don't know what Google does exactly, but at least in my case the header works as expected. I live in Germany, have set the language to en-US everywhere and Google serves me an english page just like I want it. And I'm not even logged in to Google.
  - Ballas 5y ago
    I agree that it should not be like this. I only offered a workaround, but in this case it's not only the language that changes, the entire site is served as if you geolocation is GB.
vidarh 5y ago
Consider finding a non-VPN-provider to set up your own tunnel via. A VPS already bypasses known VPN provider ranges. A friend in the UK or US willing to put a box on their network and lose some bandwidth for a contribution towards a bigger connection would be even better (but of course requiring some trust)...
- normaler 5y ago
  A VPS as a VPN server is coming from an IP range that belongs to a datacenter and netflix has Bern blockng these for some time atleast from Hetzner.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    If you use a VPS from a big provider, sure that may well have the same issue.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  > A friend in the UK or US willing to put a box on their network and lose some bandwidth. It’s very tempting to ask a friend to buy a nuc, and just post them a pre-configured .m2 drive. Likely overkill as a Pi or similar would probably suffice.
qwerty456127 5y ago
> It amazes me how few services ever take into consideration that people don't always live and work in their country of origin. Fun/sad fact (or not really a fact, honestly I didn't ask a lawyer to check) many are unaware off: "digital nomadism" is largely illegal, although nobody is hunting such people actively so far. The laws usually require you to have a local work permit if you work (even remotely, for your usual employer overseas) while residing in a foreign country. Needless to say getting such a permit usually is unnecessarily hard. I believe governments should fix this by making it easy for foreigners working remotely on "leisure trips" to legalize their status and pay a reasonable amount of local taxes (to support the local infrastructure they use) while legitimately bypassing the mechanisms set to handicap them in competition with the local workforce (because they don't really compete with them in this case). Perhaps they could just introduce remote worker visa type which would be as easy to get as simple leisure travel visas are.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  I think free, easy movement between countries is a thing of the past. Climate change is going to lead to nationalist isolation as countries try to preserve their resources as they start to run out. Things are still largely locked down from the pandemic, and I don’t think international tourism will ever go back to being as easy as it was pre-pandemic. Many formerly bustling tourist sites have decided its really nice not to have tourists. In this context, I think we can expect the Balkanization of the Internet to continue.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    > Climate change is going to lead to nationalist isolation as countries try to preserve their resources as they start to run out. War is likely as well.
    - wayoutthere 5y ago
      I agree; and war has a way of closing borders. I have a feeling that international travel going forward is going to be only for the rich and well-connected.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
I guess this all goes under falsehoods programmers believe about where people are. >Whatsapp voice calls are blocked in Qatar. that's probably a legal thing that you can't get around just because you happen to be visiting that country.
corobo 5y ago
> Google rightly defaults to Arabic if you're not logged in I dunno about rightly if they're using your IP to determine language instead of the language setting (Accept-Language header) from your browser
- ahrs 5y ago
  They do this with good intentions because not everyone can change this header (e.g if you're using some locked down browser at a kiosk you may not be able to change this) but it's infuriating for everyone who can.
  - tompazourek 5y ago
    If you are using a locked down browser at a kiosk, you cannot change your IP either.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
DevoidSimo 5y ago
The longest time I've worked overseas for was 3 months, so it's probably different to your experience. But I found the different content to be good. I had a whole new selection of shows and movies to watch since aside from the originals the content is pretty different between countries.
Aachen 5y ago
> rightly defaults to Arabic if you're not logged in The browser sends your configured language with literally every http request. If I'm in China, Chinese characters are really not going to help me no matter if I'm logged in or out. That's why my browser transfers that preference. Looking at IP only is just annoying.
endofreach 5y ago
Well, I think this is more of a licensing issue. The right owners expect the distributor to make sure to only distribute in areas they‘re allowed to by contract. Netflix understands global distribution and the power of availability, Hollywood & friends will follow some day, just a matter of time.
- pitkali 5y ago
  > Hollywood & friends will follow some day, just a matter of time. Will I still be alive, though? Because I've been waiting for some time now.
kchoudhu 5y ago
The first thing that irritated me when I moved to Qatar was how it was impossible to access a wide variety of US sites from foreign countries: my local trash service, Southwest Airlines... the list went on and on and on. I ended up standing up a VPN server in the US to deal with it, but it was a pain in the ass to deal with it.
bodge5000 5y ago
If its any consolation, the BBC recently pulled everything half decent that they own off netflix (The office, red dwarf, extras, thick of it, and loads more), so you're not missing much
bongoman37 5y ago
Its sometimes just bizarre. I once applied to Facebook from Bangalore and while everything on the website was in English, one of the final questions was about diversity and gender and while the question was in English the multiple choice response was only in Kannada. There was no way to change the language and anyway everything except the multiple choice part was in English. I finally defaulted to using Google Translate to get the correct answer.
sneak 5y ago
Even without switching countries, without a VPN every app on your phone knows when you leave home (switch from residential IP in city x to mobile IP in city x), arrive at work (switch from mobile IP in city x to business connection IP in city x), or take a flight (switch from mobile IP in city x to mobile IP in city y), or drive far, or check in to a hotel, et c et c et c. VPNs are essential for people who need to obscure their travel patterns from data brokers, for privacy or physical security reasons. Blocking them is like making an app that doesn't work at all with location services disabled: it's a privacy-invasive dick move.
Fnoord 5y ago
Use a VPN to UK via e.g. friend with fiber or your parents or other family. Not sure if you need to mind the TCP/IP stack, such as TTL?
shadowprofile76 5y ago
As an expat from Canada living in Latin America and using a number of services from both regions, I've had similar probems, also these same problems with other services from specific countries outside of where I live that I need to use due to work. Overall, this general location-obsessed balkanization of online servicces, websites and pages has become ridiculous. A great number of tech companies and websites, in ther fixation of "giving users a more localized, personalized experience" (in part mostly just tracking the shit out of them obsessively) have actually done more to break the ease of using the internet as a traveler and in ways that are ironic as helll when one considers the supposed ideals of an internet that was supposed to help more people become MORE global in their access to media, content and services regardless of where they reside or travel to. What we're seeing is an absurd, almost fuedalized regression of what should and easily could be fully delocalized platforms, which ruins them in the name of supposedly making them better. It's tedious, annoying and increasingly common.

GrifMD 5y ago

I feel your pain. I'm an American living in Australia, so I'm not as significantly affected. Still my Google account and Apple accounts are all US based. My Apple account is tied into a family account I share with my US based family. I cannot download specific apps that are only on the Australian Apple App Store. My Sony Android TV cannot download some Australian television apps. I cannot purchase Audible audiobooks without VPN'ing back in to the US, even with credits I've accrued.

908B64B197 5y ago
> I cannot download specific apps that are only on the Australian Apple App Store That's awesome for tourists. Go for a few weeks and you can't access the local apps. Brilliant.
- koyote 5y ago
  Yep, and some of them are quite important for tourists such as the national weather app (which has alerts for storms, flooding etc.). Luckily these were easily side-loadable on an Android phone.
int_19h 5y ago
> I cannot download specific apps that are only on the Australian Apple App Store. I wonder if this includes COVID contact tracing apps? It could be a very juicy story if so.
- lightsider2 5y ago
  It does. I live in Germany, but am American. I couldn't download the EU Digital Vaccine Certificate app until I switched my Apple account from US to Germany...
  - ryaninzion 5y ago
    Similar for me. My country of origin is the US, and my Apple account is connected to a US credit card. But I live in Israel and was vaccinated here. Since I am linked to the US App Store, I can't download the Israeli Vaccine Certification App ("Green Passport"). Nor can I easily switch my Apple account to Israel as I have several subscriptions that would need to be canceled.
  - rawbot 5y ago
    Same here, but at least you can switch back to your original region once it downloads.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    Have you considered going to the press with this story? It sounds like the kind of thing that could ultimately lead to a very critical piece in some major news media, which might push the tide back somewhat.
occamschainsaw 5y ago
I move between three countries but have to keep my account region to my family’s because of family sharing. I keep three accounts for the three regions, two dummy and one main. One inelegant solution I found is to sign out of the main account, sign in with a dummy account and install the apps I need from that region and signing back in with the main account.
eloisius 5y ago
The mobile apps for my US and Taiwanese banks are both region-locked to the US and Taiwan. Once I switched my region to Taiwan the Ally app stopped getting updates and eventually wouldn't let me sign into my account anymore.

chrisseaton 5y ago

> It amazes me how few services ever take into consideration that people don't always live and work in their country of origin. It's a niche requirement. Commercial services aren't built for niche requirements because it's not worth it. Shouldn't be amazing.

Corinthian 5y ago
The number of people working abroad globally is set to grow to over a hundred million in the next couple of years. I'd hardly call that niche, especially when that number looks set to continue climbing - especially when you also take into account the boom in remote work. I'd call it pretty short-sighted to not see that as an ever increasing problem. I'd also posit that a solution wouldn't take a colossal amount of resources to solve in most cases.
- netflix_temp 5y ago
  It's not that they haven't thought about it. It's that it is not legally and economically viable (for them).
- xyzelement 5y ago
  I understand where you are coming from but I think the post you're replying to is more pragmatic. Let's say Netflix has to chose between two problems to solve: secure distribution for desired content, and ensuring that you can view that content wherever you are. They likely see the tension between these things - the people who sell them media rights likely insist on tight region controls (or, would charge NF a lot more for "global" rights vs "US" rights.) If NF messes up securing quality content, they risk losing most of their 75 million users. On the other hand, they risk inconveniencing ... thousands? Tens of thousands? of users while they are traveling. I get their logic here.
  - Corinthian 5y ago
    I honestly don't think it is a complicated problem to solve when it comes to paid services. I'm making an assumption here, but I imagine as a matter of policy, every bank keeps on record if a bank account is local or foreign owned. And I'm also making an assumption that it wouldn't be a big reach for banks to share that information with payment services. Following that, if you're using a local UK bank account, you should be able to access UK structured services. Yes, I'm sure it's not as simple as that, but I can't see such a system requiring a radical overhaul of how services are distributed. Of course dual passport holders will be net winners, but no system is perfect, and I can't imagine many people going to the trouble of getting a US passport just to watch reruns of The Sopranos.

908B64B197 5y ago

I think back to the beginning of the Internet. The point was to connect computers together, and users, whatever their geographical location was. I'm still not certain why we allowed geographical restrictions to exist on these networks of tubes.

dasil003 5y ago
No one allowed it. There was a business need so someone stepped up to fill the void by geomapping IPs. Given legal compliance concerns this was inevitable, even completely ignoring the profit potential from even very coarse-grained (ie. country-level) differential pricing. Actively preventing this would have necessitated some pretty ugly tradeoffs which no one was incentivized to make.
netflix_temp 5y ago
Media licensing, The broadcast industry, and the lawyers firmly attached to it, pre-existed the Internet. So now we have laws and customs from the 1930s governing streaming tv on the Internet.
- mannerheim 5y ago
  Don't worry, with new laws requiring x% of content has to be made in a country, we can ensure that geolocking is enshrined in both old and modern laws.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    These laws are simply ridiculous. Good content simply sells. Just look at Parasites, Money Heist. International success from small local foreign studios.

javajosh 5y ago

Maybe there's a high-tech solution here, like asking a UK friend to use their Netflix when they're asleep (given the time difference). Your friend would run a VPN on their home PC for you. And honestly, I can't see Netflix caring enough to crack down on it. If anything, it mimics what N should do, which is offer people an account with a logical geography independent of physical geography.

quintushoratius 5y ago
This isn't a particularly good solution as it relies on another person's goodwill, which is neither reliable nor available to everyone. Assuming that the current geo-located situation continues, and realistically who sees that changing?, what's needed is a legal framework that explicitly allows people from different countries to access citizen-appropriate content in other parts of the world. Why should I have to jump through hoops to access a paid service like Netflix just because I happen to be located abroad for a week? VPNs were never more than a band-aid solution to relocation problems, and truly are a terrible solution. They don't actually offer anonymity, privacy, or convenience. Their original job - tying remote people into a private network - is the only thing they're truly good at.
- netflix_temp 5y ago
  Right - the legal system didn't have this problem before. If you took a vacation in France, you could only watch what was on French TV or in their Cinemas. Times have changed, and we'll suffer while old industries catch up.
saurik 5y ago
FWIW, the "high-tech solution"--if we are already giving up any pretext that we are doing anything "by the book" (which simply isn't going to be allowed any way you slice it)--is to just scrape the movie someone wants out of Netflix and let them download it from you... it 100% "solves the problem" ;P.
Hnrobert42 5y ago
Haha. I like your thinking, but it’s sort of what caused this last wave of crackdowns. All those “free” VPN services work by letting you VPN to another locale in return for letting other users use your machine as an exit node into your locale. (I’m guessing) Netflix decided to enumerate the “exit node” IPs for some of the free VPNs, and ended up blocking the residential IPs. I could even see it ensnaring innocent apartment dwellers using a NATed IP or people getting IPs recycled through DHCP.

vrc 5y ago

For Google, you should type in Google.com/ncr . The NCR means no country redirect and you get standard google. I traveled a lot and learned this trick along the way. But your point is well made

Corinthian 5y ago
I was totally unaware of that, thank you, have an uptick!
nvr219 5y ago
I learned this the other day because Google thinks I want google.co.hk when I access from my VPN IP address (which is in a New Jersey data center). I filled out their "wrong country" form and of course haven't heard back and don't expect to. The /ncr workaround means I have to go to google.com/ncr before searching instead of searching from the browser search bar - annoying!
- anthropodie 5y ago
  you could right click ncr search bar to add it as search engine. All you have to do then is switch the default search engine.
  - nvr219 5y ago
    How do I do this on iPhone/iPad?
valenterry 5y ago
Is there something like that as well to make the region match the preferred browser settings (in terms of language)?
rsync 5y ago
"For Google, you should type in Google.com/ncr . The NCR means no country redirect ..." Is there a similar trick that specifies I only want search results that contain the search terms I searched for ? Probably too much to ask ...

saurik 5y ago

What I find strange about this is that, given how Netflix accounts are all attached to a billing instrument, and how it is generally at least "very annoying" to get a bank account in a different country, it seems like Netflix should not care at all about VPN usage: they "should" just use the country from the billing address on your credit card to decide what content you have access to... it not only seems like it would be a lot less work for Netflix, but would also be a much tougher region wall to bypass. (And like, I do see the commentary about using a UK card with the wrong IP, but that's a different backing argument involving credit card fraud and clearly something you are already past due to how you have a Netflix account somehow.) I can only imagine that the underlying contracts with the content providers are "written stupid" in some way (in ways that are needlessly difficult to enforce), limiting the location of the viewer instead of the origin of the viewer. (FWIW: I am now seeing 7ewis mentioned this same idea in a different thread.)

rahimnathwani 5y ago
Imagine that: - Netflix has a smaller/worse selection in the UK, than in the US, and - Netflix charges more in the UK than in the US, and - A UK person could easily get access to Netflix US by getting a friend in the US (or a US-based ebay seller) to set up their Netflix account It would be nearly impossible for Netflix to comply with their agreements with content owners. Limiting content based on billing address is easier to bypass than your post suggests.
- krab 5y ago
  > A UK person could easily get access to Netflix US by getting a friend in the US (or a US-based ebay seller) to set up their Netflix account This can't be any random stranger if the UK person will be using the US person's means of payments. Therefore, not 100% but it could work in most cases.
  - saurik 5y ago
    Exactly... this simply isn't easy to pull off, and is certainly nowhere near as easy to pull off as changing your IP address, and is going to have way fewer false positives (in addition to fewer false negatives) than attempting to whack-a-mole VPNs over time with nothing more than limiting the number of Netflix accounts a person can pay for with a single credit card (such as to "1"). I'm literally mostly known for running a worldwide market with tens of millions of users--Cydia--and I'm telling you: it isn't some trivial restriction to bypass if you require someone's billing instrument to be located in a specific country (and the fact that such restrictions work so well is a big reason why blockchain has been so revolutionary to so many sectors... but isn't really going to affect Netflix's billing any time soon).

smashah 5y ago

As a Brit living in the middle East for most of the year, I resolved these issues by setting up Home Assistant in my house on UK with the wireguard add-on and upping my bandwidth so my local download speed matches the UK upload speed. This allows me to use all UK services perfectly. Including iPlayer. Good thing about wireguard is I can use it with my android TV also, making UK media consumption a breeze.

dcolkitt 5y ago
Thanks for the tip. From a 30,000 perspective, it’s crazy that we have to go through the wasteful exercise of shipping gigabytes of video data up and down scarce residential fiber for no other reason than to tick a performative copyright box.

rahimnathwani 5y ago

If it's vital for you, then the best option is likely setting up a private VPN server at a friend's place in the relevant country.

danlugo92 5y ago

Even when logged in your google can sometimes roll back to arabic. Go to accounts.google.com and there's an option for lagnauges and in there there's a setting called something like "automatically add languages", disable that one.

Corinthian 5y ago
This is what I eventually had to do. Finding it was tough though, as the navigation was also in Arabic.

megablast 5y ago

Why would you pay for a yearly Uk license??

tapland 5y ago
To watch BBC content > The law says you need to be covered by a TV Licence to: watch or record programmes as they’re being shown on TV, on any channel watch or stream programmes live on an online TV service (such as ITV Hub, All 4, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Now TV, Sky Go, etc.) download or watch any BBC programmes on BBC iPlayer.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  You are supposed to but a TV license if you watch YouTube or Amazon Prime Video???
  - aix1 5y ago
    > You are supposed to but a TV license if you watch YouTube or Amazon Prime Video??? This is not about those platforms in general; it is about the likes of BBC iPlayer app on those platforms. Only the latter require a TV licence. It is my understanding that, for example, watching BBC programmes on BritBox (a subscription-based streaming service from BBC and ITV) does not require a TV licence. [1] [1] https://www.cordbusters.co.uk/tv-licence-in-the-uk-do-i-need-to-pay/#Do_I_need_a_TV_Licence_to_watch_BBC_programmes_on_BritBox https://www.cordbusters.co.uk/tv-licence-in-the-uk-do-i-need...
  - SifJar 5y ago
    Specifically if you watch live broadcasts on YouTube or Amazon Prime (in the case of Prime, I believe that's mainly sports events). Watching regular YouTube videos or movies/shows on Prime does not require a TV license.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  I’ve personally setup about 5 registered to Buckingham Palace. I wonder how many are registered to prominent UK addresses? I don’t live in the UK, but she is my head of state, so I have found a use for my queen.

gumby 5y ago

> Netflix, like countless other online services, is not built for global citizens Not a huge NF fan, but TBF Netflix is built for such a customer base — see how they don’t block their own material (as described in the article). It’s the legacy rentiers who have control over distribution of various titles in individual countries. Those assholes need to die off.

geodel 5y ago
Yeah, people who funded/ supported development of content need to die off because they like to recoup their investment in certain ways.
- gumby 5y ago
  Yeah right, these are the people who got a license for their own geography years ago, won’t allow subtitling or control exposure absurdly. Whoever made the film has no say in this any more. Pathetic all around.

dn3500 5y ago

I'm registered to vote in Michigan. I live in Mexico. Michigan's web site for requesting absentee ballots blocks connections from Mexico. I checked with various vpn endpoints, they seem to be blocking the poorer countries like Ukraine, Poland, Mexico, while passing the richer ones like UK, Germany, Canada.

michaelmrose 5y ago
What about running your own proxy or vpn on a vps?
- Hnrobert42 5y ago
  I tried that on both AWS and on some super obscure (or so I thought), $2/mo Albanian VPS host. Both were blocked immediately.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    Have you considered paying someone in the states to plug a raspberri pi into their router?
    - Hnrobert42 5y ago
      Now I just use a commercial VPN provider that does a decent job getting me through the screens.
awirth 5y ago
I live in Japan and have the same problem with the Massachusetts department of state website (which contains voting information). I contacted my state representative (who does represent me, as I voted for him) and unfortunately he couldn't do much for me other than forward my inquiry.
8note 5y ago

Barrin92 5y ago

>. It amazes me how few services ever take into consideration that people don't always live and work in their country of origin I'm pretty sure they would take it into consideration, it's just that licensing of IP is a really tricky business. It's not a technical or business issue, it's a legal issue because bypassing geo-restrictions with a VPN is probably violating the terms of service of most content producers. In the entire UAE IIRC only licensed telecommunications providers can produce telecom. services, and that's why Whatsapp can't offer call

bpodgursky 5y ago
Yeah like, if the licensing wasn't an issue, Netflix would have a menu somewhere where you could simply select a country. They aren't doing this to be malicious, they just can't legally show certain content in certain countries.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
It's only a legal issue because it's allowed to be. The concept of "licensing territory" for IP is a 19th century relic. Licensing rights for streamed content could easily be made personal instead of national. Given the amount of expense and effort required to police specific IPs, it would be likely cheaper to handle this with a fine-grained approach than to keep refining the current mess with ever-more-complex content limiting epicycles.
- unionpivo 5y ago
  > It's only a legal issue because it's allowed to be. That describes all legal issues. I agree with you that its a relic that we should get rid of. But its not simple to get rid of. There are tons of existing contracts. There are some companies that their whole business is being content "distributer" for countries/territories. They will do anything they can to make sure they stay in business. They might be equivalent of horse whip manufacturer, but that doesn't mean they will go down without a fight. For giant content owners like Disney, its probably easier to "contract renegotiation". Netfilx even if they were prepared to pay for worldwide distribution deal, it doesn't mean that content owners are willing or able to sell (if they have other exclusive agreements). This mess would take a while (and by that I mean years and possibly decades) even if there was somebody powerful pushing for it. And I am not sure if there is any such powerful entity pushing for it. Another way would be to have some kind of international deal-agreement but that's even harder to get. In short technical side is the easiest. And all IP/VPN blocking is peanuts compared to what it would cost(time and money) to renegotiate all the deals.

hilyen 5y ago

you could get a $5/mo vps and you can make your own vpn. it does not anonymize you, but it does give you an ip in the area you want and it won't be on any block lists since only you use it.

julianz 5y ago
Only if your VPS is not in a big data centre, as they already block most of those.
csunbird 5y ago
terrible advice. almost all vps provider ip ranges are blanket banned

0x38B 5y ago

Slightly related: the Capitol One Mobile app just… doesn’t work in Ukraine. Maybe they thought US citizens would never travel there. Thankfully, it works through a VPN.

tapland 5y ago
US banks and state services so often ban ips outside the US. Requesting records for anything is really hard when you can't even get the phone numbers from the website.
briandear 5y ago
Having dealt with significant cyber attacks from Ukraine, Lithuania, and Russia, I can’t blame them for blocking. They probably could do it more elegantly however.

w-ll 5y ago

If you have a house or family in the us or uk, could you make your own tunnel with a rasppi or nuc or something?

briandear 5y ago

> Google rightly defaults to Arabic It’s not “rightly.” If I go to google.com, I expect google.com not the country-specific version. If, for example, I wanted Mexican google, I’d explicitly type google.com.mx etc. It’s a royal pain that google doesn’t respect the user’s intent and instead infers a language based on geography.

fistynuts 5y ago
I'd say you are the exception here. Most people type google.com to get to Google, wherever they are.

smnrchrds 5y ago

Forget country of origin. It seems that most websites don't even acknowledge the existence of multilingual countries: You are in Switzerland, you must speak German; Belgium, here is some French; Canada, I guess that makes you Anglophone. It reminds me of a comment on an article about one of the giants (Google perhaps) who did not correctly handle capitalization rules for Dutch last names and capitalized "van", etc. Someone said something along the lines of "it's the height of corporate arrogance when a company treats your entire country and identity as an edge case." How useful or convenient tech services are tends to correlate strongly with how close to SF Bay area your life is. A UK person in Qatar is way too far. Even a Francophone in North America seems to be too far for most services.

lancebeet 5y ago
Until a couple of years ago, google's date picker for custom range search only worked if your locale was set to use the American date format. If your locale used any other other format, it would flip them around and give you a completely different time range. It always amused me how just a couple of clicks from their main product was a case they probably didn't even test for any non-US date formats, and cared so little about it that it took them years to fix it, despite bug reports. In that case, almost all of the non-US world was the edge case.
manojlds 5y ago
They do acknowledge multi lingual countries like India.
- vidarh 5y ago
  When they're big enough, sure. But I've spent months of my life telling various US based employers all the ways their assumptions about languages were wrong, and it was often a weird level of blindness where they'd be aware of some exceptions but fail to realise the same pattern repeats lots of places. You'd see companies with separate Spanish versions of their US services still struggle to deal with the existence of Switzerland, for example.
  - 5y ago

nominated1 5y ago

IANAL but if you decided to pirate the content I could see a case for Fair Use [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

deleted 5y ago
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Mindwipe 5y ago
There is a reason you are not a lawyer.

tasogare 5y ago

I live abroad from some time and never had to use VPN, so vital is relative. The more annoying thing is phone numbers. More and more web services are using it as a security measure, and a lot aren't programmed to deal with international numbers. A bank in my country is especially idiotic in that respect, and I keep a monthly 5€ phone plan from there just to be sure I'll not lose access to a few websites.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

> I have a UK TV license but of course, I can't watch UK TV from Qatar. Not from UK but isn't there any app from your Set-top box or DTH provider like Sky-TV app? I recently found in India that the apps of our set-top box providers are completely functional to watch any TV channel you subscribe, I don't watch TV so I didn't know this earlier but the app was the only way I could watch olympics as events were telecasted across multiple channels often simultaneously and so I had the app in several devices at the same time streaming different events.

rdevsrex 5y ago

Yeah, I hear you. I'm a US citizen, but live in South Africa. So I have to do extra auth steps to login to banking, when not on a VPN. And also, lots of places now are cracking down on VOIP phone. I very nearly couldn't login to my bank because they wanted a phone number with a physical address attached. Netflix is an annoyance, but its the general trend that is worrying.

names_are_hard 5y ago
I'm in a similar situation. Curious if you found a solution, perhaps a VOIP provider that accepts SMS shortcodes?

sleavey 5y ago

> Google rightly defaults to Arabic if you're not logged in How about Google uses the user agent's language setting sent in the header? This frustrates me to no end living in Germany using an English language browser.

draw_down 5y ago
Not super reliable, sadly
praestigiare 5y ago
Why no website can do this correctly baffles me. My browser literally tells you what languages I want.

Ballas 5y ago

Try: www.google.co.uk/?gl=GB That should give you the same google as if you were in the UK. Or, that is what I use if I want to have the "pages from the UK" option.

rnhmjoj 5y ago
Why do I have to tell each website the language I want in a website-specific way when there's been a standard HTTP header[1] to do exactly that for more than 20 years? I'm honestly asking: do web developers ignore know basic HTTP features or is there some specific reason?
- mr_mitm 5y ago
  I don't know what Google does exactly, but at least in my case the header works as expected. I live in Germany, have set the language to en-US everywhere and Google serves me an english page just like I want it. And I'm not even logged in to Google.
- Ballas 5y ago
  I agree that it should not be like this. I only offered a workaround, but in this case it's not only the language that changes, the entire site is served as if you geolocation is GB.

vidarh 5y ago

Consider finding a non-VPN-provider to set up your own tunnel via. A VPS already bypasses known VPN provider ranges. A friend in the UK or US willing to put a box on their network and lose some bandwidth for a contribution towards a bigger connection would be even better (but of course requiring some trust)...

normaler 5y ago
A VPS as a VPN server is coming from an IP range that belongs to a datacenter and netflix has Bern blockng these for some time atleast from Hetzner.
- vidarh 5y ago
  If you use a VPS from a big provider, sure that may well have the same issue.
lostlogin 5y ago
> A friend in the UK or US willing to put a box on their network and lose some bandwidth. It’s very tempting to ask a friend to buy a nuc, and just post them a pre-configured .m2 drive. Likely overkill as a Pi or similar would probably suffice.

qwerty456127 5y ago

> It amazes me how few services ever take into consideration that people don't always live and work in their country of origin. Fun/sad fact (or not really a fact, honestly I didn't ask a lawyer to check) many are unaware off: "digital nomadism" is largely illegal, although nobody is hunting such people actively so far. The laws usually require you to have a local work permit if you work (even remotely, for your usual employer overseas) while residing in a foreign country. Needless to say getting such a permit usually is unnecessarily hard. I believe governments should fix this by making it easy for foreigners working remotely on "leisure trips" to legalize their status and pay a reasonable amount of local taxes (to support the local infrastructure they use) while legitimately bypassing the mechanisms set to handicap them in competition with the local workforce (because they don't really compete with them in this case). Perhaps they could just introduce remote worker visa type which would be as easy to get as simple leisure travel visas are.

deleted 5y ago
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wayoutthere 5y ago
I think free, easy movement between countries is a thing of the past. Climate change is going to lead to nationalist isolation as countries try to preserve their resources as they start to run out. Things are still largely locked down from the pandemic, and I don’t think international tourism will ever go back to being as easy as it was pre-pandemic. Many formerly bustling tourist sites have decided its really nice not to have tourists. In this context, I think we can expect the Balkanization of the Internet to continue.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > Climate change is going to lead to nationalist isolation as countries try to preserve their resources as they start to run out. War is likely as well.
  - wayoutthere 5y ago
    I agree; and war has a way of closing borders. I have a feeling that international travel going forward is going to be only for the rich and well-connected.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

I guess this all goes under falsehoods programmers believe about where people are. >Whatsapp voice calls are blocked in Qatar. that's probably a legal thing that you can't get around just because you happen to be visiting that country.

corobo 5y ago

> Google rightly defaults to Arabic if you're not logged in I dunno about rightly if they're using your IP to determine language instead of the language setting (Accept-Language header) from your browser

ahrs 5y ago
They do this with good intentions because not everyone can change this header (e.g if you're using some locked down browser at a kiosk you may not be able to change this) but it's infuriating for everyone who can.
- tompazourek 5y ago
  If you are using a locked down browser at a kiosk, you cannot change your IP either.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

DevoidSimo 5y ago

The longest time I've worked overseas for was 3 months, so it's probably different to your experience. But I found the different content to be good. I had a whole new selection of shows and movies to watch since aside from the originals the content is pretty different between countries.

Aachen 5y ago

> rightly defaults to Arabic if you're not logged in The browser sends your configured language with literally every http request. If I'm in China, Chinese characters are really not going to help me no matter if I'm logged in or out. That's why my browser transfers that preference. Looking at IP only is just annoying.

endofreach 5y ago

Well, I think this is more of a licensing issue. The right owners expect the distributor to make sure to only distribute in areas they‘re allowed to by contract. Netflix understands global distribution and the power of availability, Hollywood & friends will follow some day, just a matter of time.

pitkali 5y ago
> Hollywood & friends will follow some day, just a matter of time. Will I still be alive, though? Because I've been waiting for some time now.

kchoudhu 5y ago

The first thing that irritated me when I moved to Qatar was how it was impossible to access a wide variety of US sites from foreign countries: my local trash service, Southwest Airlines... the list went on and on and on. I ended up standing up a VPN server in the US to deal with it, but it was a pain in the ass to deal with it.

bodge5000 5y ago

If its any consolation, the BBC recently pulled everything half decent that they own off netflix (The office, red dwarf, extras, thick of it, and loads more), so you're not missing much

bongoman37 5y ago

Its sometimes just bizarre. I once applied to Facebook from Bangalore and while everything on the website was in English, one of the final questions was about diversity and gender and while the question was in English the multiple choice response was only in Kannada. There was no way to change the language and anyway everything except the multiple choice part was in English. I finally defaulted to using Google Translate to get the correct answer.

sneak 5y ago

Even without switching countries, without a VPN every app on your phone knows when you leave home (switch from residential IP in city x to mobile IP in city x), arrive at work (switch from mobile IP in city x to business connection IP in city x), or take a flight (switch from mobile IP in city x to mobile IP in city y), or drive far, or check in to a hotel, et c et c et c. VPNs are essential for people who need to obscure their travel patterns from data brokers, for privacy or physical security reasons. Blocking them is like making an app that doesn't work at all with location services disabled: it's a privacy-invasive dick move.

Fnoord 5y ago

Use a VPN to UK via e.g. friend with fiber or your parents or other family. Not sure if you need to mind the TCP/IP stack, such as TTL?

shadowprofile76 5y ago

As an expat from Canada living in Latin America and using a number of services from both regions, I've had similar probems, also these same problems with other services from specific countries outside of where I live that I need to use due to work. Overall, this general location-obsessed balkanization of online servicces, websites and pages has become ridiculous. A great number of tech companies and websites, in ther fixation of "giving users a more localized, personalized experience" (in part mostly just tracking the shit out of them obsessively) have actually done more to break the ease of using the internet as a traveler and in ways that are ironic as helll when one considers the supposed ideals of an internet that was supposed to help more people become MORE global in their access to media, content and services regardless of where they reside or travel to. What we're seeing is an absurd, almost fuedalized regression of what should and easily could be fully delocalized platforms, which ruins them in the name of supposedly making them better. It's tedious, annoying and increasingly common.