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Many years ago, I worked at a small (3 US states) ISP, roughly 500-600K customers This ISP was one that mostly absorbed smaller ISP's that weren't able to scal
by IntelMiner 5y ago
Many years ago, I worked at a small (3 US states) ISP, roughly 500-600K customers
This ISP was one that mostly absorbed smaller ISP's that weren't able to scale up enough to remain competitive.
One of the ISP's they absorbed was CondoInternet. A Seattle based firm that provided gigabit internet service across Seattle's affluent areas and expensive condos
As it turned out, a lot of the customers ordering the service hailed from a country with a very restrictive censorship regime. A "great firewall" if you will
They'd set up home-made VPN's using Raspberry Pi's etc for family to tunnel into and watch Netflix on typically
Netflix however even in 2017 was smart and their algorithm would see these thousands of people logging in while everyone else in Seattle was typically asleep and eventually ban the entire ISP's IP range. Logging in would give a "please turn off your proxy/VPN" error message
Every time this happened the ISP's phone tree would explode, going from mere seconds to literal 6-10 hour queue times. The NOC was entirely upskilled CS agents who had no idea how to contact Netflix's relevant teams to get the IP ban removed, instead they'd simply tell CS to have customers wait until the IP ban expired (usually a few days)
This would happen almost every other month
- encryptluks2 5y agoI'm guessing that was probably a blatant abuse of the residential service. Not that I agree, but ISPs already block port 25 for the most part. I'm surprised they didn't just start banning customers abusing the service.
- IntelMiner 5y agoPort 25 is for unsecured SMTP VPN's can be on any port
- techsupporter 5y ago> I'm surprised they didn't just start banning customers abusing the service. One of CondoInternet's advertised selling points before they sold to Wave Broadband is that you could buy the 1Gbps service and do whatever you wanted, including run your own servers. So it wasn't an abuse of the service. Everyone I knew on CondoInternet would buy the highest speed package so they could run Minecraft and Plex and other servers for their friends. It was like having Speakeasy Internet Services SDSL back again but with 200 times the upload.
- Salgat 5y agoI can't help but wonder why Netflix cares this deeply. Are their contractual obligations that incredibly stringent?
- cletus 5y agoOf course there are. Pretty much every stupid geo-restriction, restriction on downloads, restrictions on the number of downloads (why??), etc comes down to some stupid rights holder think this is something they want.
- technofiend 5y agoYou have to remember the movie business has been dragged kicking and screaming into progressively larger and larger buckets of money since forever. VCRs? They'll kill the movie industry. DVDs? Same. Blueray, even worse since quality is so good no one will ever buy a movie again. Streaming services? Last one out of Hollywood please turn out the lights. Blah, blah, blah. The then head of the MPAA Jack Valenti literally compared the VCR to a serial killer named the Boston Strangler. "'I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.' Jack Valenti said this in 1982 in testimony to the House of Representatives on why the VCR should be illegal. He also called the VCR an "avalanche" and a "tidal wave", and said it would make the film industry "bleed and bleed and hemorrhage" As quoted on slashdot: https://news.slashdot.org/story/02/05/31/1622232/valentis-boston-strangler-testimony https://news.slashdot.org/story/02/05/31/1622232/valentis-bo... My point is yes there are incredibly strict covenants in place and I'm sure they're probably preventing more revenue than they're allegedly protecting.
- smilespray 5y agoWherever Jack Valenti is now, I hope it's hot.
- crazygringo 5y agoYes of course they are! Netflix signs licensing deals that are per-country, and the licenses require that Netflix actively enforce that media is steamed only to the country in question. You think Netflix is enforcing these restrictions because it wants to, or because it thinks it's fun to defeat VPN's? Of course not. All of this effort costs money that obviously Netflix wouldn't be paying if it weren't required to. It's doing so because it's contractually obligated to. So don't get mad at Netflix. They don't have a choice. They're just doing what their content providers require them to.
- simfree 5y agoThis makes a lot more sense why CondoInternet and other small ISPs joined Wave Division Holdings now. What do you think the future of Wave is since their leadership exited the firm and convinced an SPAC to put them in charge of a new regional competitor (Ziply Fiber)?
- m0dest 5y agoNetflix likely spotted the behavior through one of the many other heuristics that can identify this, such as: - Lower packet TTL than gateway - Lower packet MTU than gateway - Much higher latency than gateway - WAN IP listening on well-known VPN ports for PPTP/IPsec/etc - Ongoing sessions that suddenly teleported to a Chinese WAN IP when the VPN connection dropped - Incorrect DNS configurations or stale caches that point toward inappropriate CDN edge nodes - System time zone (via JavaScript or native app) not matching source region - Unusual system language preferences for the region - One of the hundreds of leaky data points revealed by Android devices and other native apps