5 ms·

I feel like these have gotten better over time. The pitch used to be that your ISP was spying on you, now the pitch is that you can pretend to be in a differen

I feel like these have gotten better over time. The pitch used to be that your ISP was spying on you, now the pitch is that you can pretend to be in a different country. That's closer to the truth. (But of course, everyone has the list of VPN exit nodes and just blocks them. I wonder if any of these VPN services are actually peer to peer, so that your IP is an exit address for people that want to pretend to be in your country. The legal liability sounds staggering, but I guess that's why you set up your company in some country that doesn't care, accept crypto for payments, and hope for the best.)

subpixel 5y ago
I do use a VPN exclusively to watch geo-locked television. They have specific connections for particular services, Which they (I assume) monitor and maintain so they don’t get blocked for long. That’s worth the fee to me.
- Akronymus 5y ago
  Genuine question: Why not pirate it at that point? It seems to be more convenient and even cheaper, to me.
  - probably_wrong 5y ago
    Cheaper? Yes. More convenient? No. I have a Raspberry Pi with OSMC where I installed the plugins for several online services. My friends hate my setup. Sure, you can watch anything you want if you know what you want to watch, but it sucks for browsing the catalogues to see what's available. I also get interrupted once a month when a new Widevine version is released, which takes ~10min to download and install. And then there's the language issue: if the movie/series is not in a language I speak I need to spend 10-20 minutes hunting for subtitles. That means: download a subtitle, check that the starting time matches (or tweak it manually), skip ahead to ensure that they remain in sync (good luck not getting spoiled while, simultaneously, checking that the subtitles make sense with what's happening on screen), moving everything to the right directory... All of this is second nature to me so I'm not bothered, but I can totally understand paying a fee for a single-click interface.
  - subpixel 5y ago
    Honestly most of what I am looking for is not available via BitTorrent. Or it has like 1 seed.
wintermutestwin 5y ago
>The pitch used to be that your ISP was spying on you How is that not still the case? My ISP is a known bad actor who wants to sell my data. How else am I going to defend against these monopolist thieves?
david_allison 5y ago
> I wonder if any of these VPN services are actually peer to peer, so that your IP is an exit address for people that want to pretend to be in your country. Hola VPN used to sell access to your connection as an exit node (for web scraping etc..) under the name Luminati. I haven't looked into this in many years. Luminati appears to have been renamed to Bright Data[0] and on the surface appears to be doing the same thing. [0] https://brightdata.com/ https://brightdata.com/
evgen 5y ago
> I wonder if any of these VPN services are actually peer to peer, so that your IP is an exit address for people that want to pretend to be in your country. It is not quite peer-to-peer, but not as hidden as you might think. Nord and few other vpns that provide so-called 'residential IPs' are doing this in the background. You have to dig a bit into the T&Cs of the agreement before you find the little clauses that let them use your computer as an exit node.

subpixel 5y ago

I do use a VPN exclusively to watch geo-locked television. They have specific connections for particular services, Which they (I assume) monitor and maintain so they don’t get blocked for long. That’s worth the fee to me.

Akronymus 5y ago
Genuine question: Why not pirate it at that point? It seems to be more convenient and even cheaper, to me.
- probably_wrong 5y ago
  Cheaper? Yes. More convenient? No. I have a Raspberry Pi with OSMC where I installed the plugins for several online services. My friends hate my setup. Sure, you can watch anything you want if you know what you want to watch, but it sucks for browsing the catalogues to see what's available. I also get interrupted once a month when a new Widevine version is released, which takes ~10min to download and install. And then there's the language issue: if the movie/series is not in a language I speak I need to spend 10-20 minutes hunting for subtitles. That means: download a subtitle, check that the starting time matches (or tweak it manually), skip ahead to ensure that they remain in sync (good luck not getting spoiled while, simultaneously, checking that the subtitles make sense with what's happening on screen), moving everything to the right directory... All of this is second nature to me so I'm not bothered, but I can totally understand paying a fee for a single-click interface.
- subpixel 5y ago
  Honestly most of what I am looking for is not available via BitTorrent. Or it has like 1 seed.

wintermutestwin 5y ago

>The pitch used to be that your ISP was spying on you How is that not still the case? My ISP is a known bad actor who wants to sell my data. How else am I going to defend against these monopolist thieves?

david_allison 5y ago

> I wonder if any of these VPN services are actually peer to peer, so that your IP is an exit address for people that want to pretend to be in your country. Hola VPN used to sell access to your connection as an exit node (for web scraping etc..) under the name Luminati. I haven't looked into this in many years. Luminati appears to have been renamed to Bright Data[0] and on the surface appears to be doing the same thing. [0] https://brightdata.com/ https://brightdata.com/

evgen 5y ago

> I wonder if any of these VPN services are actually peer to peer, so that your IP is an exit address for people that want to pretend to be in your country. It is not quite peer-to-peer, but not as hidden as you might think. Nord and few other vpns that provide so-called 'residential IPs' are doing this in the background. You have to dig a bit into the T&Cs of the agreement before you find the little clauses that let them use your computer as an exit node.