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I really like mullvad's service too (wiregaurd)... My only issue is that is seems to have become increasingly difficult to access many websites through their se

by tomxor 5y ago

I really like mullvad's service too (wiregaurd)... My only issue is that is seems to have become increasingly difficult to access many websites through their servers. I suppose this is inevitable to some degree with any VPN service, it's part of the deal for more privacy, you have to share an IP with potential sources of abuse. But it seems to have gotten really bad recently to the point that I end up server hoping throughout the day because different websites will have blocked different mullvad servers - to complicate matters some of their newer server IPs hosted by another company are misidentified as russian and blocked by many sites and services. I'm not blaming Mullvad, but it's changed my use of their service from a set and forget to a constant reminder that i'm on a VPN... I don't know what the solution is beyond some crude cycling of IPs.

nonrandomstring 5y ago
> My only issue is that is seems to have become increasingly difficult to access many websites through their servers. Welcome to the world of Tor users. People who value online dignity need to work together against privacy hostile web technologies. My present bugbear is Cloudflare, who seem to do a lot to disrupt privacy respecting technologies. Ultimately though, the power lies with web service designers. One can no longer pretend "I didn't know" when turning over delivery to some cheap (free) but shady CDN who then blocks millions of legitimate users because they don't want to be tracked and spied on.
- shiftpgdn 5y ago
  The flip side to this is to have your site hammered by bots, scrapers and worms looking for exploits (look at your weblogs sometime and see how often Wordpress php pages are requested, lol). I don’t know what the middle ground is but in spirit I agree with you, especially in keeping the internet decentralized. In practice I’m not so sure.
  - mccorrinall 5y ago
    When configured correctly you can use most of the cloudflares features such as WAF without blocking all tor/vpn users. Requires a little bit more than just flicking the „i’m under attack“ button though.
- brightball 5y ago
  Yea problem from an admin perspective is that all malicious traffic attempts to use privacy respecting technology. It’s more guilt by association than anything else for the legitimate users. One of the weird realities is that in order to combat fraud you need to be able to identify the source, which is a hard reality as a privacy advocate.
  - idiotsecant 5y ago
    HN tends to be pretty micropayment / cryptobro averse (for good reason, mostly) but I think this is a problem that crypto could legitimately solve - Tie an anonymous 'identity' to a well-seasoned (unmoved for >x time, where x = days for some things or maybe years for some things) wallet with some reasonable amount of funding in it ($100 or something) and you become 'Guy who owns that hundred bucks'. Moving the hundred bucks unseasons it. The provider only respects your claim to be an individual if you can prove you've got a pile of 100 seasoned bucks. If you do something I don't like, I can ban that pile from further interaction. Malicious users would immediately move the money around, but at least the malicious actors would need a lot of piles of money constantly moving around and 'seasoning' to create a bunch of fake individual identities, which gets prohibitively expensive at scale for all but nation-state type actors which you're not going to be able to defend against anyway. Bam - I am anonymous, but have (mostly) proven I am a real person with (mostly) reasonably good intentions.
    - nonrandomstring 5y ago
      Your talking about earned capital as a forfeitable deposit. Sure that scheme has its place. I joined HN for one or two reasons. To research a book. But also to promote my last book. Anyone can post here with a throwaway, yet I didn't want to be an interloping dick who felt entitled to hit and run posting links to my own vanities... so I decided; join, contribute, participate, earn. After a few months I don't feel bad about plying my own wares a little. Reputation (social capital) is natural and ancient and doesn't really need crypto. Most of the Web isn't that though. As an information system, as Sir Tim first coined it, it's a publishing machine: You advertise a service, I send "requests", you send "responses", we part ways without complications. Quick anonymous sex on the beach. So-called Web2.0 f-cked that massively. Web2.0 wants to exchange phone numbers. And once the surveillance capitalist creeps latched on to stalking everyone around the neighbourhood... well here we are. I think what some Web3.0 people think is that crypto can repair some kind of "middle ground", where Web2.0 type behaviours can take place but anonymously and under conditions controlled by "stakes". I think this won't work for psychological and game theoretical reasons we can't get into here. Instead I think we need to repair the Web1.0 layer at least, and since transport level security and anonymity have become necessary in a post-Snowden era, for me that means getting rid of the selective prejudice inflicted by systems like Cloudflare.
- jacooper 5y ago
throwaway4good 5y ago
"I'm not blaming Mullvad" - you should - this is a direct consequence of accepting customers that pay cash and wants to be completely anonymous. In the end they are going to drive their honest non-abusive customers elsewhere.
- drexlspivey 5y ago
  I have my own VPN on a digitalocean droplet and it’s basically the same, I’m outright blocked from many sites (Imgur for example) and I have to solve tons of captchas. DigitalOcean doesnt accept cash so your argument doesn’t pass the sniff test.
  - jcrawfordor 5y ago
    DO has a generally poor reputation in the security industry as abuse from their services is very common - they don't really vet their customers to any real degree. The same is true of e.g. AWS which is why a lot of websites will outright block traffic coming from AWS. The reality is that "anonymous payment" is kind of pointless, it's basically never the payment method that determines abuse potential as abusers have all kinds of ways of making payment anonymously even when only e.g. cc is accepted. What matters is the level of time and effort put into monitoring usage. To be honest, on a pure sniff test your traffic coming from DO is probably more suspicious. There are lots of legitimate uses of commercial VPNs. There are not many legitimate users of consumer web-browsing from DO.
  - jacooper 5y ago
    I think this is different. You are banned because DO IP ranges are public and everyone wants to ban cloud IPs, since legit users don't use static VPS IPs. I am currently hosting head scale with an exit node on hetzner, and sometimes i am banned from websites. But back when I used contabo it was a rareity to get blocked, even though its a more "shady" host, maybe because its not as well known ?
- neither_color 5y ago
  Not really, this happens with any VPN service to the point that if VPN providers were more honest this is what they would tell people: Online stores are more likely to flag your purchase as suspicious on the admin side(e.g the Shopify console) You will run into captchas and prompts for authentication more often You may not be able to log into some of your more sensitive services(like banking) Streaming sites will block your server eventually Even if you spin your own wireguard instance on any major cloud provider you're going to run into the same issues.
xanaxagoras 5y ago
I've had a lot of trouble with that lately. I can't connect to imgur without turning it off, and my USPS.com account got straight up banned for logging in over Mullvad, I had to call them to prove my identity.
InCityDreams 5y ago
>seems to have become increasingly difficult to access many websites through their servers. And i, very happily, continue on without those 'many websites'. Of which, there are actually, very, very few for me. Nevertheless - fuck 'em; and not missed.
handsclean 5y ago
The way I see it, websites like that are saying they’ll only do it without a condom. You want it real bad, so it’s tempting to try to bargain about it, or maybe just take it off for now - it’s just a little while, what’re the chances it goes wrong? - but we all know that the smart move is to keep it on or back out entirely. Reasonable partners, of which there are many, understand and cooperate. And ones that don’t aren’t the type of partner you want anyway.
- vortext 5y ago
  Username checks out.
  - aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
    Please don't do this here.
  - maccolgan 5y ago
    HN isn't reddit, please keep this shit out.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  The vast majority of sites just want to reduce abuse of their site or services. They aren't trying to trick you into doxxing yourself.
mirceal 5y ago
2 thoughts: 1) if you do this for unauthenticated websites you are bad and I will not use you 2) if you do this for authenticated websites (especially if I pay you) I will stop using you and you will lose my money. The most I will accept is a captcha (because it's 2022 and this is where we are)

by tomxor 5y ago

nonrandomstring 5y ago

> My only issue is that is seems to have become increasingly difficult to access many websites through their servers. Welcome to the world of Tor users. People who value online dignity need to work together against privacy hostile web technologies. My present bugbear is Cloudflare, who seem to do a lot to disrupt privacy respecting technologies. Ultimately though, the power lies with web service designers. One can no longer pretend "I didn't know" when turning over delivery to some cheap (free) but shady CDN who then blocks millions of legitimate users because they don't want to be tracked and spied on.

shiftpgdn 5y ago
The flip side to this is to have your site hammered by bots, scrapers and worms looking for exploits (look at your weblogs sometime and see how often Wordpress php pages are requested, lol). I don’t know what the middle ground is but in spirit I agree with you, especially in keeping the internet decentralized. In practice I’m not so sure.
- mccorrinall 5y ago
  When configured correctly you can use most of the cloudflares features such as WAF without blocking all tor/vpn users. Requires a little bit more than just flicking the „i’m under attack“ button though.
brightball 5y ago
Yea problem from an admin perspective is that all malicious traffic attempts to use privacy respecting technology. It’s more guilt by association than anything else for the legitimate users. One of the weird realities is that in order to combat fraud you need to be able to identify the source, which is a hard reality as a privacy advocate.
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  HN tends to be pretty micropayment / cryptobro averse (for good reason, mostly) but I think this is a problem that crypto could legitimately solve - Tie an anonymous 'identity' to a well-seasoned (unmoved for >x time, where x = days for some things or maybe years for some things) wallet with some reasonable amount of funding in it ($100 or something) and you become 'Guy who owns that hundred bucks'. Moving the hundred bucks unseasons it. The provider only respects your claim to be an individual if you can prove you've got a pile of 100 seasoned bucks. If you do something I don't like, I can ban that pile from further interaction. Malicious users would immediately move the money around, but at least the malicious actors would need a lot of piles of money constantly moving around and 'seasoning' to create a bunch of fake individual identities, which gets prohibitively expensive at scale for all but nation-state type actors which you're not going to be able to defend against anyway. Bam - I am anonymous, but have (mostly) proven I am a real person with (mostly) reasonably good intentions.
  - nonrandomstring 5y ago
    Your talking about earned capital as a forfeitable deposit. Sure that scheme has its place. I joined HN for one or two reasons. To research a book. But also to promote my last book. Anyone can post here with a throwaway, yet I didn't want to be an interloping dick who felt entitled to hit and run posting links to my own vanities... so I decided; join, contribute, participate, earn. After a few months I don't feel bad about plying my own wares a little. Reputation (social capital) is natural and ancient and doesn't really need crypto. Most of the Web isn't that though. As an information system, as Sir Tim first coined it, it's a publishing machine: You advertise a service, I send "requests", you send "responses", we part ways without complications. Quick anonymous sex on the beach. So-called Web2.0 f-cked that massively. Web2.0 wants to exchange phone numbers. And once the surveillance capitalist creeps latched on to stalking everyone around the neighbourhood... well here we are. I think what some Web3.0 people think is that crypto can repair some kind of "middle ground", where Web2.0 type behaviours can take place but anonymously and under conditions controlled by "stakes". I think this won't work for psychological and game theoretical reasons we can't get into here. Instead I think we need to repair the Web1.0 layer at least, and since transport level security and anonymity have become necessary in a post-Snowden era, for me that means getting rid of the selective prejudice inflicted by systems like Cloudflare.
jacooper 5y ago

throwaway4good 5y ago

"I'm not blaming Mullvad" - you should - this is a direct consequence of accepting customers that pay cash and wants to be completely anonymous. In the end they are going to drive their honest non-abusive customers elsewhere.

drexlspivey 5y ago
I have my own VPN on a digitalocean droplet and it’s basically the same, I’m outright blocked from many sites (Imgur for example) and I have to solve tons of captchas. DigitalOcean doesnt accept cash so your argument doesn’t pass the sniff test.
- jcrawfordor 5y ago
  DO has a generally poor reputation in the security industry as abuse from their services is very common - they don't really vet their customers to any real degree. The same is true of e.g. AWS which is why a lot of websites will outright block traffic coming from AWS. The reality is that "anonymous payment" is kind of pointless, it's basically never the payment method that determines abuse potential as abusers have all kinds of ways of making payment anonymously even when only e.g. cc is accepted. What matters is the level of time and effort put into monitoring usage. To be honest, on a pure sniff test your traffic coming from DO is probably more suspicious. There are lots of legitimate uses of commercial VPNs. There are not many legitimate users of consumer web-browsing from DO.
- jacooper 5y ago
  I think this is different. You are banned because DO IP ranges are public and everyone wants to ban cloud IPs, since legit users don't use static VPS IPs. I am currently hosting head scale with an exit node on hetzner, and sometimes i am banned from websites. But back when I used contabo it was a rareity to get blocked, even though its a more "shady" host, maybe because its not as well known ?
neither_color 5y ago
Not really, this happens with any VPN service to the point that if VPN providers were more honest this is what they would tell people: Online stores are more likely to flag your purchase as suspicious on the admin side(e.g the Shopify console) You will run into captchas and prompts for authentication more often You may not be able to log into some of your more sensitive services(like banking) Streaming sites will block your server eventually Even if you spin your own wireguard instance on any major cloud provider you're going to run into the same issues.

xanaxagoras 5y ago

I've had a lot of trouble with that lately. I can't connect to imgur without turning it off, and my USPS.com account got straight up banned for logging in over Mullvad, I had to call them to prove my identity.

InCityDreams 5y ago

>seems to have become increasingly difficult to access many websites through their servers. And i, very happily, continue on without those 'many websites'. Of which, there are actually, very, very few for me. Nevertheless - fuck 'em; and not missed.

handsclean 5y ago

The way I see it, websites like that are saying they’ll only do it without a condom. You want it real bad, so it’s tempting to try to bargain about it, or maybe just take it off for now - it’s just a little while, what’re the chances it goes wrong? - but we all know that the smart move is to keep it on or back out entirely. Reasonable partners, of which there are many, understand and cooperate. And ones that don’t aren’t the type of partner you want anyway.

vortext 5y ago
Username checks out.
- aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
  Please don't do this here.
- maccolgan 5y ago
  HN isn't reddit, please keep this shit out.
charcircuit 5y ago
The vast majority of sites just want to reduce abuse of their site or services. They aren't trying to trick you into doxxing yourself.

mirceal 5y ago

2 thoughts: 1) if you do this for unauthenticated websites you are bad and I will not use you 2) if you do this for authenticated websites (especially if I pay you) I will stop using you and you will lose my money. The most I will accept is a captcha (because it's 2022 and this is where we are)