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"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 the

"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.
- judge2020 5y ago
  > Online stores are more likely to flag your purchase as suspicious on the admin side(e.g the Shopify console) I'm not sure a VPN provides much utility when you're already punching your (billing|shipping) address and CC number into a website - that is, unless you're using a drop site for your packages, which definitely will make you look like someone who has stolen CC digits and is trying to cash in on them.
  - neither_color 5y ago
    Well, to give one use case example, when I'm traveling I want to access websites from a US IP address so that l18n settings on websites don't serve me in another language or metric units by default. That's one way I use VPNs that have nothing to do with trying to hide from the NSA or whatever people think they're doing.
    - phatfish 5y ago
      Encountering a foreign language AND the metric system. The stuff of nightmares!
mirceal 5y ago
I'm sorry... WHAT? people that value their privacy should be banned, right?

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.

judge2020 5y ago
> Online stores are more likely to flag your purchase as suspicious on the admin side(e.g the Shopify console) I'm not sure a VPN provides much utility when you're already punching your (billing|shipping) address and CC number into a website - that is, unless you're using a drop site for your packages, which definitely will make you look like someone who has stolen CC digits and is trying to cash in on them.
- neither_color 5y ago
  Well, to give one use case example, when I'm traveling I want to access websites from a US IP address so that l18n settings on websites don't serve me in another language or metric units by default. That's one way I use VPNs that have nothing to do with trying to hide from the NSA or whatever people think they're doing.
  - phatfish 5y ago
    Encountering a foreign language AND the metric system. The stuff of nightmares!

mirceal 5y ago

I'm sorry... WHAT? people that value their privacy should be banned, right?