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Next time you find yourself in this situation, a $5 VPN subscription (Mullvad, etc.) gets you the same result without the IP being an obvious Tor exit node. Fas

Next time you find yourself in this situation, a $5 VPN subscription (Mullvad, etc.) gets you the same result without the IP being an obvious Tor exit node. Faster, too, in latency, bandwidth, and the time it takes to change locations. You only care about the VPN part for this, not the onion part.

apaprocki 1y ago
Worth mentioning a $5 cloud instance and installing Algo VPN on it gets you the same thing without having to trust a 3rd party VPN provider (only a generic VM provider such as AWS). It’s always worth minimizing companies you deal with if you already use AWS, GCP, etc.
- rrgok 1y ago
  It is not. VPN Providers have server all over the world. How many cloud instances in the different part of the world you can buy with $5?
  - bamboozled 1y ago
    A lot of, a t3.micro is free, I guess Amazon know who you are and which IP you were using at a certain time though.
    - ciberado 1y ago
      Also, public cloud machines come with IPs of well known ranges. It may be easy to spot them if required. On the other side, this is the approach that I'm currently using, without any problem for my particular case.
  - apaprocki 1y ago
    AWS offers all the regions I’d care about, but I do concede many-exit scenarios are not what I was referring to. I’ve been more than satisfied with my personal use, but have never required that feature.
- electroly 1y ago
  This is much worse than using Mullvad if you need a lot of locations, which it sounds like OP did. There are far more Mullvad exit nodes than AWS regions, and it takes mere seconds to flip between them. VPN providers have exit nodes in every major city, but there are only a handful of AWS regions. I'm not sure what trust you need--HTTPS gives you the confidence that your connection hasn't been read or modified as it passed through the VPN provider, and frankly, I trust Mullvad more than I trust AWS.
  - apaprocki 1y ago
    Yes if you need many-exit, DIY is going to be more painful. I’ll disagree about the trust point, though. It’s about relationships. I want as few corporate relationships as possible. If I already deal with Amazon and AWS and I can get this additional service from them, I will gladly do it over starting a new corporate relationship (iff my trust is never violated, in which case I will then rehome everything).
gear54rus 1y ago
Are Mullvad IPs somehow non-obvious? I assume all mainstream VPNs are detected by their IPs and slapped with captchas at best (and blocked outright at worst).
- tucnak 1y ago
  Your assumption is incorrect.
  - zahllos 1y ago
    I would disagree. One of the problems of operating a VPN is that it is somewhat like operating a tor exit node: bad traffic is absolutely going to exit your infra. This means if you're renting VPSes or whatever you need a tolerant hoster. For this reason a large part of Mullvad's infrastructure is hosted by M247 Ltd. If you simply block that ASN you will block quite a large part of Mullvad. You can block the ASN by using one of the myriad services that allow you to query all the IP blocks assigned to an ASN. It's also possible to simply enumerate all their servers. They have an API. You might not get it all, but you can block a significant percent.
    - tucnak 1y ago
      The fact you could do it, doesn't necessarily mean that you WOULD do it. In my experience, the kind of mitigation you're talking about is seldom enforced (except Cloudflare, perhaps, and pretty much anybody serious knows how to get around THAT.)
    - PaywallBuster 1y ago
      this ASN is also popular among most VPN providers so you block this ASN and you could possibly remove a lot of abuse I've done it at work, this is on a blacklist of ASNs that require "extra" authentication
- mmh0000 1y ago
  Yeah. That’s a weird parent comment. Mullvad publishes all their “exit node” ips. Easy to detect and block. https://mullvad.net/en/servers https://mullvad.net/en/servers
amelius 1y ago
The $5 will only give you the equivalent of 1 exit node.
- immibis 1y ago
  Incorrect - you've obviously never used one of these services. You get N concurrent connections to your choice of exit nodes. Sometimes N is even infinity. Sites know about them though. If you need to be even sneakier there's residential proxy networks.

apaprocki 1y ago

Worth mentioning a $5 cloud instance and installing Algo VPN on it gets you the same thing without having to trust a 3rd party VPN provider (only a generic VM provider such as AWS). It’s always worth minimizing companies you deal with if you already use AWS, GCP, etc.

rrgok 1y ago
It is not. VPN Providers have server all over the world. How many cloud instances in the different part of the world you can buy with $5?
- bamboozled 1y ago
  A lot of, a t3.micro is free, I guess Amazon know who you are and which IP you were using at a certain time though.
  - ciberado 1y ago
    Also, public cloud machines come with IPs of well known ranges. It may be easy to spot them if required. On the other side, this is the approach that I'm currently using, without any problem for my particular case.
- apaprocki 1y ago
  AWS offers all the regions I’d care about, but I do concede many-exit scenarios are not what I was referring to. I’ve been more than satisfied with my personal use, but have never required that feature.
electroly 1y ago
This is much worse than using Mullvad if you need a lot of locations, which it sounds like OP did. There are far more Mullvad exit nodes than AWS regions, and it takes mere seconds to flip between them. VPN providers have exit nodes in every major city, but there are only a handful of AWS regions. I'm not sure what trust you need--HTTPS gives you the confidence that your connection hasn't been read or modified as it passed through the VPN provider, and frankly, I trust Mullvad more than I trust AWS.
- apaprocki 1y ago
  Yes if you need many-exit, DIY is going to be more painful. I’ll disagree about the trust point, though. It’s about relationships. I want as few corporate relationships as possible. If I already deal with Amazon and AWS and I can get this additional service from them, I will gladly do it over starting a new corporate relationship (iff my trust is never violated, in which case I will then rehome everything).

gear54rus 1y ago

Are Mullvad IPs somehow non-obvious? I assume all mainstream VPNs are detected by their IPs and slapped with captchas at best (and blocked outright at worst).

tucnak 1y ago
Your assumption is incorrect.
- zahllos 1y ago
  I would disagree. One of the problems of operating a VPN is that it is somewhat like operating a tor exit node: bad traffic is absolutely going to exit your infra. This means if you're renting VPSes or whatever you need a tolerant hoster. For this reason a large part of Mullvad's infrastructure is hosted by M247 Ltd. If you simply block that ASN you will block quite a large part of Mullvad. You can block the ASN by using one of the myriad services that allow you to query all the IP blocks assigned to an ASN. It's also possible to simply enumerate all their servers. They have an API. You might not get it all, but you can block a significant percent.
  - tucnak 1y ago
    The fact you could do it, doesn't necessarily mean that you WOULD do it. In my experience, the kind of mitigation you're talking about is seldom enforced (except Cloudflare, perhaps, and pretty much anybody serious knows how to get around THAT.)
  - PaywallBuster 1y ago
    this ASN is also popular among most VPN providers so you block this ASN and you could possibly remove a lot of abuse I've done it at work, this is on a blacklist of ASNs that require "extra" authentication
mmh0000 1y ago
Yeah. That’s a weird parent comment. Mullvad publishes all their “exit node” ips. Easy to detect and block. https://mullvad.net/en/servers https://mullvad.net/en/servers

amelius 1y ago

The $5 will only give you the equivalent of 1 exit node.

immibis 1y ago
Incorrect - you've obviously never used one of these services. You get N concurrent connections to your choice of exit nodes. Sometimes N is even infinity. Sites know about them though. If you need to be even sneakier there's residential proxy networks.