I can't speak on this with any authority, but I feel like it would be fairly easy to detect.
If you suddenly see 500 different accounts all connecting from the same small block of IP addresses and most of them use out-of-country credit cards, blocking that IP range would be a logical conclusion. This could be managed automatically (or at least alerted to a human to check) with not much effort.
Actually, it's even easier than this: they just make a list of accounts that have connected via a border-hopping service, then block that service, and then see where the listed accounts connect through. Since the accounts themselves can be flagged, Netflix will always have the advantage in detecting new workarounds.
Perhaps even looking at credit card billing addresses or issuing banks maybe, if they're non US based and service is being accessed by a US IP address could raise a flag?
I'm sure there are some wonderful technical solutions involving statistical analysis, measuring velocity (user connects from country A, then 10 minutes later connects from country B; flag the IP address), and so on.
But there's a much simpler solution with no chance of a false positive [0]: Netflix spends a few dollars signing up for each advertised VPN service, then they instantly block any IP address that the VPN service attempts to route them through.
[0] As long as legitimate Netflix customers aren't sharing their connection with the VPN provider.
You may or may not be joking but it's true they really should've. There's no way Netflix can justify to content owners that they are trying seriously when they neglect to block something so obvious.
It doesn't matter. Netflix is successfully blocking most of the commercial VPN providers. It is very hard to actually access Netflix via any sort of VPN used by more than a handful of people. Is suspect even running your own VPS somewhere in the US and using a private VPN is mostly pointless unless you get assigned a residential IP address.
I was about to cancel my Netflix subscription as my family had exhausted its interest in the paltry syndicated cast-offs and young-adult anime that amounted to the totality of Canadian Netflix; but then Stranger Things came out, along with the rest of their fall originals.
Well, you've got me hooked for another month or two.
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This is one way to increase and encourage piracy while pissing off customers, including those in the US like myself, who like to keep the VPN on all the time. They deserve all the lost revenue this brings them.
My solution to this was to pay a friend in the states to share his residential connection. I'd like to see them try and block Comcast's residential blocks.
There's potential here for a middleman to write software/develop hardware that can share residential connections whilst filtering destination IPs (e.g. allowing AWS addresses) to try and minimize the potential for abuse with the goal of discouraging traffic other than that required for Netflix. The user using the service would pay a fee which the middleman would take a cut from, with the rest going towards the home owner's broadband costs.
Payment is still problematic, ideally I'd be using a US bank account and credit card. But if they start clamping down on use of 'foreign' credit cards they will alienate those taking vacations etc.
This won't work longer term if you also watch shows from your home region. A former Netflix engineer and I were talking about enforcing this sort of thing and people who "hop regions" always watch shows from different regions at different times. That flags your account, and your "home region" is known from your billing address and the "other" regions will get locked out.
From what I understood they were still working on the "driller" problem where people who live in Canada but work in the US as oil drillers/exploration folks during the week in the northern part of the state, and go home for weekends. But the thing you can't change are watching shows from two different regions on the same account.
It probably is fine, unless he wants to watch something that is only available in his local, non-US, region. As far as Netflix is concerned, if you pay in the US and you stream from a US IP address, you're from the US region.
But the question for the OP is, is that enough? As far as I can tell Netflix doesn't care at all about people who only stream from one region but they do care about people who stream from multiple regions.
> Huh? If you have US billing, you can only watch the US catalog, and you need a US IP, right?
From what I understand you get to watch the content of the region you are in at the moment. So on holiday you lose access to your home catalogue, but actually gain access to the catalogue of the country you are in at that moment. This seems to be part of how these region limited contracts with the content owners work.
The two alternatives are not being able to use Netflix at all when you are abroad, or having access only to the catalogue of the country you are paying the bills from, regardless of where you physically are.
Netflix appears to be heavily focusing on their own content to prevent this whole problem, but that does mean that the option of being able to pick whatever you want (legally) from a large back-catalogue is now blocked.
Note that content providers (Sony and others) consider that copyright infrigement on the same level as torreting the movie.
And when torrenting the movie you don't have to jump through all those hoops, it'll always be available and never block or just stop in the middle of playback.
They are blocking the low hanging fruit first... Being the advertised unblocking services.
Likely commercial VPNs aren't heavily used and may have more of a legitimate use...
If Netflix sees a lot traffic from specific methods of access they will look into it...
They have been expanding the blocking efforts since last year.
The list continues to grow of failed methods... Wasn't a hard cutover.
Likely this initiative is cause 3rd parties are making money, and content providers werent
I doubt anyone on HN would pay for a service like UFlix when the DIY alternative is much more efficient.
For less cost we use our own US-based vps, running something like the shadowsocks proxy. It's the same rig we found to work the best in China against the great firewall.
With its own dedicated IP, it would likely be cost-inefficient for Netflix to detect without blocking an entire range of legitimate IP addresses.
What about something like n2n / Hamachi / Peervpn / Freelan / IPOP / your friend in the other country borrowing you their account and hosting an OpenVPN endpoint on their home network?
Netflix has been messing with settings in their system that are breaking the experience for users in the middle of the US too. For the last two weekends I've been getting strange experiences accessing their site from my house.
My PC works fine and can access content. My cell phone, connected to the same home wireless randomly gets messages "You are using a proxy and cannot access this content". Testing both units on whatismyip.com and my own web server show that requests are coming from the same IP. A day or two later it will start working just fine. Stop breaking things or I'll just stick with Amazon and drop your service.
There's so much content on Canadian Netflix these days (Star Wars!), why would anyone bother with it?
As an aside, when I was in Paris, a hotel I was staying at routed their free WiFi through a US VPN (presumably so the Americans wouldn't be offended by having Google return results in French or some shit), and I couldn't even watch French Netflix in France! So annoying.
I know that it's not Netflix's fault per se and they're under pressure from the dinosaurs running the media companies. However really well done - you're now leaving people with no choice but to torrent again.
However, the purpose of copyright is to encourage cultural development, not enable cultural rent seeking. The latter is merely the mechanism proposed to do the former. To the extent the latter doesn't encourage the former, we should completely disregard the artificial construct of the latter.
I would argue that media companies have made this shift: Disney is no longer using the profits from copyright to enrich society with new cultural content (see very limited number of new properties), but is instead consolidating cultural control and rent-seeking (see studio/IP purchases, remakes and sequels). We should simply disregard their copyrights for as long as they continue this behavior.
Copyrights, after all, are fundamentally a deed from the public to a company or individual in exchange for a (future) service. If the company fails to render the service, the deed is revoked, and the property redistributed for better public use.
No. They don't. The industry is holding off tiny bits of content laden with ads, features disabled, and the worst tech imaginable and as many roadblocks as possible.
At this point I don't care. I don't watch much of their stuff and I really hope they go bankrupt. Not watch IS an option. Let them die.
Their data scientists will now be building features like "tried to watch a movie from a VPN IP" for their churn models.
And another note: there are also people who simply do not allow comcast to filter their traffic and therefore always have a VPN. These people despite their efforts to watch netflix content approved for their own country, would be blocked.
Netflix also tracks which region you're accessing data from, which means that if you live in Croatia and your billing info states that you're in Croatia but you're consistently switching back and forth between accessing US Netflix and Croatian Netflix, they can still tell that you're circumventing the region system despite using a private VPN.
No, you can watch the content of whatever region you currently inhabit. Just like there is a different set of shows on TV while you are on vacation in Spain, there is Spanish netflix on the internet (dumb old media contracts).
If you use technical means to pretend to inhabit another region, they will try to stop you as the article describes.
If you're planning on technically circumventing region locks then you, apparently, need an account with a valid billing address in that region to avoid this form of detection.
If I were actually meaningfully affected by this change I would just drop their service and get my content from my peers. It's honestly just not worth the effort.
What bothers me the most is that Netflix declared Hurricane Electric's Tunnelbroker service a VPN. I have IPv6 on my home network via HE.net and, since Netflix is a good network citizen and supports IPv6, I can't watch on my computer or any other device that also talks v6.
My household gave up our Netflix subscription in lieu of giving up IPv6.
Huh, people put blame for their piracy on Netflix as if they are suppose to take moral responsibility for pirate's actions. Just like people have freedom to not watch content they do not want to, rights owner should have freedom to not show content to those they don't want to.
This is pretty annoying but I will say that I still get my moneys worth out of watching international netflix. All of their original titles are available across all regions and they are coming out with new stuff at an increasing rate. When we really want more we just rent a movie on the apple tv every once in awhile.
This is a small issue in Netflix's path to its end-game. As content owners build their own streaming platforms in the US, Netflix is gradually losing content but in the meantime its gaining more exclusive content. At some point the exclusive content will be enough to justify international users paying for it Netflix since that content is not region blocked.
Netflix also seems to be striking some good deals to lure in more international viewers, e.g. they recently acquired the world-wide rights minus US for the new Star Trek series and also the well regarded The Expanse series by SyFy which is a great bonus considering subscribers in US would need to have services at additional cost in order to watch them.
It is interesting to note, that in a consumer focused market such as the US, highly competitive areas consider "the customer is always right" (I.e. catering and hospitality). In oligopolistic niches, the customer is unimportant (I.e. broadband provision), and in monopolistic niches, such as media consumption, "the customer is always a criminal".
It says a great deal about the market conditions of the media industry.
64 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadIf you suddenly see 500 different accounts all connecting from the same small block of IP addresses and most of them use out-of-country credit cards, blocking that IP range would be a logical conclusion. This could be managed automatically (or at least alerted to a human to check) with not much effort.
I can't access Netflix from a U.K. data center connection even tho I have a U.K. account because it detects it as a non residential IP address.
Just my speculation.
But there's a much simpler solution with no chance of a false positive [0]: Netflix spends a few dollars signing up for each advertised VPN service, then they instantly block any IP address that the VPN service attempts to route them through.
[0] As long as legitimate Netflix customers aren't sharing their connection with the VPN provider.
Maybe they should not call it UFlix but something like "VPN for your business needs, and for avoiding corrupt and oppressive governments".
Well, you've got me hooked for another month or two.
Oh wait, the cross boarder netflixers can't vote so HRC doesn't care.
WAKE UP SJW's
There's potential here for a middleman to write software/develop hardware that can share residential connections whilst filtering destination IPs (e.g. allowing AWS addresses) to try and minimize the potential for abuse with the goal of discouraging traffic other than that required for Netflix. The user using the service would pay a fee which the middleman would take a cut from, with the rest going towards the home owner's broadband costs.
Payment is still problematic, ideally I'd be using a US bank account and credit card. But if they start clamping down on use of 'foreign' credit cards they will alienate those taking vacations etc.
From what I understood they were still working on the "driller" problem where people who live in Canada but work in the US as oil drillers/exploration folks during the week in the northern part of the state, and go home for weekends. But the thing you can't change are watching shows from two different regions on the same account.
But that's fine with the OP, that's why he is using his friends broadband anyway. The US catalog is what you want.
But the question for the OP is, is that enough? As far as I can tell Netflix doesn't care at all about people who only stream from one region but they do care about people who stream from multiple regions.
Not sure there's anything good that's UK-only. It's usually the other way around with all the good shows being available in the US.
From what I understand you get to watch the content of the region you are in at the moment. So on holiday you lose access to your home catalogue, but actually gain access to the catalogue of the country you are in at that moment. This seems to be part of how these region limited contracts with the content owners work.
The two alternatives are not being able to use Netflix at all when you are abroad, or having access only to the catalogue of the country you are paying the bills from, regardless of where you physically are.
Netflix appears to be heavily focusing on their own content to prevent this whole problem, but that does mean that the option of being able to pick whatever you want (legally) from a large back-catalogue is now blocked.
Netflix did think I was using a VPN and blocked me from one rural German hotel, though.
Source: I had a bit of netflix subscription when I moved to Norway. Paid with US billing. Not everything was available when I switched countries.
Happens all the time when I travel and wife and daughter stay home.
And when torrenting the movie you don't have to jump through all those hoops, it'll always be available and never block or just stop in the middle of playback.
You mentioned TORONTO. two problems : you don't know which country the exit node will be in, and the speed is horrible
Worked just fine. I was able to watch a show that's only on American Netflix.
I also have a VPS in Texas that I use with openvpn. It works fine too.
Are they just blocking the "watch American Netflix" services?
Likely commercial VPNs aren't heavily used and may have more of a legitimate use... If Netflix sees a lot traffic from specific methods of access they will look into it...
They have been expanding the blocking efforts since last year. The list continues to grow of failed methods... Wasn't a hard cutover.
Likely this initiative is cause 3rd parties are making money, and content providers werent
For less cost we use our own US-based vps, running something like the shadowsocks proxy. It's the same rig we found to work the best in China against the great firewall.
With its own dedicated IP, it would likely be cost-inefficient for Netflix to detect without blocking an entire range of legitimate IP addresses.
unless you get an ip in a residential or possibly university range... you're pretty screwed.
My PC works fine and can access content. My cell phone, connected to the same home wireless randomly gets messages "You are using a proxy and cannot access this content". Testing both units on whatismyip.com and my own web server show that requests are coming from the same IP. A day or two later it will start working just fine. Stop breaking things or I'll just stick with Amazon and drop your service.
As an aside, when I was in Paris, a hotel I was staying at routed their free WiFi through a US VPN (presumably so the Americans wouldn't be offended by having Google return results in French or some shit), and I couldn't even watch French Netflix in France! So annoying.
They don't _have to_ watch it.
However, the purpose of copyright is to encourage cultural development, not enable cultural rent seeking. The latter is merely the mechanism proposed to do the former. To the extent the latter doesn't encourage the former, we should completely disregard the artificial construct of the latter.
I would argue that media companies have made this shift: Disney is no longer using the profits from copyright to enrich society with new cultural content (see very limited number of new properties), but is instead consolidating cultural control and rent-seeking (see studio/IP purchases, remakes and sequels). We should simply disregard their copyrights for as long as they continue this behavior.
Copyrights, after all, are fundamentally a deed from the public to a company or individual in exchange for a (future) service. If the company fails to render the service, the deed is revoked, and the property redistributed for better public use.
At this point I don't care. I don't watch much of their stuff and I really hope they go bankrupt. Not watch IS an option. Let them die.
And another note: there are also people who simply do not allow comcast to filter their traffic and therefore always have a VPN. These people despite their efforts to watch netflix content approved for their own country, would be blocked.
(to avoid that particular method that Neflix is using)
If you use technical means to pretend to inhabit another region, they will try to stop you as the article describes.
If I were actually meaningfully affected by this change I would just drop their service and get my content from my peers. It's honestly just not worth the effort.
https://medium.com/@ValdikSS/detecting-vpn-and-its-configura...
My household gave up our Netflix subscription in lieu of giving up IPv6.
Netflix also seems to be striking some good deals to lure in more international viewers, e.g. they recently acquired the world-wide rights minus US for the new Star Trek series and also the well regarded The Expanse series by SyFy which is a great bonus considering subscribers in US would need to have services at additional cost in order to watch them.
It says a great deal about the market conditions of the media industry.