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Actually, this is the time to do it. Thanks to how the regional licencing deals work out, Netflix has confirmed that Canada is its only market with streaming rights for Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2016. In the US, premium cable channel Starz has the exclusive rights.
In other words, in 2016, Americans will be using VPN tunnels to access Canadian Netflix.
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If Iâm on the same network with you or can see your wireless network traffic AND the site youâre going to doesnât use SSL to handle all password and login details, yep. It is trivial.
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Gonna go out on a limb and suggest it probably had something to do with 22 million Chinese VPN users each paying Netflix a monthly subscription fees. Not sure what the number are for Canada, but everybody I know uses one service or another to get at US Netflix as well. Granted, I work in IT. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/09/why-netflix-wont-block-vpn-users
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The article and blog post donât actually mention Tor and I doubt many Tor users are streaming Netflix because:
- Service would be shitty (due to bandwidth)
- Location of public IP is random (could be anywhere in the world)
So the title probably shouldnât say âTor.â
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Except, they birilliantly allow you to use your netflix acount wherever they have service, but theyâll restrict you to the content available in the region you connect from.
If you go to Canada open the netflix app on your phone, youâll get the Canadian content.
This is brilliant because even if your connection apears to, or indeed does come from a region youâre not registered in, they donât care, its part of the service. (And can continue to feign ignorance over its users sidestepping region blocking)
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from australiaâs sydney morning herald:
Netflixâs geo-blocking crackdown is doomed to fail, assuming the streaming giant even expects it to succeed.
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Where exactly was it spelled out that you have an inherent right to access copyrighted material?
I am all for âinformation wants to be freeâ (which I agree with as a basic tenet of information theory, at least) but this attitude that people have a right to privately produced media content, and that if it is not being offered commercially either at all, or for a price the consumer can decide on at their own whim, the consumer has every right to pirate it⌠I am just not seeing how this opinion developed, OTHER than as a quasi-political-sounding way of excusing content piracy.
All cards on the table, I make my living selling media technology to companies, including a lot of the big guys. Just like a ton of people I work with make their living generating that content, and being paid for it. Iâm pretty sure people have more of a codified right to control their own content, than people have a right to steal other peopleâs content⌠last time I checked, anyway.
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mumble, mumble, torrc, mumble
Iâll bet my bottom dollar Linode makes 80% of its revenue from openvpn Docker images.
Which is a fairly large benefit to consumers compared to many other region locked things such as MMOs/etc which flat out lock down large parts of the world and actively seek out and ban VPN players.
Iâm interested in whether or not Netflix is going to really do all that much here, I would put money on a lot of sound and thunder to satisfy some particularly aggressive licenseholders that are out for blood, and then ultimately folks find another way around it.
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Doesnât Linode have a bandwidth cap and steep prices after that?
Sort of like Amazon and DRM.
Hmm. Ok.
That said, I wouldnât rely on Linode for security. They get hacked a lot and donât often tell their users unless forced to (it seems).
I have a pi somewhere that I can ssh proxy throughâŚ
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I wouldnât know. We have SaaS for VOIP and certain other tools where I work, but all our file servers and our VPN is self-hosted in house, and none of those have been broken into in the two years Iâve been here.
I mean, I get alerts about intrusion detections, and infected machines. But Iâve never seen an infection on one of our servers or an intrusion warning anywhere near one of those.
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You VPN Netflix through your work VPN? Do you torrent over it too?
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Huh? No we have a corporate VPN that we self-host so that people can get their email when theyâre on fucking vacation (what the hell is wrong with people? Theyâre on vacation, but they still call in asking for help getting their email on their phones while theyâre in Tahiti or Guam). And so I can work from home when Iâm sick.
Netflix is blocked by the corporate firewall policy⌠But torrent isnât. But I donât torrent via my workâs internet. Thatâs really fucking stupid. Iâve seen the firewall logs and itâd trace directly back to me if I tried.
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Wow, you have a hardcore email server if you need a VPN to get your mail! We just use Google Apps.
Reminds me when I had to set up a proxy on one of the UK offices, so the boss could watch some soccer from there. 
(I took a ride and watched some BBC documentaries, of course.)
âŚdoes Youtube still do the region checks only at the start of streaming? Because there used to be a method exploiting those notoriously overloaded and slow free proxies. Set up a proxy, open the page, start the playback, pause, disable proxy, rewind to some random offset, rewind back to the beginning, stream at full speed.
I still donât understand what was so special on that North Sea oil rig fire documentary that it was US-onlyâŚ
âŚsimilar methods worked back during the Crypto Wars when US considered Netscape HTTPS libraries so precious nobody from The Evil Outside had access, and they enforced it via IP checks. Donât ask how I knowâŚ
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The VPN is really just a way of enforcing domain membership when connecting to Outlook365. Users arenât able to connect to their email accounts if their IP isnât confirmed to be within our corporate network. Itâs an information hygiene thing. We have a lot of users who we donât really trust to access their corporate email from home. We like to restrict email access to business hours only for everyone by default, but we do allow salaried people to access via the VPN. And those salary slaves are the ones who call in at half past midnight in a dead panic while on day three of an 8 day paid vacation begging me to fix their VPN access so they can get their corporate email.
Usually I just tell them that if they have work to do, they need to do it while theyâre not also on paid time off, and that itâs insane to be so dedicated to the company that theyâre feeling compelled to interrupt a vacation just to do some extra work for us for free.
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