In reply to a post by JonDav:

What will your ISP block then?

Which is why I asked in the first place :-

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Wouldn't it be dead simple for the powers that be just to make it necessary to have a licence to run a VPN? (Costing money of course). ISPs having to record customer VPN licences and block any unlicensed use of one.

Answer - no it wouldn't.

Edited by RobertoS (Sun 02-Feb-14 19:19:30)

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

In reply to a post by JonDav:

What will your ISP block then?

Which is why I asked in the first place

A very important point about VPNs is that they aren't just used for nicking copyright stuff (as I previously mentioned). VPNs are a useful tool for secure communication over the net.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Wouldn't it be dead simple for the powers that be just to make it necessary to have a licence to run a VPN? (Costing money of course). ISPs having to record customer VPN licences and block any unlicensed use of one.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Answer - no it wouldn't.

That is your answer.

I'm intrigued Chrysalis. Netflix is a legal service and there seems to be little necessity to hide activity using it. So, why do you need a private VPN for netflix traffic? Seems like a lot of hassle to go to for seemingly little benefit.

This is a serious question as I think I must be missing something here?

UK Netflix & USA Netflix have different contents

By using VPN, you can access USA Netflix to watch their shows that is not available here when connecting from an UK based IP address.

If that is the case then it would appear to be against Netflix Ts&Cs and therefore against the contract that has been signed up to.

So, it is another example of using a VPN to bypass the legal restrictions placed on content.

EDIT : And given that it is against movie industry licensing terms it seems pointless to pay netflix for access as might as well just download torrents - it has the same legal standing.

Edited by ian72 (Mon 03-Feb-14 11:06:14)

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Thanks Jon . I now know what TOR is.

Re the VPN blocking, which I'm almost convinced is a non-starter, unless I'm missing something to get to the foreign VPN you still have to go through your ISP who I believe would know that was where the traffic was going. So it could be blocked.

Earlier posts have shown that even if that were the case, blocking would be far from simple.

The issue is that I can disguise VPN traffic very easily as something else; North Korea, Cuba and others manage to avoid this issue by blocking everything, except a small amount of data approved by the state, which gets copied onto state-controlled servers. China and Iran do block VPNs officially, but get bypassed routinely by two different mechanisms:

1. Abuse of licensed VPNs; if China permits a VPN from IBM China HQ to IBM USA, it then has to trust IBM USA to not let employees at IBM China access forbidden material via IBM USA's Internet link. All it takes is one employee at IBM USA letting people at IBM China through (by mistake, possibly - "of course Steve, you can Remote Desktop to my machine while I'm asleep to check whether the task I triggered is complete" - and whoops, Steve can also browse the web from your machine).
2. Disguised VPNs, such as Tor in some configurations. This is VPN traffic disguised so that it looks like something acceptable, such as HTTP traffic for web browsing; the disguise is especially effective if the traffic inside the VPN matches the traffic profile of the disguise. The filtering then sees (for example) normal browsing of the Seattle Chinese Post that's been approved by the censor, but someone at the Seattle Chinese Post has arranged for that traffic to route out to the uncensored Internet.

In both cases, draconian (and enforced!) punishments for bypassing the censor are the major way to prevent it happening - if you know that being caught bypassing the censor at all is a guarantee of 10 to 30 years in jail, and being caught accessing banned content having bypassed the censor is a guarantee of life imprisonment or death penalty, you're a lot more cautious than you might be if the penalty is an £100 fine. If you then get the catch rate up high enough that most people who might consider bypassing the censor know someone who's been punished for doing so, you put a heavy brake on the idea.

Whether this is the sort of environment the country that produced George Orwell would like to create is a different question - it's entirely possible to do it, it's just not at all easy.

I dont and currently my VPN has encryption disabled for performance.

I set it up so I could get consoles accessing it via an american ip. (on consoles using a proxy server doesnt work like on a pc).

I am aware is some commercial services that allow just changing the dns server and then they reverse proxy traffic to netflix, but why pay for such a service when I already have my own resources?

yes whitelisting would be an effective way of blocking VPNs. It will be a sad day if our country ever adopts such an approach.

So you are doing it in order to get at american Netflix content that is not licensed/available for viewing in the UK?

Don't even need to use VPN, "SmartDNS" services will do this for you.

EDIT: This was in reply to using VPN for netflix..

Edited by deleted (Mon 03-Feb-14 16:13:16)