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An IPv6 tunnel as a free VPN alternative to unblock YouTube in your country (realpath.org)
36 points by simon_vetter on Feb 21, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 17 comments


So tomorrow everyone signs up for the free Hurricane IPv6 tunnel which is meant to be used by developers and administrators for system testing, HE can't respond to the huge traffic and closes a free and extremely useful service?

Thumbs down. If you want to watch youtube, get out and fight GEMA, don't go and abuse free services.


"Hurricane Electric cant respond to the spike in traffic generated from somebody's blog post about their tunnelbroker service."

Thats a riot, thanks for the laughs.


A high definition youtube video, transfers over 40MiB of data per minute.

If 100.000 teenagers decide to test it (obviously not all of them concurrently), then yes, it will possibly come to the point where it isn't justified for HE to keep the service up.

It doesn't need to bring their network down, it is enough to cost them more than what they get in return.

Since the youtube pages mentioned are permanently banned from Germany, this could be a pretty sustainable spike.


Are you familiar with HE's network? Take a look at Google/Youtube's biggest peer:

http://bgp.he.net/AS15169#_peers6


Biggest IPv6 peer, as I understand it, right?

I'm not sure how much traffic that represents in total?


I don't have the stats on it but the increase in bandwidth from people using the tunnel to watch YouTube videos is likely a drop in the bucket compared to people leeching Usenet binaries all day off the free IPv6 Usenet servers. I understand your concern but I think you are underestimating how much usage the IPv6 tunnels get right now.


> So tomorrow everyone signs up for the free Hurricane IPv6 tunnel which is meant to be used by developers and administrators for system testing

The tunnelbroker service is for more than just system testing. It's meant to provide usable and stable IPv6 connectivity for people who don't have native IPv6. I've even hosted servers on it (nothing mission-critical though).

You have a point that HE is not going to want to maintain it if it starts costing them too much, but note that they have a very vast global network (both IPv4 and IPv6) and can reach most of the Internet without paying for transit.


People are already using HE IPv6 tunnels to access binaries newsgroups on IPv6-only Usenet servers. I think they'll be OK.


Maybe a dumb question, but why would a Usenet server be IPv6 only?


To encourage adoption of IPv6 or as a not-too-expensive public service or just as a hack.


This is fine for accessing YouTube from Germany, but it should be noted that IPv6 tunnels offer no encryption or authentication so don't trust them for tunneling out of truly oppressive regimes any more than you'd trust your native Internet connection.


This. It depends if the blocking is at the content owners end, or somewhere in between. This method didn't work in China last time I tried.


The article mentions one drawback of VPNs: if you're using one to access the wider internet (rather than a specific LAN), then it's likely that all of your traffic goes through it.

One effective way around this, at least for those using VPNs in China, is to create a set of static routes forcing your in-country connections to go directly. This python program gets a list of China IP ranges from APNIC, and creates a shell script with a list of route commands: https://github.com/jimmyxu/chnroute


One researcher at Peking University once told me that he uses IPv6 to access YouTube. As far as I could tell, it was available to all students and staff. Just a simple matter of selecting the right Wi-Fi network. :)


This is interesting. Do you know whether he has native IPv6 connectivity or is using a tunnel? A few months ago, I tried using HE's IPv6 tunnel from China. It connected, but did not enable me to access blocked sites.


I'm pretty sure it was native. I think they had hotspots for IPv4 and IPv6.

This was 6-12 months ago by the way. I imagine they might have tightened security since, with the party congress and all that.


Whenever I see someone describing the steps they go through for port forwarding I always ask "Why dont you just use IPv6?"




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