
Netflix hammers cross-border watchers and there may be no way out - fraqed
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/netflix-border-hopping-television-1.3805525
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planetjones
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.

~~~
dorian-graph
They have the choice to not torrent and not watch whatever content.

They don't _have to_ watch it.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
You are correct.

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.

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lol768
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.

~~~
ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
revelation
Huh? If you have US billing, you can only watch the US catalog, and you need a
US IP, right?

But that's fine with the OP, that's why he is using his friends broadband
anyway. The US catalog is what you want.

~~~
ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
lol768
> unless he wants to watch something that is only available in his local, non-
> US, region

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.

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pixl97
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.

~~~
pjsg
Do you have IPv6 anywhere -- I have found that they think that my IPv6 address
is a proxy, and the IPv4 is OK.

~~~
pixl97
Yep, I have an HE tunnel. That's probably it. Thanks.

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compactmani
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.

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rdtsc
> UFlix

Maybe they should not call it UFlix but something like "VPN for your business
needs, and for avoiding corrupt and oppressive governments".

~~~
ianlevesque
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.

~~~
Freak_NL
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.

~~~
atomical
True. They are blocking Linode ip ranges.

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techsupporter
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.

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dleslie
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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kyriakos
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.

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pixld
Any ideas on what technical means Netflix is using to tip the scales in their
favor?

~~~
chrisfosterelli
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.

~~~
gnicholas
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.

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junto
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.

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noodles23
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.

~~~
ilogik
Tried that... I think by now, Netflix has banned pretty much all VPS
providers, most likely as all the unblocking sites went from one to another

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Mikeb85
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.

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joshontheweb
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.

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geodel
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.

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mig39
I just tried it from a commercial VPN provider. Tried New York, Miami, Los
Angeles and Atlanta.

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?

~~~
sergers
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

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samgranieri
ugh. Hollywood should just release content globally at the same time so this
won't be an issue.

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cylinder
How can they know all VPN? Can I setup a private VPN somewhere?

~~~
beisner
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.

~~~
awqrre
So you need one Netflix account per region?

(to avoid that particular method that Neflix is using)

~~~
Spivak
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.

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andrewvijay
So they are blocking by blacklisting foreign ISPs? What happens in tor
network?

~~~
ilogik
Netflix is available worldwide, but content is different in each country.
They're blocking vps providers.

You mentioned TORONTO. two problems : you don't know which country the exit
node will be in, and the speed is horrible

~~~
andrewvijay
I think your auto correct fucked you up here.

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joesmo
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.

