The source of the VPN servers is vpngate.net - an academic research that started 2013, at Graduate School of University of Tsukuba, Japan. From their about [0] page:

   - You can get through the government's firewall to browse restricted web sites (e.g. YouTube).
   - You can disguise your IP address to hide your identity while surfing the Internet.
   - You can protect yourself by utilizing its strong encryption while using public Wi-Fi.

The list of servers (on the main url) gives throughput and others stats and you can support them by creating a node [1].

They use SoftEther for VPN server - does someone have any experience with it?

[0] http://www.vpngate.net/en/about_overview.aspx [1] http://www.vpngate.net/en/join.aspx

I've taken a cursory look at SoftEther a few months ago.

It looks like a research project that was then unsuccessfully commercialized, and then released to the public somewhat hastily.

The code quality leaves a lot to be desired (there is nothing offensive, but it still does not inspire confidence for there not being security bugs), and the code style is not great either. The amount of marketing copytext is disproportionately large to the amount of code comments and design documentation.

It generally seems to go for a everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach in terms of features (which is not a bad thing per se, but an approach that I dislike). The SoftEther repository is 280k lines of C and headers, while OpenVPN is 80k.

Bugger. I set up SoftEther because it was the only thing I could get working reliably (by that, I mean only 2 disconnections per hour).

Yes, I've been using it for a couple of years. It has a decent UI to spinning up a variety of VPN configurations.

Test latency, get around geofencing, test your application in various regulatory environments.

This would have been really useful a few years ago, when the international version of NBA League Pass was a far better experience due to the complete lack of blackouts, as well as being roughly 50% of the price for the much more limited US version. Instead of fixing the US version, they've simply doubled the price of the international version and made it worse, from what I understand.

To research censorship in a country, as another example.

To watch Netflix for instance.

Netflix is able to detect you're using a VPN, and advices to switch back to enjoy its services, I'm sure. At least I got that alert recently. So is there another bypass?

Just throwing it out there - are you sure there isn't a session cookie tied to your login still on your machine? Or, am I completely wrong and you're just limited to the country's offerings by your location on registration?

they block known vpn and vps ip spaces, it's been a cat and mouse game for the past few years between vpn providers and netflix

currently working providers can be usually found on /r/NetflixByProxy/

You're not limited by registration. I've travelled and found that I had a different library in different countries.

Can they detect I'm using bittorrent?

I didn't realize people had ripped Netflix original content.

Everything on Netflix is available on Bittorrent.

i get your point, but connecting to a random country won't be of much help though.

> Automatically connect you to a random VPN in a country of your choice.

Country wouldn't be random in this case

You choose the country, it just selects a random VPN within that country.

You can choose the country by passing -c argument.

Example: easyvpn -c JP

oh, my bad, didn't notice that

One major use case I can think of is testing SEO in different regions.

Test firewall settings to see if you've correctly blocked things.

Not wanting your ISP to know what your traffic looks like?

...and wanting some other, probably less trustworthy org to know what the traffic looks like

youtube videos being blocked based on your location.

Some people may use it as free proxies for web scraping.