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A comment on Comcast, AT&T and Verizon pose a greater surveillance risk than Facebook. Parent comment

Re:Comcast, AT&T and Verizon pose a greater surveillance ris... by rmcpherson on Friday April 06, 2018 @03:33PM (#16776618)
One of the problems I've run into with using a vpn service is that many services block IPs from common vpn services. While this may be due to abuse originating from those IPs this still seems like a lazy approach to abuse prevention.

One approach that could work around this in many cases is to run a VPS with a private VPN server on a cloud provider. This is beyond the technical ability of the average user though and costs more than most VPN services.

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Re:Comcast, AT&T and Verizon pose a greater surveillance ris... by pgm8705 on Friday April 06, 2018 @04:18PM (#16776999)
I run a private VPN server on Digital Ocean and still get blocked by some sites. Zillow.com comes to mind as one I was unable to access recently.
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Re:Comcast, AT&T and Verizon pose a greater surveillance ris... by paulie_a on Saturday April 07, 2018 @07:18AM (#16780289)
If you can't access Zillow, nothing of value was lost.
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Re:Comcast, AT&T and Verizon pose a greater surveillance ris... by troncjb on Friday April 06, 2018 @05:47PM (#16777759)
Same -- Netflix, craigslist as well
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Re:Comcast, AT&T and Verizon pose a greater surveillance ris... by desertru on Friday April 06, 2018 @07:01PM (#16778236)
FYI NordVPN works on Netflix. At least it does at the current time. Though I've been blocked on Amazon even just while shopping.
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Re:Comcast, AT&T and Verizon pose a greater surveillance ris... by 411mrc on Friday April 06, 2018 @07:54PM (#16778523)
Why would Amazon care? I think I've went to Amazon over Tor and had no problem. I never tried to log in, but they let me browse just fine.
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Re:Comcast, AT&T and Verizon pose a greater surveillance ris... by trsse on Friday April 06, 2018 @03:58PM (#16776841)
In practice this isn't much of a problem, and I get it with Netflix. I turn off my VPN if I am watching Netflix on my computer and I don't think my privacy suffers too much for it. It feels bad not to have 100% coverage but I honestly don't care who knows what I watch / how often I watch Netflix.
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Re:Comcast, AT&T and Verizon pose a greater surveillance ris... by rmcpherson on Friday April 06, 2018 @04:13PM (#16776966)
It is more of a problem if you want to run the VPN on your router upstream of your devices, which simplifies management and ensures all devices are protected from ISP snooping, including devices where I don't control the software like a Chromecast.

I had to disable router-level vpn for exactly this reason, which is frustrating.

Amusingly enough, when I did have it on, my Chromecast showed weather data for the vpn endpoint so it's using IP-based geolocation for weather. It could be smarter.

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Re:Comcast, AT&T and Verizon pose a greater surveillance ris... by troncjb on Friday April 06, 2018 @05:07PM (#16777446)
> my Chromecast showed weather data for the vpn endpoint

That is pretty awesome. I feel your pain and that is why I haven't gone and flashed my router even though I finally bought one that will let me.

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