How Is NordVPN Unblocking Disney+?

Re:How Is NordVPN Unblocking Disney+? by derefr on Friday November 29, 2019 @10:51AM (#21665025)

A VPN provider is basically a choice to trade one country’s passive adversary for another. I.e., if you’re in the US and using a VPN with German corporate headquarters, then your Internet transactions are able to be wiretapped by the German government, but not by the US government. Either way, yes, your data will also be wiretapped by your carrier themselves and sold on the open market—but not usually in a form that will result in legal problems for you, since ad-targeting data tends to be semi-anonymized (in the sense that it isn’t in a form where a court would accept it as evidence of who you are; not in the sense that it couldn’t be used to deanonymize you by a sufficiently-motivated private researcher.)

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Re:How Is NordVPN Unblocking Disney+? by toyg on Friday November 29, 2019 @11:32AM (#21665260)

Actually, legally speaking, by using a German VPN you are effectively allowing the NSA to spy on you, since the traffic is now “overseas” — which is always fair game for any US agency. Conversely, you might be protected from German surveillance (depending on German law).

(This said, obviously no agency is going to come after you for the occasional lootin’ of moving pictures, and if you are doing anything more serious, then you should have your own VPN infrastructure.)

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Re:How Is NordVPN Unblocking Disney+? by robcohen on Friday November 29, 2019 @11:58AM (#21665421)

This is correct, however in theory the NSA is not allowed to spy (let's not argue about "wittingly" here, I get it) on American citizens without FISA or 702 approval:

https://www.newamerica.org/oti/blog/scope-standards-and-prot...

So if they did not know you were an American through your identifiers, they could intercept foreign traffic. However, once they identified you they would need to stop unless the above exceptions were met. IN THEORY. Exceptions have occurred, the most egregious that I can think of is that the FBI has NO ACCOUNTING WHATSOEVER of how many agents accessed the 702 database:

https://www.justsecurity.org/66622/how-to-address-newly-reve...

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Re:How Is NordVPN Unblocking Disney+? by tobias3 on Friday November 29, 2019 @05:09PM (#21667120)

Yeah, they'll just ask the German intelligence service to spy on Americans for them using NSA tools.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/german-intelligen...

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Re:How Is NordVPN Unblocking Disney+? by owenmarshall on Friday November 29, 2019 @12:06PM (#21665467)

Wasn’t the whole point of five eyes that we’d spy on the British and they’d spy on us and merrily round we go, merging data together to bypass domestic spying laws?

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Re:How Is NordVPN Unblocking Disney+? by Scoundreller on Friday November 29, 2019 @07:10PM (#21667585)

This is why I hate Canadian ISPs.

Their in-Canada peering is so terrible, it's common for local Toronto traffic to have round-trip through Chicago or NYC.

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Re:How Is NordVPN Unblocking Disney+? by kitteh on Friday November 29, 2019 @11:42PM (#21668553)

Yep. Bell, Telus, Videotron, Rogers have preferred to interconnect in the US for a long time (Chicago & NYC). During the mid 2000s the CRTC made bell and Rogers peer domestically over an OC12 (622Mbps) which was congested all the time (they shed some of load into the US). The Canadian IP transit market was a disaster until Cogent came into Toronto at 151 Front which paved the way for several other providers after.

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Re:How Is NordVPN Unblocking Disney+? by raxxorrax on Friday November 29, 2019 @11:07PM (#21668450)

In that case a Russian VPN service is indeed preferable.

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Re:How Is NordVPN Unblocking Disney+? by lsofzz on Friday November 29, 2019 @07:18PM (#21667623)

> Either way, yes, your data will also be wiretapped by your carrier themselves and sold on the open market [ ... ]

Woah. Hold your bong son! ;)

Any reference to documentation or any information of what you mean by `sold' on the open market?

If you wanted to prove a point by saying that internet is an insecure medium then yes I agree but `tapped' and `sold' is a whole different ball game that I am not aware of. At least in the internet I know of.

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Re:How Is NordVPN Unblocking Disney+? by q3k on Friday November 29, 2019 @12:17PM (#21665549)

> A VPN provider is basically a choice to trade one country’s passive adversary for another.

Plus, whatever VPN provider you're using. Unsurprisingly, most seem to be based in countries with very lax telecommunication laws and that make it very easy to start shell companies.

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Re:How Is NordVPN Unblocking Disney+? by daxorid on Friday November 29, 2019 @04:35PM (#21666925)

Yes, pretty much this.

The Lithuanian government has no interest in me, and even if they did, they have no jurisdiction here. One should always be more interested in privacy from the government that has authority to no-knock raid your home than the one that does not.

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