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[–] 287 points 1 year ago (11 children)

VPNs aren't hard to detect, especially if you're using a major service.

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  • [–] 125 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    100% this, I work in cyber sec and it's very easy these days for services to detect this.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Feel sorry for the guy in the datacenter using Netflix on his brake.

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    using Netflix on his brake.

    Offering Xzibit some new ideas

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (2 children)

    That seems like a failure on their part. Buy more exit IPs.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    There's a lot more than just recognizing known raw IP addresses used as endpoints.

    One method larger services with CDNs use effectively is to use DNS for blocking. When you try to access a site, your DNS request will resolve to a server close to you, with your location determining the domain resolving to a different IP. Then the platform just responds to those requests from outside their normal area with a consistent message. No need to know whether it's actually a VPN or not, the traffic is acting like it is and doesn't really have much of a reason to do that normally.

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  • [–] 141 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    This isnt new. Its been happening for years. There is a post about this on lemmy every few weeks. It just doesnt happen consistently, so people always think that they "discovered" this for the first time.

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  • [–] [S] 74 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    But this is even dumber than before, you can't even login to bypass. What about people living in a country where youtube is blocked. I guess Google just says "fuck 'em"?

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  • [–] 84 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    What about people living in a country where youtube is blocked. I guess Google just says “fuck 'em”?

    Yyep.

    If you're using a VPN, you're likely anonymized and not directly making YouTube any money. Those are leeches, as far as a Google accountant is concerned.

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  • [–] 77 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    "This will allow Youtube to locate the best content" 🤡

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  • [–] 42 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It's so insulting they add flavour text like this as if to call you a fucking moron to your face

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  • [+] 64 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago

    Sure, but there are also lots of other ways around it. Non-chrome browsers (or Chromium-based browsers) still allow for good extensions that can block YouTube ads.

    Firefox + uBlock Origin still works great, even when all the front-ends are broken.

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  • [–] 57 points 1 year ago

    I encounter VPN blocks everywhere frequently. I usually just reroll my selected server until the block goes away

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  • [–] 53 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    The "best content" being ip-located ads, probably.

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  • [–] 48 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    VPN ads seriously need to stop promising that you can get around content restrictions.

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  • [–] 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

    People should educate others on how to get content not available in their area for free without the hassle.

    If media isn't available in your area, then the company is telling you they don't want your money. There is a $0.00 loss to them if you pirate it.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Unless you calculate it using the Nintendo formula, in which case you owe them $3 million.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Which is why there needs to be better pushback "Okay, so where exactly are you selling a functional SNES cart that I can plug into my SNES and play?" as an example.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    I’m not sure how that pushback can be applied. It’s not a legal argument that I am justified in stealing something if you won’t sell it to me. Although, at the same time, I don’t know what basis they have for claiming damages.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    The pushback would be when they cry about monetary losses for something they literally don't even sell anymore. Is this not why they're always trying to take down ROM sites?

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  • [–] 44 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    Well, they need to make sure the right people are watching the right propaganda.

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  • [+] -8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    They lobby both parties, people are just talking about the Trump donations now as he is currently in power

    https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/google-inc/C00428623/candidate-recipients/2024

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  • [–] 35 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    My ISP has started throttling YouTube to ~2mbps when viewed from desktop. Using a VPN gets around this and lets me watch in HD. Luckily I've not encountered this error yet, but if I do I guess it's no more YouTube for me, 480p is just way too blurry to put up with.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    I wonder if there’s any workaround besides VPNs like changing DNS or something?

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Phone->revanced

    Smart tv->smart tube next

    I don't ever watch YouTube on my laptop but I'm sure there are utilities available.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    I use 1.1.1.1 so I don't think it's easily ignored by changing DNS. But interestingly while using Revanced and NewPipe on my phone I don't have any of the same problems. Maybe my computer is ignoring my router's DNS? Maybe mobile YouTube is delivered from a different server? I wish I knew but ultimately using a VPN still works for me and is a very low effort fix.

    What I don't get is why it's only YouTube they choose to throttle. I've never noticed any issues on other streaming websites and fast.com which literally uses Netflix servers is also full speed.

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  • [–] 33 points 1 year ago* (9 children)

    I'm surprised it took so long, I've not been able to watch Channel 5 for years.

    Anyhow, I love Revanced.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (8 children)

    Every time I see people talk YouTube alternatives they complain that Revanced is bad and Newpipe is good.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    ReVanced will work almost flawlessly 90% of the time. Newpipe, Freetube, Pipepipe, Invidious, etc. will frequently break and require so much VPN hopping that I barely bother with them. Watching YT on my laptop is a pain in the ass compared to my phone.

    Honestly, until late summer ReVanced hadn't done me wrong at all and I had been using it for about a year, but YT managed to patch whatever loophole they found for YT Music, so I suffered for a month and listened on the regular YT app. It works now, although sometimes I have to VPN hop because it'll play a song only up to a minute, and then hang.

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  • [–] 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    Listen at this point, we either re-upload our favorite creator's content to other platforms. Convince them to join alternatives or help out *their replacements" on those alternative platforms to grow.

    Either way I do not respect content-creators that do not support alternative platforms (& decentralization) on principle

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago*

    Listen at this point, we either re-upload our favorite creator’s content to other platforms. Convince them to join alternatives or help out their replacements on thise alternative platforms to grow.

    I am with this, tired of using a yt frontend to watch videos (sometimes real website), and no reuploads nor have alternatives.

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  • [–] 63 points 1 year ago

    They always could. What appears to be happening is that channels now have the option to turn on "a switch" so that content wont play if a VPN is detected. Most VPN ip addresses are well known, because they arent a secret. Everyone who uses the VPN goes through it.

    If you come across the above message, its because the content creator turned it on. I had it come up with "stick to football". Its the only thing that it comes up with. I just unsubbed and wont watch anymore. Im not turning off my VPN for anyone or anything. Id rather just go with out. I encourage all of you to do the same.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Oh, so what they’re really saying is that a platform owned by GOOGLE has trouble FINDING the best content?

    Everyone knows.

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago

    Sure, there's big lists of them right here.

    https://github.com/az0/vpn_ip

    Hardly a secret.

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  • [–] 42 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    As someone who uses multiple VPNs daily I have a suggestion. Try to locate a different server and connect to it. See if there’s a drop down menu in your VPN app. Sometimes a particular IP on one of those servers flags websites’ fraud detection. Sometimes I can switch servers on my VPN and refresh the page and it loads just fine.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago

    Excellent advice. It’s a game of cat and mouse (or whack-a-mole, whatever metaphor works…).

    Sites that want your data for whatever reason hate VPNs, so they identify exit points and blacklist traffic from them. VPN providers know this so they spin up new exit points with different IP.

    Just try a different server. Sometimes it’s a regional ’rights’ issue, so pick another server that is in the same jurisdiction, for instance in the case of streaming.

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  • [–] 40 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I mean... detecting (some) VPNs is as trivial as

    fetch('https://github.com/NazgulCoder/IPLists/raw/refs/heads/main/output/vpn-ipv4.txt').then( res => res.text() ).then( res => console.log( res.includes( "1.2.3.4" ) ) )

    thanks to https://github.com/NazgulCoder/IPLists/

    FWIW though I did try, connected via a random VPN from ProtonVPN from Argentina... and it wasn't in that list. So it's not perfect. Also ProtonVPN has apparently today 13K servers according to https://protonvpn.com/vpn-servers

    That being said I can imagine that Google, which is literally built on crawling the Web, has all the infrastructure and expertise needed to have such lists and up to date ones.

    I'm not justifying blocking VPN here, only trying to clarify that unless you self-host in a rather specific setup (i.e. not relying a popular cloud provider but truly self hosting) it's technically not hard to block VPNs.

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  • Yeah, detecting the VPN isn’t really difficult at all. VPN providers sometimes try to cycle through IP addresses to make it harder, but there’s only so much they can do.

    This isn’t really noteworthy, especially when you consider how many services require a sign in when you’re on a VPN anyways. It’s shitty, but not really surprising; They want to be able to tie your traffic to you, not just to a random VPN server. Hell, even without signing in, they probably have your browser fingerprinted. If you’re privacy focused, you probably have a lot of privacy based extensions, in a privacy based browser. And that makes you easy to fingerprint.

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    [–] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Dude, I seem to find more sites that break when using my VPN than those that allow it. The bastards are winning

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago

    "This will allow YouTube to locate the best content"

    They mean slop? Another reason why I still use Newpipe on mobile.

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  • [+] 25 points 1 year ago (6 children)
  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Been trying out Invidious lately. Nice stuff if it is not down for a reason or two.

    Oh! Speaking of a devil. It is down right now!

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    Yeah, i even made a script just to log into its container (proxmox lxc) and pull the latest image when i see videos cant load.

    It’s almost always google actively changing things, sometimes directly targeting invidious.

    What did also helped was give its container 2 cpu cores rather than just 1. The internally errors and timeouts causes by google changes cause a big strain on it so it often crashed in combination with needing an update (leaving me unable to backup my up to date subscription list)

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    [–] 13 points 1 year ago

    locate the best content

    Hell nah, please dont

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago

    I'm so damn tired of corporations telling me what I can and can't do.

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