Comment on Youtube can detect VPNs now... the fuck?

• Crozekiel@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  They kind of have it backwards. They aren’t triangulating your location, they are taking the location your connection tells them you are and tests to see if that is correct or not by checking with known servers in an area around your claimed location. It can verify you are not where you say you are, but beyond that it can’t find you. At least, not the paper the person is mentioning - this “other method” they mention doesn’t appear to be linked to any paper or anything and might just be their personal theory, not sure.

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• rami@ani.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I imagine they could compile large datasets of ping times and server locations and do some extrapolation. I don’t think it ever goes past a best guess but they’d have an idea (if what this person said actually happens).

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  • lazylion_ca@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Companies dont really need to know where you are. They just need to know where you aren’t. If you are not within a certain threshold of response time to certain cdn servers, then its reasonable to assme that you are to be outside their contractually obligated broadcast region.

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• finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Yeah there was a cool paper on Delay Response method by AbdelRahman Abdou with Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University called “CPV: Delay-Based Location Verification for the Internet”.

  The other method I mentioned, checking packet size and general direction, would require accessing data along multiple stops before reaching the other endpoint with which to compare the sizes of encrypted data packets and use that to identify what is traveling where, which either has not been demonstrated or the companies utilizing it haven’t admitted to it, yet. It’s not a stretch to think it’s happening, though, with massive companies like AWS and CloudFlare or telecom giants like AT&T.

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