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

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 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 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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heavy@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Understanding is the first step to fighting draconian policies.

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mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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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nlgranger@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Many websites now just block a large range of cloud and VPS services in order to reduce DDOS from AI crawlers. For youtube and reddit you can still access if you are logged in though.

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