Comment on Youtube can detect VPNs now... the fuck?
Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 1 day agoThe CPV paper was not doing what you are saying, defeating a VPN by finding your real location. It is basically the opposite - if you are using a VPN to claim you are in a place, it can verify that you are not in that place. It doesn’t find your location, it can only verify you aren’t in the area you claim to be.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 1 day ago
If you can prove where people aren’t then you can prove where they are.
Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Not really, because the only reason they have a location to test against is because the connection looks like it is coming from the vpn server location. They don’t have any other location data to test against, and even if they decided to then run the test against every possible location on the planet, they still have the issue that their data is heavily skewed by the fact your traffic is flowing through a vpn, so your latency is not going to be perfectly matching their test servers unless they force the test servers’ traffic through the same vpn server.
Nothing about this is setup to find your location on the other side of a vpn - it is basically testing if you are using a vpn or otherwise “spoofing” your location and returning a yes or a no.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Incorrect. They can test against the recieving computer and any other relays they control on the way there. They can use that along with other information like number of packets, size of packets, and response time to determine, not with any certainty but with probability, where it comes from.
Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 21 hours ago
Do you not think a VPN will affect response time?? I implore you re-read the paper you keep referring to because they spell it out pretty basically what they are doing - and finding a person’s actual physical location behind a VPN is not it.
I am not claiming a VPN is a perfect or complete solution… The modern web has an absolute ton of ways to track you even through a VPN, but CPV isn’t it.