Just had a bad experience doing several verification steps just to get to purchase games from Humble Bundle and tying PayPal to Battlenet over a VPN.
First, Google distrusts you as soon as you use a VPN, so I used my LTE connection to do my Gmail stuff for verification. But as soon as I created accounts and tried to purchase stuff, it just won’t purchase because you’re behind a VPN. It requires “intervention” to complete purchases… So I started linking accounts to try to solve that.
Next, I logged into my Battlenet and it needed verification again because I was behind a VPN. I gave it SMS verification… Then I get a message my account is locked out… yet I can still login on both the site and the client…
I’m using a VPN because my ISP is a Chinese ISP in Canada with a FTTB/FTTH device that has those backdoors that were recently reported. The only way to connect is using VDSL to the FTTB/FTTH device. So as you can see, this is extremely frustrating.
That sounds quite normal. The only real way around it is to actually set up your own private VPN on something like OVH/Linode, even then, that isn’t guaranteed.
Most VPNs are flagged due to the sheer number of connections to the same place from that IP.
Yup, CIK Telecom is the name. It’s fully a Chinese ISP in Canada using Chinese FTTH/FTTB equipment that was recently exposed to have backdoors.
I’m paying $100USD for a year of ExpressVPN and honestly a Linode node too far away from Vancouver with manual setup is a ton of burden to have downtime. No freaking way am I using OVH because it’s where most (if not all) of the spambots in Canada are based.
Have you tried getting a new ISP? Your current one just leases the lines off the big 4 anyways. Not like it’d be any different, just an extra pair of eyes looking at your data instead of just having the big 4 look at it.
NOPE. My parents are loyal to the communist party and it would be traitorous and a subject of abuse if I used my own ISP. They cut the DSL line and permanently connected it to the FTTH machine, don’t have a spare land line.
Only thing I could get is cable, and I don’t like sharing bandwidth.
I like the VPN though since I can use Deluge freely now. With any of the other ISPs, I would get notice and notice letters and my parents could notice that. Popcorn Time would be easy to use too.
As much as I condemn it, I won’t judge how you want to use the internet, I just think it is a piss poor reason to jump through the hoops then complain on here about public VPNs obviously not being trusted.
If I ran a VPS on my friend’s residential gigabit connection, it’d be better and I’d pay for the service… Unfortunately that friend is not on speaking terms anymore. So I have to use a public service because I have no friends.
Also, my current ISP is billed exactly like they do in China, 1 year of service up front, and cancellation fee is DOUBLE the cost of the year of service.
The pandemic is only a road block, as long as you are careful with how you interact, you should be fine. Just don’t move to Alberta, Ontario, or Quebec.
Hell, where I work, we are currently working on getting a new hire relocated to Alberta from Winnipeg.
Saskatchewan was on my list of provinces to move to in a worst case scenario. It’s either that or enter the incredibly broken social housing system of Vancouver.
Why would you do anything like that over a VPN? Well okay, why would you be surprised pika face when it doesn’t work? It’s the same logic as kids trying to play online games through Proton or whatever it is, and being banned because the anti-cheat doesn’t know what they’re doing.
It’s because people using a Chinese ISP in a foreign country that know better about backdoors, but have no control over changing the ISP because their house is loyal to the communist party, is pretty much limited to using the VPN for freedom of expression. Take Hong Kong for example. I’m of foreign citizenship, and I can’t even freely speak my mind on Hong Kong if I want to go back for my Grandparent’s graves.
You’re reacting like I was using a ball joint tripod head on a video camera for panning. I had no clue, yet that is also the subject of intense “Darwin award for stupidity” stuff. Should we just call all people doing this retarded?
I would be concerned if everything was routed through the great firewall, but it’s Shaw Fiber upstream from my traceroute observations… They just spy on everything with the FTTH device, being able to decrypt naked HTTPS traffic.
It’s the ACTUAL great firewall that can spy on OpenVPN and SSH tunnels that I’m concerned about if I was forced to move back there.
I think you need to look up how https man in the middle decryption works.
Being paranoid is good security posture, sure but if they are able to do that, at scale for your traffic then I’m sure the NSA has a massive trove of data they would like help with.