I'm seeing more and more websites are blocking VPNs entirely and I really really don't like it.
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@Em0nM4stodon any particularlu big or noteworthy ones? In my mind this is a declaration of war
@Em0nM4stodon this has been making me quite mad. If it’s a random site whereby someone shared a link or whatever, it’s a little frustrating. But it’s easy to move on. But if it’s important, we wind up having to make a choice that we shouldn’t have to make.
@Em0nM4stodon It's really maddening. And they don't even always tell you.
It's really getting annoying because some don't have proper redirects or whatever. I can usually use Tor browser to get in on those that pull this crap, but some are even blocking it.
Naturally, I will not be visiting without my VPN, so when they block everything, as far as I'm concerned, they've blocked me and I cannot use their service. I will never ever disable my basic privacy for them.
@Em0nM4stodon I stopped routinely using Reddit a while ago but now I won’t use it at all because of what you mentioned.
@Em0nM4stodon $WORK blocks cloud hosters because they are all happy to host aggressive and IP-agile AI scraper bots. If your VPN ends in one of those, you'll be out of luck, I'm afraid.
@Em0nM4stodon is V2Ray obfuscation not sufficient to circumvent?
@Em0nM4stodon @ireneista who is blocking VPNs?
@Em0nM4stodon Salon was the first site that blocked my VPN. I put them in my /etc/hosts as 127.0.0.1.
Requiring that I turn off ad blocking is another way to get banned. A while back Boing Boing, a site I visited regularly, started enforcing disabling ad blocking. I've long since emailed their CEO about their use of a dodgy vendor to sell their merch (NEVER BUY ANYTHING FROM stackcommerce.com). Requiring I disable ad blocking was the last straw.
I haven't been to the site for months unitl just now. They're selling subscriptions instead but I can wander around the site again. I guess the drop in traffic made their CEO rethink that decision. Either way, I think they're well on the way to complete enshitification. @pluralistic used to work with them. I wonder if he's NDA'ed by a non-disparagement clause from saying anything about their current managment.
@Em0nM4stodon It could be web-hosting services that are blocking VPNs. Has anyone checked for that possibility?
Websites wouldn’t care about VPN services if they weren’t selling user’s data
@Em0nM4stodon They don't deserve my business anyways. Hopefully at least some of them lose enough traffic that it matters.
@Em0nM4stodon - OpenVPN allows two devices to connect to its software for free. With a $6 a month VPS (cloud computing) you can spin up a low resource instance with high bandwidth and have your own VPN.
It doesnt share IP addresses with others, so you lose the anonymity of the herd. But you gain in that you arent on public block lists. You can often rotate out IPs as you like.
@tinker
I think wireguard should be available nowadays everywhere where OpenVPN is, and it generally is a much better choice of protocol.
@Em0nM4stodon
@Em0nM4stodon Yes! Big time major league annoying!
So there is a nitch market in every business space for those who aren't blocking VPN's.
I can't think why I might ever want to block them myself, over say blocking AI crawlers or Chinese and Russian ASN's but I guess there is a reason (however spurious).
Dumb question: how does a website block VPNs? Is it nothing more than a game of whack-a-mole with blocked IP addresses?
@Em0nM4stodon The strongest VPNs had been limited from a lot of services for a long time. Mullvad was already several years ago limited on many instances/services etc.. Still your observation is pristine. Tor has been blocked from major projects also since a longer time.
@Em0nM4stodon Totally. I even built my own and those are blocked as well. Kinda sucks.