- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
The IT company Mullvad’s founder Daniel Berntsson is behind a giant donation to the populist Örebro Party, which advocates “comprehensive re-immigration” from Sweden. “It’s sad that it’s needed,” he told Flamman.
~ https://www.flamman.se/techprofil-ger-miljoner-till-orebropartiet/
Are you able to get through geo-restrictions on streaming services with IVPN? They have fewer servers than Mullvad it seems. Like for Singapore, they have 2, Mullvad has 5. In Japan, they have 1, while Mullvad has 9.
Number of servers is less relevant than users per server.
Mullvad is a much bigger company so I’d expect them to need more servers.
It is, when you want to evade geo-restrictions. More servers spread over different IP blocks means there’s more chances the streaming services aren’t aware of some of those IPs yet, so they aren’t blocking them yet.
I’ll preface this by saying I used to work in the industry.
The restriction evading isn’t really related to the number of servers. VPN companies for streaming block evasions buy IP addresses that aren’t data centre specific. Those ranges are well known and easily blocked. So for example when you browse you’ll generally use a “standard” IP but while connected to the same endpoint if you fire up a netflix session it’ll route that traffic out the “streaming” IP. This is also partly to try to prevent steaming companies from getting easy access to a list of those IPs
It’s quite expensive to get IPs that aren’t blocked by steaming services so that is a cheaper cost per user for larger companies. Where I was that cost was way more than the cost of any individual server per month (and some of those servers were hefty). That is one way that Mullvad would have an edge but it’s minor.
For what it’s worth I did have a call with the iVPN lads (twice I think) and found them lovely. Never interacted with Mullvad but I will never give them money after reading this. Weirdly I’m in the market for a new subscription and they would have been my go to. Their fiver a month thing is really very smart.
Edit: for geo blocks on standard browsing it would generally present to us as a support ticket. We’d raise it with engineering and they’d assign a new outgoing IP with whoever our provider was. We used M247 a lot and they were very responsive when that happened. Usually a few hours and it was sorted.
Thanks for the info, I learned something new. So if for example I run my tv through my VPN and I’m watching youtube. When I switch to the netflix app, the VPN service determines that I’m trying to hit a netflix IP, so it routes it out to an outgoing IP specifically for netflix geo-blocking evasion that is separate from what youtube was using?
Yeah that’s exactly it. That’s how we did it anyway. I guess other providers may have their own secret sauce but I have to assume it’s some variation of that. We paid for a pool of, I think, 1000 non-contiguous residential / business IPs and if any of them got blocked we just immediately rotated.
Honestly we never had much trouble with it after the initial engineering work was done. I don’t think the providers really give a shit beyond best initial effort to make the rights holders happy.
Its been a couple of years but I didn’t have much luck with IVPN and mlb.tv but that was really the only one I tried at the time.