Recently I have been using a VPN to watch an online series available only to Americans – on a website called https://go90.com. Until a few days ago everything was running smoothly with just Hola VPN. Then for some weird reason the website started to lock me out. I read up a little and saw that when I go to https://ipleak.net/ they could be able to locate me via WebRTC detection and DNS leaks. I went ahead and fixed those so that WebRTC shows no IP on the site and the DNS shows an American address. When I try to go to the go90 website I am still locked out however.
Being at a complete loss I tried to create a virtual machine with Ubuntu on it, did the same thing so that ipleak shows me as browsing from the US and then for some bizzare reason I can access the main page of the website but clicking on any link takes me to the ‘you are not in the US’ page. How can the website locate me? What should I do?
If it is helpful I’m currently running Windows 10 and Chrome, though tried similiar things on Vivaldi and Firefox without any effect.
confused. are you only using Hola? I used to use it to be able to access BBC from the US and found that many times it simply didn’t work and I would have to keep attempting to ‘unlock’ the site, even going as far as relaunching Hola.
I’ve since learned about Smart DNS and have changed my entire outlook on life.
by the way, without reading too much about it, not sure Hola is all that sketchy. They explicitly tell you that by using their free service, you become a peer to peer exit point.
I think WebRTC is browser specific so did you make sure to disable it in the browser you used in Ubuntu as well? I think Ublock Origin has an option to let you disable it. Also check out Privacy Settings add-on for Firefox: Privacy Settings – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US)
As well as Privacy Badger from the EFF.
Make sure you have location completely disabled in Windows 10 settings as well as a ton of other privacy settings. There’s a few hoops to jump through for that.
Try another VPN? Some are better than others at not appearing to be a VPN service.
I know Hola is supposed to be sketchy for other reasons which may or may not be interfering (something about them selling your local bandwidth to allow others to use your computer as a VPN location). I read that a while ago, so I don’t know if that’s still true today or not.
The site you’re on might be able to detect VPN’s and maybe you’ve had the bad luck of being routed/connecting to blacklisted IPs? I only discovered yesterday that Papa Johns started to blacklist VPN IPs. They have a “technical difficulties” page that they show when you visit their site while on a VPN, and I thought their website was down for a couple weeks before realizing that they must have just started to blacklist those IPs a couple weeks ago (I normally use VPN constantly, and their page always worked before, so it never occurred to me that it could be the VPN).
Anyways that was good thinking with the VM to ensure that your browser isn’t the cause of it (besides cookies, browsers can be fingerprinted).
If it’s not the VPN that’s causing the issue, then there’s nothing else I can think of at the moment to suggest.
Try www.dnsleaktest.com as well, maybe something else is showing? If your ISP supports IPv6 that could be one thing, most VPN’s are still routing in v4 only. If that’s the case you can simply disable v6 in your network protocol settings.
To fix the WebRTC issue you need to install the limiter extension and disable non-proxied UDP…
Tried both, and beforehand I had geolocation set to ‘ask for permission’ so this is unlikely to be the cause as well.
The site shows me the same page as if I didn’t run any VPN at all. I did try with a couple of free VPNs and they were not working either. Perhaps they know about all the common ones? If so that sucks, I guess.
Edit: What’s also curious is that it seems that Netflix works fine and send me to the US version no problem…
I have tried a couple different VPNs and unfortunately none of them worked. Thanks for recommending the Smart DNS. I shall try it and see if that works.
this is by no means an endorsement, but check out simple telly
they offer a 2 week credit card free trial and claim to support go90 (see above link). I actually already have an annual subscription with unlocator, but they don’t support DisneyLife so I looked elsewhere and simple telly appears to be one of the least expensive ($30/yr) with large support across geolocked sites.
what I will endorse is the concept of smart dns. I’m technical, I’ve seen technical explanations of how it works, I still can’t figure it out, but it is a game changer. Basically in most cases, it handles the initial ‘handshake’ with the site, presenting as you from being inside the country the content is locked to, but then passes the connection off to you so while the site thinks you’re in the proper country, all communication is being passed directly from you to the site, so no middle man slowing it down with overhead.
Just know that they have the same issues with Netflix that many VPN providers do. Some try workarounds, others just disable or provide the option to disable Netflix.