Today, for the first time, I couldn’t use iplayer. As usual, I switched country to UK, cleared browsing data, deleted everything from temp app data file before going there. Was using Firefox. Tried same procedure with Epic browser. Same result. Chatted with Nord support. They wanted screenshots of results from dnsleaktest dot com. Tech said wait while they checked it out. After a little while, chat terminated. Created a ticket via email.
Have BBC finally made themselves bullet-proof?
@riley0 Your other comment hasn’t federated to my server so I can’t reply directly. Replying here instead.
Tailscale isn’t a VPN in the same way Nord is, where it directs all your traffic through an external server. Rather, it’s a system for creating a “tailnet” of all the machines you install it on. It creates a personal little clique.
For example, if installed on your phone and home PC, they can connect to each other anywhere in the world as if they are on the same network.
In addition, you can designate any machine in your tailnet as an “exit node”, and optionally route all your traffic through it. This way, when out and about on 4G/5G, you can appear to be coming from home.
Now I have machines in two countries. One happens to be the UK. By setting the AppleTV in the UK as my exit node, I look like I’m coming from my home ISP there. It’s resistant to VPN blocking precisely because it isn’t like Nord: it’s literally just my home IP address.
So iPlayer works, Netflix login sharing works, and all that good stuff, because everything looks to be coming from one site.
But that’s MY exit node, uniquely part of MY tailnet. If you don’t have a suitable exit node located, Tailscale won’t help you.
Now Tailscale has just partnered with a traditional VPN provider to give you public exit nodes, Nord-style, but that’s susceptible to the same sort of traffic analysis and blocking that they’re using to target Nord, AIUI.
Nord is still useful for torrenting, but for directly accessing geo restricted services, it seems to be losing the arms race.
So you may need to resort to torrenting.
Thanks for that explanation. I have seen references to Tailscale forever and even looked at the official web site… And you explained it better than they did.
Interesting write-up. But I wonder e.g. what the benefit of this would be over using Wireguard? It’s easy enough to set up on a UK router and then with a tap of the button you’re sending requests via your personal VPN to UK to the internet.
@janguv Don’t need to poke holes in your firewall for Tailscale, which is a positive.
Tailscale is wireguard but even easier.
How is this different from a VPN provider? Both are breaking out from a node in the country where you want to consume your media. Only one is used by 1000’s, one is used just by you.
Not dissing tailscale or anything. But just curious from a technical pov.
Commercial VPN-providers IP-addresses are known, and easily identified by things like the amount of traffic coming from them.
A single user connecting from a residential IP’s indistinguishable from legitimate traffic.
@tordenflesk @Fraeco this is exactly the thing. We leave a very different footprint and it’s not one they’re looking for.