AFAICT, if a Netflix account owner sets up a VPN for their household, then anyone sharing the account who routes their Netflix traffic through that VPN would appear to be accessing Netflix from that household’s WAN IP address.
Is anyone doing this? Is it really that simple or are there more challenges?
EDIT: We get it, you like torrenting. Let’s keep comments on topic folks.
No, but I use a VPN to download movies from various sites. No reason to pay for Netflix.
This is the way.
Tail scale, wire guard, open VPN all work
They see your traffic coming from a residential ISP and don’t give it a second thought.
That said, if their service is that bad, piracy’s not a bad option. If someone’s going to provide me a service that I have to pay for and then tighten down the screws until let’s no longer reasonable, why should I care about following their rules?
Not using vpn but using mail filter fwd. Mails from netflix with codes are fwd to all using the shared account. So if you need to reactivate a device you request a device code and get it in the mail.
Smart, thanks for the interesting idea.
If you even get the option for the code. For some reason my TV will never do it.
EDIT: We get it, you like torrenting. Let’s keep comments on topic folks.
To be fair, you posted in the self-hosted community discussing an Issue for proprietary software.
To answer your question, which others have already done, yes your VPN tunnel will share the same IP as your household so long as it’s setup properly.
An issue which I aim to resolve using a self-hosted VPN.
Just a stupid question - Is self-hosting (and this forum) only applies to open source products?
This is just my opinion but nope, not at all. There’s plenty of proprietary self-host software. Plex is self-host software and it gets talked about here despite being proprietary.
If you pay for something to not abide by it’s rules, why do it?
It’s a messed up logic I really do not understand.
Arr!
I pay for the streaming services to fund the development and production of the shows I enjoy watching.
I torrent the content for my convenience.
It’s a classic “tragedy of the commons” scenario. I ask myself what would happen if nobody paid and everybody pirated.
No shade if that’s your choice, just recognize that you’re relying on all the people who do pay to keep the system going.
what would happen if nobody paid and everybody pirated
they wouldn’t just slowly starve to death you know. they’d start making the price more competitive and the service more user-friendly before they’d even had to pawn a single Porsche.
This is basically what happened to the music industry. Shawn Fanning scripted Napster, others followed suite. The RIAA squealed and threw a tantrum, busted a realitivly small amount of people, and then all of a sudden, we had .99$ downloads that were quality. The music industry has always been reactive in lieu of proactive. When AM radio first became a thing, the music industry execs squealed because the morons couldn’t figure out how to make a buck off of AM radio. ‘They’re taking our jerbs!’
AFAIC, Shawn was the pivot point in a digital age of music. I don’t condone it, but I understand it.
How many people listed in the credits of your favorite show do you truly think own one, much less multiple Porsches?
Right now this is the system we’ve got. It’s like tipping culture. You can refuse to tip, but the only person that’s impacted is your server who will never be able to change the system from within.
How many people listed in the credits of your favorite show do you truly think own one, much less multiple Porsches?
I don’t think those people are responsible for pricing. The Porsche comment was a flippant way of pointing out the whole parasitic machine that sits atop the actual creatives - the actors, the set designers, the script writers, all those people that you and I do want to support. All those people are not involved in pricing decisions or exclusivity contracts, and they’re mostly paid a salary so by the time a movie or series is out, they’re already on to the next job. By refusing to subscribe to all the myriad streaming services, you are mainly putting pressure on those executives to make a more appealing product.
I think you’re right in that it’s very reminiscent of US tipping culture (I’m not in the US), in that the people at the bottom are the ones who do the real work and yet they don’t get a fair share of the profits and instead have to take on unfair risk (i.e. the risk of not being tipped).
That said, I need to confess that I’m partly playing devil’s advocate, I pay for Netflix and just the other day I paid YouTube to “buy” a digital copy of a movie - for the exact reasons you said, I want to support the creative people behind the shows & movies I enjoy. I just don’t think it’s accurate to say that there’s a moral requirement to pay for entertainment, especially given how unfair the system currently is.
I see it differently. The service (as in content and delivery) should make me want to pay.
I’m all for paying the creators.
But, I do want to pay. I want to support the artists who create the shows and movies that I enjoy. I want people to be able to earn a living in the creative arts.
I don’t think anyone is debating that, as in, of course everyone can relate and do that, if possible.
But the latter detail is the issue. Sometimes the middle man screws up so badly that even then it does not matter.
If you need to use a VPN to get your shows: it’s impossible in a legal, contract respecting way to get your content.
Yes it works. It really is that simple!
I do this, it’s been one with other providers but I don’t use Netflix.
Yeah.
I considered setting up a Pi for WireGuard at my mom’s house (her router doesn’t support VPN), so we could share subscriptions still, but decided it wasn’t worth the hassle and risk that they would start VPN detecting from the client: could just imagine them sending her emails about it that would confuse her lol
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I’ve done this. I have a Google TV Stick. If Netflix starts preventing people from opening their app when it detects a VPN (in Android), then you can do what I did and run the VPN on the routers themselves. In my case it’s ASUS routers on both ends, and they support Wireguard natively (GliNet are also really good for this as they support and run OpenWrt)
The benefit to doing it this way is that neither Netflix nor the Google TV itself are aware they’re on a VPN. The ASUS routers I use have a feature called VPN Fusion, where you can put different clients on or off of different VPN connections.
Edit: To clarify, I share with family. I’m not the account owner, but I’m one of the profiles in the account.
Every wifi device we own that’s connected to wifi and the Internet can be precisely located by the companies involved even when using a VPN.
If you have an Android phone you’ve probably noticed a prompt at some point asking for your permission to transmit precise location information and enable wifi scanning. Those wifi SSIDs and MAC addresses along with its GPS location is sent back to Google. The combination of all that information is almost as unique as a fingerprint. They can use that along with signal strength of each AP in the area to determine your device’s location with precision. (Google used to allow apps like Maps to be used with wifi scanning turned off, but no more.)
Your Google stick can’t tell it’s on a VPN directly, but even without GPS Google can still pinpoint its physical location using their database of SSIDs and MAC addresses, and if they want to they can determine you’re using a VPN by comparing that to the expected location of your IP address. There probably aren’t enough people doing this right now to make it worth the trouble to detect your VPN, but IMO it’s just a matter of time before they decide it is.
I also expect that Google sells that information to every company willing to pay for it, so almost every single wifi enabled device can be precisely located if it can transmit data to the Internet.
We live in a scary time.
Interesting info. I switched to grapheneos recently, which allows you to disable a lot of that stuff. Combining that with WG, should make a solid way to share
Netflix’s restrictions are not based on IP address. That would be an incredibly unreliable way of determining a location
They’re looking at the network you’re connected to. Exactly what they’re looking for is not public
How can I spoof EVERYTHING to be identical in all locations using my openwrt routers ? Do they look at my GPS data, or the name and addresses of other wifi and bluetooth devices ? Do they check my traceroute between my device and their servers ?
You don’t have to spoof everything. If you setup a wireguard server on your router then, then VPN into that then you’ll be on the actual network and Netflix cannot tell the difference.
Netflix has come out and said they don’t use GPS. I cannot authoritatively say they don’t traceroute or use other signals, but the wireguard tunnel works so you can only assume they do not.
I was wondering because if they use wifi & bluetooth discovery, then a VPN isn’t going to help,. one phone will see a certain bunch of your neighbour’s SSIDs while another phone will see other. Also A-GPS is not technically GPS, it is cell tower triangulation, the name of your cell towers and in what quadrant they’re seeing your phone (that’s how they caught Mitnick).
Also the wireguard VPN acts as a L3 separation, so you still see on your L2 segment, different MACs and different addresses in the broadcast traffic.
I imagine that Netflix would use an heuristics based machine learning system, so while not one particular aspect would out you as part of a different household, an inventory of signals might make them suspect you “enough” that they start harassing you with 2 factor authentications invalidating your session cookies. Not exactly expulsing you from the service but just annoying enough that most will prefer to cough up a few more bucks for a separate account. And of course, as their needs to supplemental revenue increases, they’ll be able to tweedle your knobs until they get just the perfect amount of annoyance to convert “freeloaders” into paying customers rather than defectors or pirates.
This never worked for me. It would always detect my VPN and alarm out. Even when I was logged in from my own country. If it was on, I was locked out.
I think they mean hosting their own VPN on their home network, not using any third party provider.
It still wouldn’t work. If the system is set up to deny service when a VPN is detected, then it doesn’t matter where you’re connected, or if you’re hosting or not.
How would it know you’re using a VPN?
if you use the Netflix application chances are they’ll detect the virtual network on your system and if it’s in use, most people don’t seem to realize that applications have direct access to your hardware unless it’s containerized, virtualized or explicitly restricted by some policy.
That is not true at all
I use a third party VPN without any issues (USA)
