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VPN Blockade Backlash Doesn't Hurt Us, Says Netflix (torrentfreak.com)
Ernesto Van der Sar, writing for TorrentFreak: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says that the recent crackdown on VPN and proxy users hasn't hurt the company's results. The VPN blockade only affects a small but vocal minority, according to Hastings, and there are no signs that hordes of subscribers are abandoning ship. Earlier this year Netflix announced that it would increase its efforts to block customers who circumvent geo-blockades. As a result, it has become harder to use VPN services and proxies to access Netflix content from other countries, something various movie studios have repeatedly called for. When asked about the impact of the VPN changes on the results, Hastings brushed the issue aside as a minor detail that doesn't impact the bigger picture in any way. "It's a very small but quite vocal minority. So it's really inconsequential to us, as you could see in the Q1 results." Earlier this year, Hastings also admitted that a VPN-blocking policy might be impossible to enforce.
Don't use a third party VPN service. Deploy your own VM with OpenVPN (or just use the built-in L2/L3 facilities provided by OpenSSH), configure it (and a couple of DNS-related things) properly, and HAND. If anyone is truly interested, I might put together a small guide (and maybe a basic "doitnow.sh" script) for this. -PCP
I've worked in their customer care (recently quit). There is such a thing as false positives, little old ladies who don't know the difference between a proxy and a flux capacitor. And the company line for someone calling about a VPN error? Do **not** help or advise them in anyway except telling them to undo what they've done whatever that was, and call the ISP to help find what default settings should be. Next thing you know, you've got a rep from the ISP calling in because an entire IP block is getting flagged, and nobody can actually cite any particular instruction, marker, or standard for why it's getting flagged and what needs to be done about it. I can tell you this, the corporation looks to weigh the undue hardship of innocents in dollars, and that ought to be incompatible with some ethical systems.