BBC iPlayer cracks down and blocks VPN users

[Peter Corlett]

On Fri, Oct 09, 2015 at 01:38:42PM +0100, Owen Smith wrote:
> It can't be *all* VPNs since there is no way to detect from the traffic
> itself that it has been VPN'd (or at least you'd hope there isn't).

Let me crush your hopes: it's not actually all that difficult to
fingerprint traffic and find candidates that have likely passed through a
VPN or other tunnel. It's too error-prone to use for blocking individual
connections, but in aggregate can be used to identify new address space
used by VPN providers.

The BBC may well be doing this, although just googling "watch iPlayer from
abroad" and blocking the first page of results would probably be just as
effective :)

> If the blocking is by known IP addresses of commercial VPN providers
> then any private VPN people run themselves won't be blocked, until the
> BBC decides to find these and add them to the block list.

It would be a terrible waste of BBC resources to play whack-a-mole against
end-users users running their own bespoke VPNs, because it's harder and
has less effect than just picking off larger VPN services as they appear
on the radar. Blocking merely has to be good enough to satisfy the
rights-holders that the BBC are making reasonable efforts.