Re: Hulu thinks all my IP addresses are "business class", how to reach them?

[Tom Beecher <beecher () beecher cc>]

> Never did figure out if it was stupidity
> or malice driving that.

Personally I think it's neither; it's just $$$$$.

They could invest in a robust system to accurately identify what they chose
not to allow to access the service. Or, they can choose to run with a
'close enough' system with some legitimate users caught in the middle.

They've most likely done the math and decided that the revenue lost from
people getting caught up in inaccurate blocking is small enough that the
investment in a more accurate method isn't worth it. This is unfortunately
the more common decision in this age of worship at the Altar of Maximum
Shareholder Value.

On Wed, Nov 20, 2019 at 12:20 AM Valdis Klētnieks <valdis.kletnieks () vt edu>
wrote:

> On Tue, 19 Nov 2019 13:39:56 -0500, Tom Beecher said:
>
> > They are essentially equating 'business' with 'VPN provider'.
>
> Not at all surprised.
>
> Many moons ago, I had a Tor *relay* running on one machine in my home
> network,
> and Hulu decided that my connections from a *different* home machine were
> "VPN".  Now, if I were running a Tor *exit* node, I'd be totally OK with
> them
> rejecting my non-Tor connections because they were NATed to the same
> outside IP
> address - but Hulu should never have seen any packets from the relay and
> if I
> *was* using a VPN I'd have a *different* IP address.
>
> Near as I could determine, they were screen scraping the list of Tor relays
> and conflating them with exit nodes. Never did figure out if it was
> stupidity
> or malice driving that.