Tried to download an app banned in my own country, took 6 hours to find a working workaround

I needed a messaging app that's blocked here in the US for a project. Spent 3 hours bouncing between VPNs that got detected and shut down. Finally found a free one from a site run out of Vietnam that actually held a connection for more than 10 minutes. Has anyone else had a VPN just stop working after a few days with certain apps?

2 comments

2 Comments

daniel55216d ago

Six hours is dedication, I would have given up at hour two and just started yelling at my router. My VPN lasted exactly three days before it got blacklisted by one of those streaming sites, now I just rotate through a bunch of free ones like a lunatic. The Vietnamese one is probably being run out of someone's basement, which honestly makes it more reliable than half the paid options out there. I swear these apps have some kind of sixth sense for sniffing out VPNs, like they can smell the desperation through the wifi signal.

finley_bennett2815d ago

Man @daniel552 nailed it with that "smell the desperation through the wifi signal" line. These streaming sites have some kind of bloodhound level tracking for VPNs, I swear they can tell when you're just trying to watch one episode of some 90s anime and suddenly your connection gets flagged faster than a bootleg DVD at customs. I had that exact moment with Nord after three days, felt like I was personally offending the Netflix algorithm gods. Now I'm hopping between random Russian proxies that probably route through a toaster in someone's kitchen, and somehow it works better than the paid ones. The basement guy's Vietnamese server is probably running on a Raspberry Pi with a fan taped to it, but hey, as long as the speed is consistent I'm not asking questions.