Comment by tallytarik

TOS are pretty meaningless in cases like this. It amounts to getting rejected as a customer and your account canceled.

Maybe the tables could be turned and we can build a service with dozens of subscriptions to every VPN detection service and report them for ToS violations ;)

> I trust that you are in full compliance with all contractual agreements and Terms of Service

Why? It's not like there's any real moral (or, likely, legal) reason to care beyond avoiding the service's ban hammer.

There's a little secret that most of the business world knows but individuals do not know: You don't have to follow Terms of Service. In most cases, the maximum penalty the company can impose for a ToS violation is a termination of your account. And it's not illegal to make a new account. They can legally ban you from making a new account, and you can legally evade the ban.

Unless you're the one-in-a-million unlucky user who gets prosecuted under the CFAA's very generic "unauthorized access to a protected computer" clause, like Aaron Swartz. It seems the general consensus is this doesn't apply to breaking a website ToS, and Aaron was only in so much trouble because he broke into a network closet, as well as for copyright violation. But consult a lawyer if unsure. (That's another difference: A business will ask a lawyer if it wants to do something shady, while an individual will simply avoid doing it)

Probably contrary to the stealth aspect.

Much of the internet still does not support IPv6, so most providers will give you an IPv4 address. In fact only a few providers even support IPv6 at all.

Even with IPv6 it's not a huge problem. With a few samples we can know that a provider is operating in a given /64 or /48 or even /32 space, and can assign a confidence level that the range is used for VPNs.

IPv6 isn't magically unrouteable, it just routes much larger blocks of "end IP addresses."

You just track and block /24 or /16 as necessary.

Many websites including Soundcloud are still only accessible through IPv4, so this is moot, even if VPNs support IPv6 it's enough to block their V4 exit nodes for Soundcloud.

That's a hosting service IP block. Some sites block them already. Netflix for instance.

It won’t end up in our proxy detection database, but we track hosting provider ranges separately: https://www.iplocate.io/data/hosting-providers/

It is even easier to block hosting providers. They typically publish official lists. Here's the full list for both of those providers:

https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json

https://digitalocean.com/geo/google.csv

(And even if they don't publish them, you can just look up the ranges owned by any autonomous network with the appropriate registry.)

Sounds like snitching as a service

I fail to see the problem if people that allow their internet connection used by scammers/AI crawlers are banned from every service