My VPN appears to be blocking and even CHANGING some websites

VPN
1

I have [VPN], and I thought I’d check out the Tribler filesharing program.

  • When I connect through “San Francisco”, the download page loads, but all the download links are changed to be hidden(!)
  • When I connect through “Seattle”, the whole site won’t load
  • When I connect through “Detroit”, the page loads just fine.

I find it VERY DISTURBING that my vpn provider would block certain sites, or worse, change the HTML out from under me, and it makes me worry what other sites they might be changing. After all, the whole point of my having a VPN is to circumvent this kind of censorship!

If you have [VPN], please try this link and see if you can confirm this behavior: https://www.tribler.org/download.html

Is this a known thing that some VPN providers do? Why would different servers handle this differently? I thought [VPN] was a reasonably well-respected VPN, but this sort of thing makes me very nervous.

P.S. Sorry mods for naming my VPN in my first attempt at posting. I should have read the rules. I hope this is ok now.

2

Perhaps the DNS server for some of their servers are misconfigured if you are using their default servers. Try changing the DNS servers and see if it loads for you.

Also, VPN providers do not “change HTML out from under you.” Most websites are created dynamically by the web server before being sent to you, but if you are not able to download the resource files it need (e.g., DNS issue), then the resulting website may look different. It’s like when ad-blockers use DNS to block you from downloading advertisements and thus the website won’t display advertisements.

3

My guess is it’s because someone before you was up to some shenanigans when they were using the VPN provider in that city which shares that IP address when you’re connected. So the site’s webhost is throttling or blocking that IP for some time.

4

Interesting. So your hypothesis is that a dns problem caused the web server to change the css elements to be hidden? It’s a pretty simple download page, but I suppose it’s possible. I suppose the web server could also be serving up the page differently for different IP locations.

When you say VPN providers don’t do that, do you mean that it is impossible given how VPNs work, or just that you don’t think they would do that and have never heard of it? The former would make me more comfortable.

Thanks!

5

Yeah that’s not acceptable. If anybody’s getting up to shenanigans around here it’s gonna be me :slight_smile:

6

VPNs route your traffic so that it appears you are connecting from someplace else. They don’t do man-in-the-middle attacks. In your link, it is HTTPS not HTTP, which means it is encrypted by a SSL certificate. If a VPN server were downloading and decrypting HTTPS content, modifying it, and re-encrypting the content, your web browser will complain about the SSL certificate.

To avoid this, you would need to purposely download the SSL certificate of the VPN server into your computer, store it, and tell your computer to trust it. The VPN server would then need to know it should act as a proxy server, downloading content, modifying it, and then sending it to you…but only to you, because you downloaded and trusted the certificate. Every other VPN user who hasn’t done it wouldn’t get that behavior and their traffic will just be routed like they should be.

Hopefully you can see how unlikely it is for a VPN server to change content on you. And that would also imply that the server would need to know how to change the content.

It is more likely that if DNS doesn’t point you to where you can download the needed components, then they will not be rendered. Maybe the website hides download links and will only display them if it can download icons for the links.

Even if your VPN provider set up a proxy server, like I said earlier your computer will warn you about the SSL certificate. Do you remember telling yourself you want to trust the certificate and took 10+ steps to download it and store it on your computer? Do you remember configuring your computer to use a proxy server that your VPN provider provided?

If you didn’t do either, it is more likely that the dynamically-generated web site rendered different results based on what components are available.

Just to explain dynamically-generated websites, think of a website like Amazon or Ebay. They don’t create millions of websites for every possible search term (shoes, white shoes, white girl shoes, white bowling shoes). They create a template page, which has certain parts dynamically changed based on parameters. If you searched white shoes, it’ll show you white shoes from Nike, New Balance, etc. You can click on any of the items. But if Reebok isn’t listed, you won’t have a link to click on.

In the same way, if your website isn’t able to download all the components necessary for the rendering, it’ll be left out.

Try setting your DNS servers to something reliable, like Google’s 8.8.8.8 server. When you connect to all of your VPN servers, you should be able to see the websites properly (assuming that DNS is the issue, which usually is one of the most common issues).

7

That’s a great point about https. I should have come to that conclusion on my own . . . I appreciate your pointing it out :slight_smile:

Thanks; I feel much better about my VPN now.