Sunday, June 10, 2012

American Netflix in Canada

American Netflix in Canada

Have you wanted to watch American Netflix elsewhere in the world but don't want to pay for a US proxy?  Turns out there is an easy way to do thanks to IPv6 and Hurricane Electric.

The process is really simple, sign up at http://www.tunnelbroker.net/ and create a regular tunnel.  Select the nearest end-point to you to get the best performance.  From there, follow HE's example configuration to get your IPv6 tunnel set up on your PC.



The downside to this is you will no longer be able to view your regional films in NetFlix until you disable the tunnel.

What's going on?

It turns out that web browsers prefer to use IPv6 over IPv4 when available.  By configuring an IPv6 tunnel you are being assigned an address from the upstream provider's pool.  If your provider is American then you will appear to be American.

 So when you connect to netflix.com you will come in over a US-provided IPv6 address.  Netflix will then attempt to geocode your address and it will determine that you are, in-fact, in the US.  This is the fundamental flaw in using IP address to determine where a person is located.  IPs do not correspond to a person's physical location.  At best, IPs can reliably tell you where the upstream provider is registered, but if they're providing service to people in Tonga and Britain you won't be able to tell them apart.