SoundCloud has banned VPN access

https://old.reddit.com/r/SoundCloudMusic/comments/1pltd19/soundcloud_just_banned_vpn_access/

by empressplay • 7 months ago

293 212 7 months ago

old.reddit.com

xfeeefeee• 7 months ago

Over five years of paid SoundCloud here, I thought something was wrong with my setup. If this continues I'll have to cancel, basically. What a pain.

voltagexd3• 7 months ago

same here. been a paying customer for 2 years, a soundcloud listener for 5+. this is where i switch back to downloading music off russian pirate websites.

jijijijij6• 7 months ago

this is where i switch back to downloading music off russian pirate websites.

As a bonus you may even get discount codes for your VPN!

For real tho, fuck all those rent-seeking control freaks. Piracy was almost dead, we had a good deal. But no, it's never enough, so here we are.

Also, some piracy boards are actually pretty steady, nice and cool communities, and listing to local files feels way more intentional.

shelled• 7 months ago

SoundCloud once messed up a huge song import - hundreds (as in more than 9 hundreds). There was no way to batch clean/edit, or even clear/nuke (i.e delete everything). Support refused to help. They clearly said they "won't" do it and they helpfully asked me to do it one by one because that was the way users were supposed to do it. I kept requesting that they could just delete everything and I would set up everything again because at that point my profile looked all garbage and noise. They refused and stopped responding. I found a CxO email and mailed seeking help. I never received a reply. A few days later, I just deleted that really old account. I used to use the site very regularly since the beginning. But after that, they never even came to my mind until I saw this here on HN.

majorchord2• 7 months ago

You can't just blanket block all VPN access, that's not how the internet works... they could pick some common/well-known providers of VPN services and block their IPs/ASN/etc., but you can't just flip a switch and make all forms of VPN/proxy stop working, as there's no way to tell with certainty that someone is using one.

protocolture2• 7 months ago

GEOIP providers often sell a database of known VPN/Proxy endpoints. They take the approach of shoot first, ask questions later. Using one of these databases bans a lot of legitimate ip addresses that have seen been the source of known VPN or proxy traffic.

Its not perfect ofc, but its not meant to be. Its usually just used as a safety blanket for geoblocked intellectual property, like netflix.

itake• 7 months ago

I connect to my residential ISP in the USA via VPN all the time and have never had issues with being blocked for VPN use.

Maybe they mean commercial VPN providers that run on the cloud?

wkat4242• 7 months ago

For low-volume stuff you can always get a non-expiring 4G/5G bundle eSIM and tunnel through that. Because 4G/5G roaming always tunnels traffic through the home country, and then emerges from CGNAT so it can't be identified as foreign traffic.

But those data packages are expensive and not available with each wanted origin country. Also you need hardware on your side. But it is an option, just saying.

polski-g• 7 months ago

MTU detection is the easiest one. Sucks for people with ISPs that don't do 1500 bytes but those are rare.

zinekeller4• 7 months ago

looks at Japan, UK (OpenReach), and a lot of other places still using PPPoE (on fiber!) for complicated reasons

xiconfjs• 7 months ago

Isn‘t sub-1500 bytes the norm for residential internet access? (DOCSIS and DSL with PPPoE are the most common access protocols here in Germany)

joecool1029• 7 months ago

but those are rare.

yeah sure, if you ignore the existence of literally every mobile isp.

ranger_danger4• 7 months ago

Hard disagree... there are still a vast many providers around the world doing < 1500, such as PPPoE DSL.

makeitdouble• 7 months ago

As long there isn't a critical risk, these kind of business decisions won't aim for certainity.

They probably assume some amount of collateral damage, a small number of VPN users still flying under the radar, the bulk of VPN users being properly targeted, and the vast majority of users not noticing anything.

tallytarik3• 7 months ago

There are plenty of VPN and proxy detection services, either as a service (API) or downloadable database, which are surprisingly comprehensive. Disclaimer: I’ve run one since 2017. Years on, our primary data source is literally holding dozens of subscriptions to every commercial provider we can find, and enumerating the exit node IP addresses they use.

There are also other methods, like using zmap/zgrab to probe for servers that respond to VPN software handshakes, which can in theory be run against the entire IP space. (this also highlights non-commercial VPNs which are not generally the target of our detection, so we use this sparingly)

It will never cover every VPN or proxy in existence, but it gets pretty close.

rdsubhas• 7 months ago

Interesting. I assumed all VPNs switched to IPv6 by now, making detection much harder.

addandsubtract• 7 months ago

Tangent: if you hold access to all VPN providers, have you thought about also releasing benchmarks for them? I would be interested in knowing which ones offer the best bandwidth / peering (ping).

acka• 7 months ago

Years on, our primary data source is literally holding dozens of subscriptions to every commercial provider we can find, and enumerating the exit node IP addresses they use.

Assuming your VPN identification service operates commercially, I trust that you are in full compliance with all contractual agreements and Terms of Service for the services you utilize. Many of these agreements specifically prohibit commercial use, which could encompass the harvesting of exit node IP addresses and the subsequent sale of such information.

ranger_danger4• 7 months ago

This will also cause problems with anyone that happens to (even accidentally/unknowingly) use apps that integrate services from companies such as BrightData/Luminati/HolaVPN/etc. where they sell idle time on your device/connection to their VPN/proxy customers.

The legitimate end-user will then no longer be able to use e.g. SoundCloud.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 7 months ago

which are surprisingly comprehensive

How does the buyer even know what the precision and recall rates might be?

m00dy• 7 months ago

who's buying your service ?

vb-8448• 7 months ago

just out of curiosity: if i'm located in spain and i setup an ec2 or digital ocean instance in germany and use it as a socks proxy over ssh, do you will detect me?

reisse• 7 months ago

Big part of the Internet blanket ban countries, why do you think VPNs are any different?

IAmBroom4• 7 months ago

Countries can be isolated at the physical junctions (in the case of a country as restrictive as NK).

Banning by a hosted IP amongst billions of other IPs is different.

dJLcnYfsE3• 7 months ago

It is easier to block all non-residential addresses, than block VPNs. As an added "bonus" it also kills personal VPNs running on VPS. VPNs in residential space exist but are sold as "premium" product.

ranger_danger4• 7 months ago

yes and those users that happen to have their bw sold as residential VPN will be caught in the crossfire... many times they are not even aware of it because it's something buried in a ToS they didn't read for some random app.

jijijijij6• 7 months ago

Yes, and email is decentralized in theory...

If using a VPN for access is forbidden by the ToS, you only need to detect a VPN connection once to prove violation.

The IPv4 address space to consider is limited and it is technically absolutely feasible to exhaustively scrape and block the majority of VPN endpoints. Realistically any VPN provider will have some rather small IPv4 subnets make do, shit's expensive. More so, for the trivial case, VPN anonymization works best, when many people share one IP endpoint, naturally the spread is limited. There are VPN providers, some may even be trustworthy, which have the mission of "flying under the radar" with residential IPs and all, but they are way, waaaay more expensive. For most people that's no option.

IPv6 is a different matter, but with the very increase in tracking and access control discussed here, that may be even more of a reason, IPv6 is not going to be a thing any time soon....

Thinking about it, maybe this AI monetization FOMO and monopoly protectionism, will incidentally lead to a technological split of the web. IPv4 will become the "corpo net" and IPv6 will be the "alt net". I think there may be a chance to make IPv6 the cool internet of the people, right now!

ranger_danger4• 7 months ago

you only need to detect a VPN connection once to prove violation

But an IP address is not a person (legally in the US at least), and many IPv4 addresses get re-used fairly often. My home 5G internet changes IP every single day, and it's a constant struggle because other users often get my IP blocked for things I didn't do. I cannot even visit etsy.com for example. Just for fun I even checked 4chan and the IP was banned for CP, months before I ever had this particular IP (because I'm paranoid and track all that stuff).

giancarlostoro2• 7 months ago

Hell, I remember malware (Trojans / RATs) from the 2000s that allowed you to use your victims IP as your personal proxy.

szszrk2• 7 months ago

Nowadays it's called "residential IP proxy".

A lot of shady shit under that term. Used by all the harmful services - scammers, AI crawlers... :)

citizenpaul• 7 months ago

Maybe its a trick and they are logging all the people on VPN's trying to see if they are blocked over the next 24 hr. Then they can take the data and start blocking it lol. Maybe not lol?

999900000999• 7 months ago

They blocked *some* vpns. I was able to get it working just by switching location with my vpn provider.

mig39• 7 months ago

Doesn't reddit block VPNs as well?

hdra• 7 months ago

i tunnel my internet through linode with wireguard - reddit blocks me if i'm not signed in.

with soundcloud, i just got a generic 403 from cloudfront

combine that with country-level internet filter, the internet is getting harder and harder to use :(

miyuru• 7 months ago

ah if they are using cloudfront, they must be using the AWS managed WAF rule, which is pretty bad.

I used that once and got in trouble with the client since the ruleset was over blocking.

rjh29• 7 months ago

Well, most sites are going to block VPS IP spaces (which are published online) as it's ~100% bot activity.

extraduder_ire• 7 months ago

Works for me most of the time. A couple of months ago, there was a period where a subset of the exit IPs were blocked for a short period each.

timbit42• 7 months ago

IME, only if you're not logged in.

elashri• 7 months ago

The irony is that I tried to access the link here but reddit blocks VPN access aggressively.

gruez4• 7 months ago

Across 3 VPN providers I use, none of them have issues accessing reddit anonymously. There are nodes/regions that are blocked, but finding a working server isn't hard.

suslik2• 7 months ago

Might be you're logged in? I often hit a block when using (proton) vpn if I'm logged out but not otherwise.

alex-robbins• 7 months ago

Care to name them? I use Mullvad, and I love them, but their exit nodes are routinely blocked by Reddit and streaming services.

prosody• 7 months ago

What's the motivation for blocking VPN read access for this and other services? Are AI scrapers using commercial VPNs to get around rate limiting?

danpalmer• 7 months ago

Legislation. If a country requires age verification, identity verification, moderation, etc, it's easy enough to either block that traffic or enforce the local laws. However users can easily circumvent this with a VPN. For some countries, this traffic is still in scope, and so the only real way to prevent it is to block or impose the restrictions on all VPN users.

Could also be spam/abuse prevention. Credential stuffing often goes through VPNs, signup over VPN is a strong signal for future abuse or issues in various ways.

rendaw• 7 months ago

Yeah, but age verification for _music_?

SchemaLoad• 7 months ago

AI scrappers made it so much worse. Now most things completely block VPN users who aren't logged in. Reddit and Youtube will refuse to load anything until you log in if you are on a VPN.

Rastonbury• 7 months ago

I suspect country level licensing, soundcloud I sometimes seen songs "not available in your country" or something along those lines

kaizenb• 7 months ago

Yes mostly about this. I can't use SoundCloud (or Spotify) in Serato DJ Pro to connect and play songs, not available in my country. But Apple Music connected, so moving my archive there.

switz• 7 months ago

It doesn’t really matter if they’re using commercial VPNs or the same upstream providers as commercial VPNs. Blocking an ASN is a million times more effective than blocking single IPs (at the risk of blocking genuine customers). I’ve had customers reach out to me asking to be unbanned after I blocked a few ASNs that had hostile scrapers coming out of them. It’s a tough balance.

VPNs often use providers with excellent peering and networking - the same providers that scrapers would want to use.

thenthenthen• 7 months ago

Strange, it works here (Taipei based vpn and logged in)

october8140• 7 months ago

I think it's the thought that counts. Presumably they will get better at blocking all VPNs.

IAmBroom4• 7 months ago

And VPNs will get better at avoiding them. In the military world, this is called "C-squared" (counter-countermeasures).

syntaxing• 7 months ago

Even Russia and Iran has issues blocking VPN country wide…curious what SoundCloud is going to be able to do. I’m guessing it’s to block AI scrapers but ironically, they have way more resources than your customers. SoundCloud will end up pissing off their paying customers and AI bots will still be able to scrape.

t0lo• 7 months ago

Financial times does as well for me on certain browsers but not others. Pretty annoying.

lightyrs2• 7 months ago

Last night I was blocked from HBOMAX (or whatever brand they go by these days) for being on a VPN. That was the first time I've ever encountered something like that on HBOMAX. I wonder if there is some coordinating event here.

rsync• 7 months ago

Did the error condition actually call out "VPN use" ? Did the HBO UI actually call out, by that term, a VPN ?

... or were you simply using a VPN and that's the most likely culprit for a general failure of the service ?

Genuinely curious ...

dewey• 7 months ago

Having it spelled out as "Are you on a VPN?" on streaming services is pretty common these days. I guess with the popularity of consumer VPNs that term isn't just a technical one any more.

lightyrs2• 7 months ago

They specifically used "VPN" in the error message but I can't remember the exact text of the whole message.

rekabis2• 7 months ago

Yarr… when this happens to ye, it’s time to sail the high seas!

beej71• 7 months ago

They're doing everything they can to make piracy the best option.

pixel_popping3• 7 months ago

Exactly, and you should go deeper and encourage absolutely everyone in your surrounding to drop the service.

0_____02• 7 months ago

Uhhh. Unless people are now using SC completely differently from how I was using it, the media people publish on SC is far too niche to be available via piracy.

rekabis2• 7 months ago

Then people need to coordinate. People with active SC accounts need to talk to people who can take ripped files and torrent them.

I don’t have an SC account myself. But get me a file and I will gladly torrent it for others. Some of my torrents have been active for well over a decade, and have hit ratios in the tens of thousands.

LightBug12• 7 months ago

Arrrrrrrhhhhhh me hearty !!!

ThatMedicIsASpy• 7 months ago

I don't even need to be blocked. I can't jump ahead so I just download and keep or discard.

diimdeep• 7 months ago

Not the first,

Patreon also banned VPN

YouTube, Reddit - locked out, requiring to log into account, on pretense of security and care concerns, yeah to identify and track VPN users.

big-chungus4• 7 months ago

link for actual people https://www.reddit.com/r/SoundCloudMusic/comments/1pltd19/so...

vpShane3• 7 months ago

Should be interesting to see how the internet blocks those of us who don't want to be fingerprinted, ID'd, or reveal our home IP addresses. YouTube already blocks embeds to login and prove I'm not a bot, funnily it doesn't work and embeds never play. Reddit will block me unless I'm signed in which I don't mind too much, but the daily beast and many others block me which is a shame because I'm a real human being using the internet as intended.

Instead of blocking or limiting features to whitelist users with approved behavioral patterns and limit / block those that don't -- such as loading a page and immediately commenting or doing things that normal humans don't do, they block IP addresses and ASNs.

I just close the browser tab and remind myself not to waste my time caring, there'll be other platforms.

My router is setup for WireGaurd and it'll never be disabled.

Shame on SoundCloud

bilekas• 7 months ago

which is a shame because I'm a real human being using the internet as intended.

This is the main issue here, the web has become actively hostile to normal people in the quest to monetize every second of online activity.

IAmBroom4• 7 months ago

"Actively hostile" is another of the common myths. See also: "corporations are evil".

"Completely indifferent" and "Corporations are completely amoral" are more accurate.

It's the difference between someone trying to drown you, versus someone trying to fish while you drown just off the bank. Same end, of course.

sigmoid10• 7 months ago

block those that don't -- such as loading a page and immediately commenting or doing things that normal humans don't do, they block IP addresses and ASNs.

As someone who has both spent quite a bit of time writing scrapers and later lots of headache on blocking malicious bots from accessing websites, I can tell you this has become futile. Bot makers aren't stupid. If you put in a check for how fast actions are performed, they will put in a sleep timer in their script. If you start blocking residential IPs because many people use it, you are probably just blocking a school or dormitory, while the real bots will quickly move to another IP once they smell something is off. Today with modern multimodal LLMs, you can bypass almost every "human-check" imaginable. And if they can't pass something, most of your users sure as hell won't either. Not because it is too hard, but because it will take too long to solve. The sweet 3-15s actionable human intelligence threshold has been passed by now. The cats and dogs type captchas were already solved more than 12 years ago by simple CV machine learning. The tech has progressed an insane amount since then. In the end I always ended up basically doing what SoundCloud did here if my service was sensitive: Block entire countries, all tor exit nodes and all known VPN ASNs. That will get it down by like 90%. Bear in mind that anyone who wants to put in some effort will still easily bypass this, but at least the low-effort guys from third world countries will take a while before they catch on. So you can go back to doing some actual work in the meantime.

butlike2• 7 months ago

In the nicest way possible: who cares? So "they" know my vile pornographic proclivities, my daily commute, and probably what color my poop was this morning. Then what? I get embarassed?

Snowden showed the NSA has taps upstream, so in my book: that's over. I'm fairly convinced if your company reaches a size where it could potentially be a national security threat, the government comes knocking (Facebook, Apple, Twitter, etc.), so that seems like it's over. You have the AI companies scraping god knows what. And, I imagine most countries have corollaries.

Really, all the bad actors I'd encounter in my daily travels would be ones who want to steal money from me. That's a simple ideology. I can handle that. My identity gets stolen, my bank account...there's multiple levels of billion dollar companies with vested interest in me not losing faith in "the system," so I'm not worried about it really.

If a company wants to associate my phone number to glean all my purchases forever in order to target tailored ads to me, fine. Again, it's in the spirit of taking my money, which is a simple ideology.

If the neighbors want to snoop on my traffic, hats off to them for having the capacity to live two lives: both theirs, and mine after they figure out my day-to-day dealings. Doubt they have time to do much about it. Hard enough to live one life in 24 hours.

If the government wants to try and keep tabs on everything to see who's making ICBMs and who isn't, or whatever else they want to do, that's their prerogative but it seems like a complex goal that doesn't affect me.

webstrand• 7 months ago

This only works so long as you're not interesting to anyone. You never know what past information associated with your identity will be weaponized against you. By the government, corporations, or individuals to justify harming you. Even if you're safe and secure in the belief that your neighbors will never turn on you, others are not so lucky.

Did you travel to get an abortion? Someone might be interested in charging you with a felony. Did you associate too closely with non-citizens? Maybe you're one too. Did you reserve a hotel room? Probably willing to pay more for flights there. Do you frequent hacker news? Might not be so in favor of the current political establishment.

teddyh• 7 months ago

You may believe yourself and your actions to be ignored by the watchers, but you might still want everyone in general to be free of watchers. Both since being constantly watched is detrimental to the human condition, but also since some people may actually dare to improve society if they are not watched.

For a longer argument, see The Eternal Value of Privacy, by Bruce Schneier in 2006: <https://web.archive.org/web/20241203195026/https://www.wired...>.

brianmurphy• 7 months ago

These vpn believers don't understand how concentrating all of the traffic thru a single chokepoint (the vpn provider network), they're infinitely easier to network monitor.

vpShane3• 7 months ago

That's one way to look at it, mine is no data goes out or in unencrypted, and for me it's simple. Adtech? "No." - let packet kiddies get my home IP address? "No."

It's as simple as that: No thanks, then I slide the slider on WireGuard and then I have an encrypted tunnel that all of my devices can communicate with each other, use a DNS through the tunnel with domains blocked and I can control what phones home and what doesn't. I'm not concerned with foreign governments, snoopy neighbors, war driving, or anything.

I can't solve all the problems but there are no what ifs on my end, *What if" -> No.

I'm not a number in some algorithm or malicious because I route my data securely, I'm a human being.

bird0861• 7 months ago

stares in Lidarr

russelg• 7 months ago

Doesn't really fulfill the same niche Soundcloud does. Most content on SC is non-commercial or just simply not available on any streaming service.

Lidarr relies on people ripping this music, and also adding the metadata to Musicbrainz, which just simply isn't going to happen for most SC uploads.

0_____02• 7 months ago

I thought for a moment while reading these comments that somehow SC had completely changed in terms of content and type of user. People seem to think it's a Spotify-like or something. I consumed essentially audio shitposts and DJ mix sets on SC, stuff that you're not going to find published in a pirateable form...

cedws2• 7 months ago

I tried creating a SoundCloud account recently for uploading DJ sets to and it just outright wouldn't let me. Didn't matter whether I was or wasn't on a VPN, or whether I had clean cookies. Crappy bot detection. You can be sure I'm never paying for such a hostile service.

yeasku2• 7 months ago

Uploadig dj sets with comercially released music to Soundcloud is not allowed.

cedws2• 7 months ago

Given that I have hundreds of SoundCloud DJ sets bookmarked that contain commercially released music that’s obviously not true.

pixel_popping3• 7 months ago

Well, goodbye SoundCloud (and all services doing the same thing).

devwastaken• 7 months ago

irony is this is posted on reddit, who also blocks VPN’s

lagniappe• 7 months ago

Ironic posting that on reddit who also blocks vpn access.

paganel• 7 months ago

Still seems to work via the desktop interface while accessing the old.reddit version, at least it worked a couple of days ago for me, I can't speak for the new web version nor for their phone app, cause I'm not using those.

elcapitan• 7 months ago

For me also the normal web version (non-old) works, at least with Mullvad.

edit: Ah, it's based on login status

sebzim4500• 7 months ago

I'm in the UK, so I access Reddit through an Irish VPN all the time and have never had issues.

celsoazevedo• 7 months ago

Are you logged in? The block is usually for logged out users.

socalgal2• 7 months ago

I keep wishing “privacy” company, Apple, would release a VPN such that no business would be able to block it as they’d lose too many customers

misnome• 7 months ago

They… do?

fourside2• 7 months ago

This comment would be more useful if you have the name of the product or linked to it. I’m also not aware of this offering and wasn’t able to find information on it.

stewartbracken• 7 months ago

Private relay is an Apple VPN-like service that only covers iOS safari. That means the SoundCloud app or desktop usage will not receive any privacy benefits.

brigade• 7 months ago

They’re not big enough and some sites will hard block it with other VPNs, like the government of Delaware. Bigger sites still soft block it like Instagram which will randomly ban accounts using it, or Google with captchas every couple of searches.

jijijijij6• 7 months ago

Unless Apple would make an anonymizing VPN connection mandatory, I don't see any difference to the situation as is. As long as people can be pressured to turn off the VPN, nobody loses any customers. Additionally, I don't think paying customers are the target, since they usually provide identifying information anyway.

cowboy_henk• 7 months ago

If Apple started routing all iPhone/Mac traffic through some anonymizing VPN by default, services that block it would absolutely lose lots of customers.

paulddraper• 7 months ago

It's a matter of numbers.

If 20% of people are using VPNs, blocking them is going to be a double-digit hit.

NicuCalcea• 7 months ago

I don't think mandating that all traffic on Apple devices must be routed through their servers would be that great for privacy.

ryandrake• 7 months ago

It sucks that we need rely on a big company to make a big, scaled-up change like that in order to move the needle. This looks like a pretty fatal flaw in the design of TCP/IP. IPs should be randomized periodically and they should all be equal. You shouldn't be able to tell someone's country from them, let alone their city, ISP, whether it's coming from a business or somewhere residential, whether they are a bot or a human. The Internet shouldn't have boundaries like this, and the fact that it still does shows there's still work to do.

irusensei• 7 months ago

They kinda do on Apple Private relay and most services don't block it. Funny thing if you put it in your router and point the tunnel to a certain country is a good way to source address launder since the endpoint will just think its an apple private relay user from local country.

Tradeoff is that it seems to be a browser only thing. Some tools like the default macOS curl seem to be integrated with it.

Razengan• 7 months ago

Apple, parading as paragons of privacy, also allow companies like Facebook etc. to track you across reinstalls and EVEN DEVICE RESETS and NEW DEVICES through the iCloud Keychain API.

This shit has been going on for maybe 5 years but no one seems to know or care.

lvl155• 7 months ago

I am so sick of these IP blocks. Same thing in Discord where a lot of servers deploy third-rate services like Double Counter that’s effectively a malware host. There’s nothing wrong with using VPN. I don’t want my IP exposed when my ISP doesn’t allow me to freely change it like they used to even a couple of years ago.

taikahessu• 7 months ago

Ironically, I can't read the Reddit post with my VPN.

londons_explore• 7 months ago

I'm pretty sure reddits reason for blocking VPN's is they want the AI scrapers to pay them for a data feed.

They also block data center IP's

Aurornis• 7 months ago

I'm pretty sure reddits reason for blocking VPN's is they want the AI scrapers to pay them for a data feed.

Signing up for Reddit through a VPN has been difficult to impossible for a long time.

The amount of abuse that comes through VPN-sourced IP addresses is much higher than normal. It's common to block it on any social media site.

raverbashing• 7 months ago

They block but they do allow you to browse if you're logged in

orliesaurus• 7 months ago

i’ve watched this VPN arms race get weird over the years... as a user i feel like the license wars always spill over onto my connection.

rights holders keep demanding geo fences and identity checks... service providers comply because they don't want to get sued.

BUT... the blunt tool is to block whole swaths of IPs... then we all scramble.

i think the conversation around Apple or any single company saving us is missing the point.

ALSO... even if a big platform rolled out an anonymizing proxy... regulators would still push for carve outs... copyright exemptions... law enforcement taps.

the root is the business model... ad targeting... licensing... fraud detection... all of which depend on tying a real person to a real IP.

HOWEVER... if enough of us treat VPN use as normal... the calculus changes.

blocking a few percent of weirdos is easy... blocking half your paying users is not.

i don't know the answer... but i suspect it's going to get more fragmented before it gets better.

pvibby762• 7 months ago

Your mileage may vary. Logged in and listened to a couple of tracks DHCP VPN which exits in Denver using Surfshark at 64.44.x.x about 1600 miles away.

everdrive• 7 months ago

More will follow. I hope you collected what you need. For anything truly valuable, record the audio during playback and manually enter the metadata.

Liquix• 7 months ago

record the audio during playback and manually enter the metadata

there are more elegant solutions similar to yt-dlp. scdl is very user friendly and automatically embeds metadata.

https://github.com/scdl-org/scdl

https://github.com/miraclx/freyr-js

siva7• 7 months ago

If this is true, i will cancel my subscription. I'm using tailscale and certainly won't use a service that wants to dictate me how to use my device.

angry_octet• 7 months ago

If you're using tailscale it's a true VPN, not a proxy, and it won't have any impact on you. If you're using the Mullvad add-on that's a different situation.

NoteyComplexity• 7 months ago

Just cancel it.

Soundcloud these days is nothing but a spambot filled website that have ripped countless users’ tracks and scam to earn fake followers, which the platform doesn’t block these bot but instead shallow banning proper users. The support is also nonexistent and my support ticket hasn’t being been responded for more than an year.

I ended up trashed my account because I got shadow banned for no reason while they keep on stripping off basic features. Some of the users in my community also faced the similar stories.

Unless there is an irreplaceable feature in SoundCloud you rely on, I see no reason to use it.

ck2• 7 months ago

btw I've wondered if Cloudflare Warp is considered to be a real VPN by VPN-blockers since it's not true privacy and just an "acceleration" tunnel

aren't Cloudflare exit nodes also content edge servers so impossible to block?

LightBug12• 7 months ago

Just cancelled subscription and uninstalled.

Thanks for the heads up.

platevoltage• 7 months ago

How does this help Soundcloud's bottom line? They aren't a streaming service that curates and licenses's content intended for specific regions are they?

e44858• 7 months ago

They have a lot of user-created music that doesnt exist anywhere else. Maybe they're trying to sell that dataset to AI companies for training their models. If they allow non-residential IPs, those potential customers could just scrape their site instead.

kristopolous• 7 months ago

Oh this is why I can't download some podcasts from China.

I worked around it but it was a pain

technonerd• 7 months ago

Soundcloud got breached

However, the company's response included a configuration change that disrupted VPN connectivity to the site. SoundCloud has not provided a timeline for when VPN access will be fully restored.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/soundcloud-co...

dgellow• 7 months ago

VPNs is such a shady industry, I really don't blame companies for blocking them. 99% of people using a VPN do not understand they are giving all their traffic to a random company in a jurisdiction they can't verify, with privacy policies they didn't read, operated by people they've never heard of, based entirely on marketing claims and affiliate-driven "reviews".

There is pretty much zero regulatory oversight. The ownership structure of VPN companies is opaque, often owned by holding companies. For example Kape Technologies owns ExpressVPN, PIA, CyberGhost, etc.

Anamon• 7 months ago

... on the other hand, there's the fact that millions of people can't meaningfully participate on the Internet without one.

Many VPN providers may be shady, but none as shady as the governments and corporations that drive people to using them.

SoundCloud has banned VPN access

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