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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

> The big advantage offered by many of the VPN vendors this article looks down on is the fact they can give you a residential IP in the target country

This is almost always not true.

There are "residential" VPN providers, but they are scammy AF. The only way to get access to a true residential IP is via some proxy/gateway software run by a customer of a real home ISP. These are usually obtained via botnets of infected PCs.

Users of residential VPNs are usually using them to scrape sites which try to prevent scraping and so are probably happy to turn a blind eye to where they get their IPs from.

They're also much more expensive then traditional VPNs.

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I'd dispute that most access is obtained through botnets. I see it as generally obtained through the user themselves. I will agree that the provider may not be clearly notifying the user what they are agreeing to by utilizing their software, hiding it in their lengthy Terms of Service, but the user is agreeing to it by installing their software and accepting their ToS.

This was a huge controversy not long ago. The biggest issue I see from it is that it opens the user up to a fair amount of legal liability for what other users of the VPN service do while connected to the VPN service. If the user failed to understand what they agreed to in installing the VPN service and agreeing to it then it can make for some very awkward conversations when law enforcement comes knocking.

As a cybersecurity person I also think users fail to understand what information they are potentially making available to some rando running the VPN software on their PC. I can (and have before) see any traffic that you are sending through that VPN, and potentially tamper with that traffic. If you thought Nord or PIA could not be trusted with your traffic then how do you feel about Joe Random being able to see and tamper with your traffic?

> This is almost always not true.

If you read my statement, "they can give you a residential IP in the target country" - I never said this was universal.

Some private VPN companies will offer you a residential IP or dedicated IP, sometimes for additional fee - I'm paying for such a service right now. I perhaps should have broadened statement to "dedicated IP" etc, but it remains true you can get a far more "useable" IP from some private VPN providers.

One such example - and I know from my own testing this dedicated IP has far fewer issues with region locked content such as the BBC iPlayer or Netflix, where as almost every IP AWS has assigned me, including elastic IPs, has been blocked in the last few years:

˜ https://nordvpn.com/features/dedicated-ip/

Same thing, different vendor:

- https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/vpn-features/dedicated...

And another...

- https://surfshark.com/dedicated-ip

etc etc

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