• https://ipleak.net
• https://whoismyisp.app

Those websites (and tons of others) will tell you who your ISP appears to be. Whether or not a service considers it a datacenter isn’t set in stone, but usually it’s easy to tell based on what’s shown there.

Edit: If you’re getting the captchas it’s probably because you appear to be on a VPN.

Are you familiar with web development by chance? Can you see anything in your browser’s developer tools like failed XHR/fetch requests? I’m kind of wondering if they’re doing something specific since you said traffic is flowing as expected on other websites.

If your VPN exits from a datacenter (common with VPN and cloud providers) it could be that while their website wasn’t smart enough to block you, the server the content streams from is and is refusing to stream the content. This would probably show up as a failure in the developer tools (HTTP 401 Unauthorized, some JSON with an error, etc).

As they should.

Oh wow, I didn’t notice.

This isn’t great advice because dictionary attacks exist. Password crackers are smart enough to replace letters/numbers switched around too; at least that was the case back in 2009 when I cracked ~20 passwords in half a second.

“Password is too long” when it’s like, 16 characters 😒

Banks are still doing SMS-based 2FA. And after doing some security training at work written by the FBI and seeing it suggest switching letters/numbers around to make a password “more secure” (like th15); I’ve completely lost confidence in banks’ security standards.

What does Wireshark or tcpdump show on any relevant interfaces?

This whole debate is so tired. Just use IPv6, it’s 2024 and it’s so fucking easy these days.

I’m a web developer and I’ve had to ensure both work properly as users across the globe usually have one or the other or both.

It might be time to do some good by your users and implement it (or better yet 20 years ago).

Orion for macOS is pretty awesome.

I actually love Safari but on my work computer I’m forced to use their VPN and can’t run my ad blocking DNS stuff on it, so I use Orion with uBlock Origin on it. It’s basically Safari (built on WebKit) with support for Chrome and Firefox plug-ins (which can be selectively disabled).

Block all their servers on your network, it’s really not hard to go Google-free.

To me it sounds like they want to host a store on Tor or i2p considering it’s typically recommended to disable JavaScript while browsing those networks due to security concerns.

I’m really big on IPv6 adoption but you’re probably right — I have no clue which subnet to advertise on Tailscale for IPv6. Also, the subnet router happens to be the only device I can’t seem to get IPv6 to work on (Alpine Linux). Each time I’ve tried I ruined my /etc/networking/interfaces and had to plug the hard drive into another machine to undo my changes.

DNS-based ad blocking is the way to go. Apps load tons of telemetry, and you can sprinkle in malware protection too. I prefer the DIY approach of Unbound + a ton of blocklists, but the solution is essentially the same.

hidden internal USB port

Wtf?

It’s the fucking robotic phrasing that doesn’t mean anything. It’s like when you read an article about some crazy bad thing a company did and the company is asked to make a statement, it’s always “we follow all applicable laws” or some version of “we didn’t do it.”

I barely want to use WiFi at home let alone send it to a tower far away. This reminds me of those stupid 5G home internet plans you can get — why on earth would I want to add so much latency to my internet connection?

I prefer Ruby myself 🥰

Joking, of course. Ruby would be slow as hell.

How does anyone put up with using that OS? It’s 2024, it’s time to move on. Sheesh