Zippyshare - error 403 on UK & DE IPs

[takkaria 4]

Hello,
Zippyshare seems to be blocking German and UK IPs with a 403 error.
It would be very nice if AirVPN "Smart DNS" could handle that if possible.
Thanks in advance!

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

It's a cool feature for sure, but we get such reports a lot and it might be time to remind people of why it's there.

This feature originally existed for circumvention of blocks based on geolocation, and this kind of access control is mostly used by IPTV and VoD providers who usually don't overdo themselves in tracking down each and every IP range of proxy or VPN providers (except for those with capacities to do so or those operating worldwide, like Netflix). What you and a growing number of other people suggest is a downright misuse of this feature, and this will backfire on all of us pretty quick. You get it unblocked for a few weeks, yes, maybe it will last two or three months, fair enough. But then even the rerouting/"double-hop" servers, of which you don't even know the IP address as you can't connect to them, get blacklisted and we might end up with no way to unblock geolocation-based blocks at all because their IP address is known.

When I fired up the Route checking feature of AirVPN in the past, I sometimes saw servers connecting through rerouting servers which couldn't reach the websites I was requesting, but some connecting directly could. It's a worrying picture and, as I wrote, could negatively impact location-based access control circumvention - one of AirVPN's features we talk about here on AirVPN's website, on the internet and in the world.

They might be there because some user simply abused Zippyshare somehow. So it's also on all people to treat the services they use fairly, even in the face of relative anonymity when conntected to AirVPN.

[takkaria 4]

Yeah, I understand that this cat and mouse game must be annoying for vpn operators.
It's not that much of a deal to switch servers manually anyway.

Just a small correction though, it's not just airvpn that's blocked by zippy but many German IPs, there was an article on heise about it:
https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Filehoster-Zippyshare-sperrt-Nutzer-in-Deutschland-aus-4408980.html