Hi 2p2,

I currently have a stakee that has a large sum of $ on FTP right now. He was living in Japan for a while, but now resides in the US. We came up with the solution of telling FTP my stakee still lives in Japan. We sent the proper documentation showing he was a Japanese resident and FTP confirmed. We were planning on playing behind a Japanese VPN. However, in the e-mail, FTP added:

My stakee said he had logged on FTP under the US IP aswell as the Japanese IP. We believe this is how FTP concluded we were under a VPN, however we aren't sure.

My question is: if, from now on, we play 100% on the Japanese IP, is there any way FTP can detect this? I've always understood VPN's being pretty much the same thing as playing behind a proxy, which is pretty hard to trace. Any tech experts have any thoughts on this?

I would be interested in a answer to this as well.

this type of info is only useful if it is not public.

11,000 new Japanese residents signing up after the OP question is answered

Unless you had your VPN setup by a well-paid security expert that understood you needed it to be undetectable by even the most intrusive of searches then you should assume that it is trivially easy for them to detect this.

Using a VPN to hide on the internet is like walking around a shopping mall in camouflage hoping that no one notices you. It's the wrong tool for the job.

No its not very hard to trace for two reasons.

1. the client is running on the wrong side of the tunnel. It can see everything thats going on on your computer, including your use of a VPN and your real IP address.

2. If youre using a commercial vpn, its probably in a known/easily researchable IP range.

A vps running stars with remote desktop would work better, but would still probably be detectable because of 2.

Even if this is not true your analogy sure made me laugh.

A better question is, why did your stakee logged onto FTP with both US ip address and Japanese?

My roommate is a software engineer and I asked him about this. Be basically said it is very easy to detect if you are using a VPN and there is virtually no way to hide it. It would be very interesting to see if this issue could be solved.

VPN detection is super trivial for the most part. At the most basic level your IP is now the IP of the VPN and since you are likely using a commercial solution that means you're busted the second you connect to their servers. However, even if you went more sophisticated, since you are forced to run the client to connect to FTP, there are a practically infinite amount of other ways of detecting the VPN client side that are much more reliable and of varying sophistication.

Question I've had that I haven't really gotten a strait answer from Stars or Tilt is do they allow non US players to play using a VPN?

For example if they could call you from a land line in your country to confirm your location would they let you play with a VPN running.

Can any non US players comment on this?

No.

Just out of curiosity, wasn't he playing using the same computer than in Japan ?

Best solution is to get a hosted pc in Japan with dedicated ip and then use remote desktop. That way you actually play in Japan even though your buttocks is in America. Technically you would not be using a vpn. Ideally you would have the pc at the residence where you are paying "rent" and have someone there to help out with the physical operation if needed. Not sure how latency would impact this though. But don't tell anyone, please.

Noob question here since I've never used a VPN before, and the extent of my computer knowledge is knowing how to power on a computer and that is about it; what exactly is the purpose of a VPN if it can be detected easily?

I had this illusion you paid money for a service that would hide your location and make it seem like you are connecting from a different country, if that isn't the case why would someone spend money on this service?

vpn has to be run on the gateway/router. running vpn on same computer as any other program will allow that program to get the ip addres of the incoming packets

host PC in Japan runs a unix with a windows virtual machine with poker software. then you remote control the unix from abroad. The windows vm shouldnt have a way of noticing this, as the input (mouse + key) comes at OS level.

no idea if this works, just my idea

They have alot of uses. One of the biggest is getting by firewalls. So for instance if you live in China and want to look up information on democracy you'd probably need to use a VPN. Or if you haven ISP that throttles torrent downloads for instance, a VPN could help. VPNs also provide safety. For instance, email passwords may be sent in plain text depending on your exact protocol. A VPN ensures all communication is encrypted and as such provides a big layer of security so a nearby 'snooper' couldn't as easily grab your email data if you were at a coffee shop for instance. It can also aid in a company that wants allows employees (or students for instance) to securely access their servers remotely.

Its 'legitimate' use is to allow entities such as companies that operate from different sites to use a 'public' ISP(s) and yet have their network appear to be a homogeneous, private one.

So, say Virgin has its main offices in London but wants all its branches to to appear to be on a single network it would use a VPN with larger branches on leased lines and smaller ones connected via normal ISP(s).

That would be a 'proxy server'.

Something that makes it appear that you are attached at some point other than the one to which you actually are. Note that these are not foolproof and would be useless for attaching to a poker site with the intent to deceive the site as to your location.


ETA: A VPN will allow you to do some things for which you might otherwise use a proxy server but that is not their primary purpose.

While I'd imagine this much more fool proof from a getting caught standpoint, remote desktop is painfully slow and would make grinding quite a pain in the butt, if not useless.

Has anyone actually used remote deskptop and enjoyed a 'normal' computer experience?

The fundamental problem is that the poker client has local access on your computer. Once this happens, most bets are off conerning hiding your location. If you wanted to use this, for example, to access a website from a country where that website is not allowed (like some countries dont allow facebook) youd have a much better chance at being able to effectively hide your location.

Remote desktop is a massive PITA. I do some web browsing stuff on one from time to time and it's like being back in 1995. I might be able to one table on it but it would make me rage.

use of brain permitted:

http://www.pokerstars.com/usaplayers/faq/

I use this at work for locations sometimes as little as 5 minutes away, let alone Japan. Pretty painful.

don't use VPN just invest in decent "IP CHANGER" software - will run you like $50 and you can get an IP address from anywhere in the word