eng3

I use the Juniper java based VPN and have never had an issue in the UC other than being slow.

I'll try using Tor next time I'm in a club, see if that's blocked

LAXOGG

FWIW........no problem with proxpn at HNL UC.

ZZYZXROAD

Your using an anonymizer, nothing to do with VPN unless your VPN is doing that. TorBrowser worked with .bomb before but typing passwords and userids with TorBrowser defeats the whole purpose of that VPN.

Tchiowa

Then you don't travel much international. Many countries block VPN. Countries that monitor your usage and what you post.

dsauch

There may be technical and legal reasons for UA to block anonymizing VPN.

If you think that your banking is safer because you bought VPN connection to an unknown entity - you are sorely mistaken.
Perhaps you want to talk more to your son - someone on the other end receives your encrypted packets, decrypts them and then sends them on to your desired websites.
Obviously your are using https (any sane bank will force it), but the "trusted" VPN provider could replace the certificate and create a Man-in-the-middle attack should they so desire. Or be involuntary part to it.

Unless you control the VPN personally, or its your business VPN - you are just marginally safer than without VPN. Especially for banking (if you use all the other precautions).

mrswirl

China and Iran are the most notorious although there are ways to disguise VPN protocols if you know how.

Many public (and most corporate) networks block certain protocols and filter traffic using proxy servers and advanced deep packet inspection in order to protect themselves from illicit or illegal activity like piracy and malicious network attacks.

Public wifi networks usually allow VPN protocols like L2TP and IPsec (which is what most corporate VPNs use) but won't allow technology to spoof or anonymize your IP address which can be viewed as trying to circumvent proxy servers.

FWIW, I've never seen VPN usage restricted inside a UC but I don't doubt for a second that they filter traffic in order to protect the network.

exerda

This is the key. An anonymizer is not a VPN.

Although the OP did say that his mobile device worked fine on the UC network using that same anonymizer...


Meh, they also block all kinds of traffic. Plenty of ways around that in the majority of cases. FWIW, my corporate VPN has worked from every country to which I've traveled, including a couple which block some traffic and VPNs.

mduell

Only if a CA you trust issues a cert to the VPN provider for your bank's domain.

dsauch

It would have to be sophisticated attack , no doubt.
But a VPN aggregator is a sweet target. And there is no shortage of news of sophisticated attacks - both government and criminally sponsored.

bocastephen

Depends on the VPN. My corporate Juniper software VPN worked fine on my laptop and mobile phone in Shanghai.

o9b5x8m

I recently encountered the same issue when in the NRT club. UA uses a 3rd party URL filter from Websense and it looks like they are sharing the same filtering templates they use internally, which explains the flyingtogether.ual.com link in the URL filter Denied page. Some large companies using URL filtering technology block 3rd party VPN services, which are oftentimes listed under Proxy or similar categories. I'm a little surprised UA applies filters within the clubs for anything other than the most obvious sites like malware, adware, etc.

itsMoe

Wouldn't you be effectively spoofing your IP address through a VPN tunnel? You'll be connecting from whatever IP address sits at the end of the tunnel, no?

halls120

I've been in Australia, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Bahamas, Netherlands Antilles, Jamaica, Barbados, BVI, Aruba, Canada, UK, Ireland, Germany, Denmark, Norway, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary, Italy, Croatia, Ukraine, Benin, Cameroon, Togo, Malta, and Russia. The only two places in the above list that my VPN didin't work was Ukraine and Russia, because I didn't bring any gear that required it - those two countries were at that time on the list of places where my employer restricted laptops and phones because they would be compromised.

In every other country listed above, my VPN has worked. Flawlessly.

Singapore_Schwing

Agreed. I can add China and Vietnam as two countries often talked about for censoring internet, where I've had no problems with VPNs.

As for the previous comment about any VPN obfuscating the location and browsing habits (but not the identity) of the person using the VPN client, this is true. UA would be unprecedentedly un business-friendly to block VPNs. I think there is something else which happened here on a technical level (somehow ended up on a corporate network, perhaps due to UA's IT prowess), causing the issue with the OP.

mrswirl

The difference is that you have to establish a connection to the local network first (authentication & authorization) so your session is identified at a network level - aka: you a known user on the network and you are assigned an IP address.

After this, you establish a VPN session that connects you to a remote network using a protocol that creates a virtual 'tunnel' that allows you to securely access the remote network's resources. Only traffic that goes thru the tunnel is encrypted and secured. Your local IP address and session is still established - not spoofed or obscured.

(You can test this yourself by doing an ipconfig -a from a command window on your Windows machine. You'll see different IP addresses for your Local Area Connection (wired Ethernet), Wireless LAN Connections (local IP) and if connected, your Tunnel Adapters.)

By default, VPNs do not hide your activities from the local network. They obviously can't see any of your encrypted data but they still know who's connected and can identify the session that's generating traffic and tie it back to a user. They just can't tell what kind of traffic it is.

Anonymizers work to hide your browser sessions so that activity cannot be traced back to an individual user. This is a common tactic for hackers using public Internet hotspots to launch malicious attacks so competent network admins will block access to anonymizer websites.

Remember that there's a whole lot more to IP networks than what you do in a browser. VPNs work to secure your data but they are not meant to obscure your identity. That's a common misconception.