There are a lot of inconveniences when you, an otaku, that is also a computer geek (or nerd), wants to access some of contents region locked by Japan. The problem is that it doesn't just block you using the language barrier, it's also a somewhat "Sakoku decree" but for the computer world. You're basically blocked by IP, which means that anyone that tries to access from outside of Japan is virtually unable to do so.

Me, a system administrator, and a cloud platform engineer at heart, had thought to use VPS located in Japan datacenters and then just create a tunnel to it. Basically planting your own OpenVPN server in the deployed VPS and assign yourself a client to that server. This, for most of the time, works well! Most of the sites are just checking whether the IP is originating within Japan or not. Probably by IP address block check, if it falls on a specific subnet. There are websites that provide specific data on this, which grouped by the AS (Autonomous Systems) operated by the ISPs. For example, mine (Biznet) can be seen here. At the same time, you can see the AS on other countries, and track down the IP blocks for certain AS(s). And in the end, you can check the owner whether they operate for datacenters or for standard consumers.

As far as my observation, most of the sites are just checking whether you're outside of Japan or not. This is probably done by checking if your IP falls on the whitelisted IP range. But some, like for example, Uma Musume (JP server), will just whitelist those that falls into "ISP" or "Education", since I seemingly could not connect through the VPN in which I planted in my datacenter VPS. It is kinda hard because I am forced to choose for other VPN providers.

Here, I tried two options. One is the umavpn and one is vpngate . This is just because I want to play Uma Musume on JP server because I am consumed by that FOMO feeling, y'know. :D

`umavpn` : The easiest, yet the most unstable one

This is a website for tracking eligible vpngate servers (more on this later) that can probably connect to Uma Musume JP server. The amazing thing is, the owner already put a document explaining about things that you probably need to know.

Inside the document, it is mentioned that Cygames probably have put additional safeguard to check whether the connection originating from the IP is "normal" or not. And by "normal" is by checking whether it's "a connection that come from an individual Japanese person", with emphasis on "there is no way an ordinary player would play a game from non-residential IP located in industrial area (datacenters)". And I wholeheartedly agree on this since that is the case that I'm feeling as well.

Aside from abuse checking ("why there are a lot of different users connecting from this IP"), excluding the datacenters AS IP range is probably the thing that Cygames been doing, so this is a great alternative when you want to connect to Japan from someone's IP. Though, need to understand that the machine you're tunneling into is probably being owned by an individual, and truly, you're basically "using" their IPs, so it's highly advised to not do anything funny while you're at it. Just use it for the standard gaming and I think you're good.

"But what about transactions? Like if I want to buy stuff from DLsite?"

Great question! I myself am unsure whether it's perfectly safe since tunneling into someone's machine means that they have the power to observe your network traffics, and there is no guarantee that a standard HTTPS connection would be secure enough. At worst, they can log and capture your packets and do analysis later on (the ol' "harvest now, decrypt later" paradigm), though this is really less likely to happen and you would need to magically use the oldest TLS version for that. At best, your connection is in HTTP, unsecured, and yeah, you're basically screwed up.

But if you, as a user, just connect to the VPN server without any other additional config (like installing custom root certificate authority), then you'll mostly be fine.

Trust :D

`vpngate` : The central gateway to the Animeland

How they presented themselves is already enough for the explanation. Basically vpngate is a VPN server based off SoftEther VPN which supports multiple protocols. This means that you can connect not just by using OpenVPN but also other method (like IPsec).

I originally thought that umavpn is having their data source somewhere which lists the OpenVPN-compliant server that user can connect to. But it turns out that the data is being scraped from vpngate which means that I have been talking about basically the same thing. One is just with a particular flavor set.

But there you have it, vpngate acts as a free VPN server list that you can just connect to. After testing, I not only can play Uma, but also able to open DLSite on some tags/categories that are blocked outside of Japan. And by knowing that they would not have so much power to decrypt your traffic, I think using the servers to do transactions is a viable option. We'll just hope that the end service (like Cygames or DLSite) doesn't actively flag the IP as abuse/fraud, because well, it's really visible if a single IP address is being used by too many logged users, right?

But hey! At least, I can be pretty sure that I have a pretty reliable option and with a lot of choices even. Just need to use it moderately.

Afterwords

I think this simple research adds more knowledge to me, as in, the existence of vpngate which is really cool. In reality, I've stumbled upon this long time ago but I was being skeptical about all the security thingy, but now I'll just YOLO it and of course use it with moderation.

Additionally, I got ze Kachow

But this doesn't mean that I should always rely on someone's machine for something free. It truly has the limitation, like changing credentials, poor bandwidth, and other things I haven't discovered yet. I think I'll still ought to try the premium VPN options, probably starting from ProtonVPN later on, and see whether I can both play Uma and access DLSite on the certain parts of it.

Until next time.

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There will be awesome contents here

Today I discovered vpngate because I want to see Rice Shower again