AppleTV hardware now supports Tailscale, with exit nodes.

I am astonished that Apple allowed this blatant circumvention of region coding, but they did.

Get it while it’s hot, I guess.

  • spiritedpause
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    1 year ago

    You can now install Tailscale on AppleTV. Tailscale is a sort of personal VPN service that allows you to directly connect your personal devices to each other over the internet. tvOS 17 added support for VPNs to run on Apple TV.

    What this means in the case of AppleTV region coding:

    If for example, you have a computer at home that’s running tailscale, and you take your AppleTV with you while on vacation in let’s say, Egypt, you can set Tailscale on your AppleTV to use the Tailscale node on your home computer as an exit node, and you’ll be able to stream Hulu on that AppleTV in your hotel in Egypt normally because the traffic is tunneling through your computer back home in the US, and it thinks that’s where you’re located.

    Normally with commercial VPNs, that wouldn’t work because Hulu/Netflix/etc have a list of IP addresses associated with VPN services, and so they’d detect youre connected to that VPN and block you from using it. But in the case of tailscale, the IP address they see is that of your computer back home, so they don’t think you’re connected to a VPN.

    This can also theoretically help get around Netflixes password sharing restrictions, because if the account owner runs an exit node on their AppleTV, and the other password sharers set their AppleTVs to use that owners AppleTV as their exit node, Netflix will think the logins are all coming from the same IP address located in one place.

    • spez@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      This post specifically mentioned Tailscale only, does it now also allows WireGuard installation?

      EDIT: Other comments says it does, so not Tailscale only. The post should have just mention VPN instead of Tailscale.

    • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      This can also theoretically help get around Netflixes password sharing restrictions

      This is the interesting bit here. I assume others will follow in Netflix’s steps shortly (Netflix made a fuckton of money from this) but this would also help you circumvent this crackdown with your Apple subscription…