Safari and Secure Connections From Thailand

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First Things First: I live in Thailand where the government is increasing its surveilance and censorship of online activity.

Over the past few months I've noticed difficulty in connecting to some websites in the US. Safari says it is unable to establish a secure connection to the site. If I switch to a VPN, I connect instantly.

Also, I've done some speed tests involving hosts in the US and find that with the VPN throughput is often twice what it is without the VPN.

Oddly, one of the sites to which I have difficulty connecting is the GoPro site. What the heck?

What would prevent Safari from making a security connection to a site in the US?
 

Raz0rEdge

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HTTP communicates over port 80 and HTTPS (secure connection) communicates over port 443. So if you wanted to prevent secure connections, you just need to block port 443 and you're toast. If you VPN to a location outside of the realm of the firewall, then the connections happen as they should.

A VPN shouldn't slow down your access in general, but a lot of people who need to VPN are doing so from places without the fastest Internet connections so it seems like being VPN'ed in is slower than not. If you are seeing better connection speeds, then you are likely VPN'ing into a access point that has pretty good bandwidth.
 
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I don't think it's a port-blocking problem as it doesn't happen with all https connections. (This one, for example.)

Last night I was reading a Washington Post newsletter email that had a link to Twitter. I clicked on the link and it just wouldn't load. Turned on the VPN and it loaded in a heartbeat.
 

Rod


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I have a VPN running full time in . I know my traffic is being constantly monitored even when I’m not being geo blocked there are many news sites that are blocked (censored) here as well as sites that may contain “adult” content like Reddit. My VPN blocks all traffic if it drops out so I’m quickly aware if I’m unprotected.


Sent from my iPhone using Mac-Forums
 
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I hadn't considered running a VPN full time until recently as I figured it would limit throughput. But, that seems to not be the case in a major way. I've mostly used the VPN to get around geo-blocking. SNL on YouTube: The uploader has not made this video available in your country. and the few sites I want to see that are blocked by the Thai government. (Most of their blocking seems to be Thai language political sites which I avoid as my ability to read Thai is mainly limited to menus and street signs.)

But, now that I'm experiencing the big https slowdown I may change my ways.
 

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