love is sharing a password or at least that's what Netflix used to
say these days they seem to care a lot more about
that's right Netflix's Crackdown on password sharing has already started so
if you're still using your ex's Netflix account it's a matter of time before
they notice the bigger Bill and cut you off
or is it climb aboard mateys four with just a few
clicks and zero credit card numbers Netflix will have no idea that you moved
out years ago and you don't even have to
mess with your router to do it can I get an R
yes are you ready for this message from
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for almost 10 years Netflix has not only
allowed multiple users to watch with a single account but they've even provided
tools to tailor the experience to each individual none of that is changing what
is changing is that Netflix now says that a single account is for members of
a single physical household so little
Jimmy off at College he doesn't count anymore now I want to make it clear
before we move on that this is well within their rights and any
circumvention of their terms of service could lead to the termination of your
account or whatever enforcement they deem appropriate but hey you click the
video so I'm pretty sure you don't give two Hoots about any of that let's move
on once this change rolls out in your region every account will have a primary
location and any devices that use the account need to connect from that
location at least once a month if you go
longer than that you're gonna have to pay up more on that later first let's
talk about primary locations if you're using a computer or a phone
Netflix will attempt to automatically determine your primary location through
a combination of your logged IP addresses your logged device IDs and
your account activity again more on that later you can also explicitly set a
primary location but the only way to do this is through a TV or a set-top box
like the NVIDIA Shield curiously when we tried this though from
our office on a brand new account we just got an error message and then when
we contacted support they informed us that our primary location had been set
automatically anyway so your mileage may
vary on the whole manual primary location thing Frankly Speaking from how
disorganized this whole rollout has been it doesn't surprise me that the process
is a little messy it's just especially frustrating to encounter these weird
bumps in the road when they're right in the middle of giving us less for our
money anywho once your primary location is set
all we need to do to enjoy our shared Netflix in peace is make sure that
Netflix thinks that we live there at least some of the time they explicitly
state that they allow use while traveling to achieve this we need a VPN
but don't click away because I'm not talking about surf shark or nordvpn or
anything like that Netflix cracked down on the use of that sort of VPN years ago
what I'm talking about is running a VPN server of your very own from the
accounts primary location that way your
kid who's off at University or your so can connect to that VPN server and Route
their traffic through it to trick Netflix into thinking that they're still
just chilling from home perhaps in some nice new pajama pants from lttstore.com
but Linus I hear you ask doesn't making a VPN mean that we have to fiddle around
in our router settings surprisingly no unless you want to the
easiest way that we found to do this is tailscale not a sponsor by the way just
really cool software go to tailscale.com and click on use tailscale for free and
sign up we're going to use the same account in all of our locations but with
a few extra steps you can share machines across accounts it just gets a little
tougher to manage if some of your users are less technically inclined once
you've logged in add your first device we're going to assume that there's a
Windows PC somewhere in your primary location that will be left on all the
time but you can also host it on a Raspberry Pi or on a Mac the important
thing is that it is always online because otherwise you ain't watching no
Netflix we're going to click on download tail skill for Windows install it and
log in once we're connected the website walks us through the setup asking us to
set up a second device for our example we're going to use an Android set-top
box like the NVIDIA Shield we open the Play Store search for tailscale and
install the app once you've logged in go back to the Windows machine and check
the browser the website should have updated to show you the second device
and to show you how to Ping between devices if you want to run a quick test
we're going to click on success this takes us to what's next where we can
just click on the go to admin console button which will take us to the proper
control panel where we can see our machines listed their IPs on our virtual
Network and their current status next we need to decide which of our devices will
be our server or as tailscale calls it our exit node this is the machine that
we're going to Route all of our traffic through so that Netflix thinks that we
are watching from that location all the time in our case that's the Windows PC
so we're going to right click on the little tail scale icon in the system
tray here click on exit node and then run exit node it's going to give us a
little warning and since we're okay with all of what we're doing we're going to
say yes now it'll take a few moments for that change to get to the website so in
the meantime let's rename our devices so they're a little easier to remember if
we click on the meatballs menu on the right side we can edit machine name for
each and we're going to call them mom's PC and shield now you can see that this
little exit node flag has come up for Mom's PC which tells us that Mom's PC
has offered to be an exit node for our other devices we need to approve that in
the admin console before it'll work so we go back to the meatballs menu for
Mom's PC and click edit route settings in the window that pops up we just need
to click use as exit node it's going to give us a warning here about key expiry
by the way basically it's telling us that we're going to have to re-authenticate periodically the default
is every few months but we can turn that off just close the pop-up go back to the
meatballs menu and pick disable expiring the final step on the server is to right
click on the tailscale icon in the tray select preferences and check run
unattended that's going to allow tailscale to run as a service even if
nobody is logged into the Windows machine it gives another little warning
and a help message and we just say R to
that I mean sorry yes we click yes okay we're almost there I swear back in the
tailscale app on our client device we go to the menu and select use exit node a
dialog pops up and we pick mum's PC the
main screen of the app will now show that we are using an exit node which
means that all of our internet traffic from The Shield is going through mom's
PC so if we bring up Netflix everything
is good it's easier to show this on a computer though so let's go over to a
laptop we're not connected to tailscale right now and if we Google my IP we can
see that our IP is okay we're not going to show you that but you can see what it
starts with now we go to tail scale and
use our mom's PC exit node and you can see that the icon now has a tiny Arrow
indicating that we're going through an exit node we check our IP again and
there you have it it thinks we're on the same IP as that workstation that we set
up in the other building now as tailscale warned us the Windows exit
node isn't really optimized yet so if we do a speed test the result is not that
impressive but it's fast enough for a smooth Netflix experience which was the
whole point of this exercise in the first place all you need to do is
disconnect tailscale on the client if you want to do something other than
Netflix without using up bandwidth on mum's PC that's another thing you'll
need to consider is depending on how many users are accessing Netflix through
mom's PC mom might need a faster
internet connection now hold on a minute earlier we learned that Netflix makes
allowances for traveling that means in theory at least that as long as we
remember to use this VPN method to log into Netflix at least once a month on
each device that is not in the primary location the rest of the time we should
be able to just go about our business and Netflix should just assume that you
know we travel a lot well maybe we can't
know with 100 certainty how Netflix decides where you are Netflix could log
everything you do in their apps or on their website and determine that hmm
profile a usually logs in using a Windows PC and a Samsung TV from IP
address 1 which is the primary location meanwhile they could observe that
profile B never uses any of profile AIDS
devices instead sticking to their MacBook and iPhone from a totally
different IP address except exactly once
a month so I would say that you might
want to err on the side of consistently using your VPN rather than doing only
periodic check-ins but it remains to be seen even if they know that you're
totally not living there how Draconian Netflix is actually going to be about
enforcement there's a very fine line between extracting maximum value from a
customer and just ticking them off to the point where they cancel out right
for the tech inclined by the way tailscale is not the only solution we
found another one that doesn't require you to mess with your router is soft
ether VPN from the University of sukuba in Japan or if you don't mind poking
around in your router settings a wire guard VPN is a fantastic solution with
apps available on many platforms you can use a tool like Pi VPN to install the
server on a single board computer or a Linux machine and if you want to use a
Windows machine as your server GitHub user Micah Mo has created a simple
application to guide you through that process links for all of these will be
in the video description one final thing to remember though even
if you have a fast enough internet connection and you can afford to cover
Netflix for all your buddies anytime you let someone connect remotely to your
computer or to your network you are taking a security risk and potentially
allowing everything on your network to be seen by that outside party or anyone
that they are careless enough to allow to use their devices so with any of the
solutions we've presented just make sure that you can trust the people that
you're giving access to like you can trust me to tell you about
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if you want to learn more about setting up your own VPN maybe check out this
other video we did on the topic back in 2020