Ok, after much internal testing and security review, Baneki is proud to announce the official public release of our GeoChoice "country selection" capability for all of our VPN security customers. We're asking our customers who are active in the forum here to do some stress testing of this functionality over the next few days as the final step before we do a larger announcement of this new capability in Baneki's VPN network. So this is sort of a "post-beta" phase for GeoChoice.

What is GeoChoice? Well, it's what we generally have referred to as "country selection" - but that's such a clunky and vague phrase we felt it's better to have something more specific. A similar capability has been announced (and turned out to be vaporware) by another, pptp-based network last year - they were using some sort of "passport" name and we don't want to have any sense we're riding their (vaporware) coattails so we came up with a name that's pretty much specific to our network: GeoChoice.

GeoChoice allows our customers to choose which country their VPN session "exits" in - specifically, which country is the indicated (via ARIN geoIP mapping) location of their public IP address. That's the IP address that "the internet" sees in relation to one's VPN session. For example, if one chooses Holland as their GeoChoice preference, the rest of the internet will "think" they are in Holland - google will load Dutch ads, and so on.

After polling our customers and discussing quite a bit - and doing deeper research on the jurisdictional issues of short-listed candidates, we've rolled out with the following GeoChoice countries:

- Holland
- USA
- United Kingdom

We've got a slew more countries ready to add, but we didn't want to overload the feature until we've had more chance to have our customers test the interface. We're going to streamline the interface, but for now here's how to choose your preferred country (this choice menu will become functional from the client, rather than only the service area of the website):

1. Go to the new member dashboard area of the Cryptocloud website (it works for Cryptocloud and Torrentfreedom members - and will be added directly to the TF website shortly as well), and log in using your standard userID/password combo.

2. Under "Account Options," click on "Choose Country Preferences" as the sub-menu - from that menu select the country you want to use, and click the update button.

3. If you're currently logged in to the VPN network, for now you need to log off to grab the new IP address you've chosen (this will likely change in the near future, as well). You don't need to do anything different during login - we're migrating more and more of the configuration side of each member's network account "into the cloud" rather than stored in the client (this ties in to our work to create an "install-free" client).

4. When you connect to the VPN network, do a quick IP check at a website like Speedtest - it should match to the country you've chosen.

As always if you see any snags or problems with the GeoChoice feature, please do post your results here in this thread (or PM one of us if you prefer). There's definitely some tuning to be done on the "user interface" side of the feature (we've always despised the term "user interface" and hope to come up with something better, someday). Once we've pushed the new feature around a bit, we'll do a broader announcement and lock in the functionality more definitively. For now, it's still a bit of a work in final steps of completion - by intent. We prefer to work with our customers in final configuration rather than try to guess what's best, internally.

Regards,

the Baneki team

ehhhh The login page I was taken to when I picked the link "member dashboard area" doesn't accept my username/password using the login info. I have for cryptocloud or what I use to login to the cultureghost forum. I have no problem connecting to the VPN service and that is my cryptocloud user info... Should I do something else

^^ ah, good point - the login for the member area is your VPN username/password - not your forum login information. We're working on synchronizing the two (I personally despise having multiple logins), but for now the forum login stuff is pretty much totally separate from the "production" system, i.e. VPN and member dashboard.

Fausty

I can't actually log in using that member dashboard area. It keeps telling me that my login details are incorrect but they are exactly what I use to log into the VPN. I'm using the Torrentfreedom VPN service if that helps. Thanks.

If you're using TorrentFreedom, the URL should be:

Torrentfreedom Member's Area
The cryptocloud one is
Cryptocloud Member's Area

There's two different URLs, one for cryptocloud and one for TorrentFreedom. You gotta use the one you signed up for your account with in order to connect (Think I should change it to let people from any brand log in?).

hour reconnect bug fixed!

Disconnect and reconnect using your VPN client and it'll pick up the new settings automatically.

Report bugs here!

Varka

That was my error, in assuming the brands would inter-operate like that. Given that folks might end up logging in back and forth, I don't think it would hurt if it was possible to use either of the two brands' member dashboard frontends - wondering if it would be useful, or whether it's something that would be ignored anyway.

Fausty

Well I've been using the USA choice for awhile and my speeds are actually faster going through the VPN than not. I like it My wireless card is capable of 7.2 Mbps and I have seen 6.9 Mbps download and 3Mbps upload doing speedtest. I have never seen those speeds before just going through my ISP service. Over all I'm at least one and a half times faster through the VPN.

Hello!

My first post on here so a big hello to you all and I hope to be able to contribute positively to the forums on here. I've signed up this evening and have had no problems with the incredibly straightforward setup (many thanks!). I have one small problem in that I set my location on my account to UK and then connect to cryptocloud yet show up as being in Holland. I've checked the location on my account settings again and it shows up as the UK yet when I reconnect I still show a Dutch IP. I have also changed it to the US and have the same problem. Am I missing something or is there a problem this eve?

Thanks guys,

EB

^^ that certainly shouldn't be happening - once you've changed selected country, disconnected from the secure network and reconnected, the IP address should be showing as the new country you've chosen. We do routine cyclical testing of the various countries, via test accounts, on a daily basis and if something's wrong it needs to be fixed.

The one thing I'd suggest is perhaps a full reboot of your PC, if you haven't done so in a while. I can't think of any specific reason why that would help - the settings for server connection are dynamically "pushed" down from the network every time you connect - but I've learned the hard way over the years (ok, decades...) not to assume much when it comes to PC behavior. A full reboot would, conceptually speaking, flush out any potentially cached settings. Frankly, I think full PC reboots are generally healthy nowadays - with the number of script-based malware nasties out there, a full reboot every few days does serve the function of killing off any non-installed scripts that are sucking resources. Perhaps not orthodox advice, but it's still what I do personally.

Ok, other than that I should ask to be sure you've got the current version of the cryptocloud client (3.1) - there are some older versions that won't be happy receiving the new, GeoChoice server settings from the network and will therefore revert to a connection to our Dutch VMs.

A few other minor notes on GeoChoice (which we'll also be pushing out via twitter announcement shortly):

1. There's some unacceptable blocking being done upstream of the colo we've been using for our US GeoChoice capacity - so far it looks like youtube is blocked, and some forms of BT packets relating to opening new UDP sessions via The Pirate Bay. Needless to say, this is not acceptable, was not disclosed to us when we leased capacity there, and is not going to continue. We're already actively in pissed-off mode with the colo facility; either they stop censoring our connection or we're canceling that contract and moving our US point of presence someplace that's more honest and less censorious. ETA: a week or so, tops.

2. The UK GeoChoice point of presence has seen some uPnP daemon drama, requiring manual daemon reinstantiation a couple of times already - what that means in customer-land is that port mapping will go wonky when the daemon is 'down,' and magically reappear when it's up and running. That's actively under investigation and will be fixed. ETA: couple of days, tops.

3. The Dutch selections for GeoChoice are, to be quite frank about it, being hammered with customer demand. That's wonderful, no complaints! We're bringing more capacity online in rolling chunks, to ensure we don't get behind on growth - we're also learning more about how VMs behave when they get close to - but not at - capacity. Basically, each VM can theoretically carry a gigabit's traffic. In reality, various switching-level and OS-level and gateway-level snags tend to mean that 100 megabits is the actual throughput per NIC, which sounds less sexy but is more realistic. And, within that, we're seeing a 'soft cap' of around 80 megabits up/down when it appears that some customers will start seeing less than 100% throughput speeds (i.e. those customers who are used to getting several megabits up and down). So, we're now provisioning based on those statistics - a simple process with the data in hand.

Short answer: typical network tuning going on, no massive growth pains from the GeoChoice launch (so far) - though we've actually held off on any 'official' press announcement for a few extra weeks just to be sure we shake the system out fully and don't hit any snags with wider usage. I'm glad we did - the couple of tuning points above are best resolved now.

Side note: we've been handling the usual flurry of content cartel spambot emails - which show up with metronomic regularity, and which don't even pretend to adhere to the standards of legal process and factual support to which the rest of the world routinely adheres. As I say in our (canned) response to these (canned) spambot "abuse complaints," if anybody else were spamming ISPs with these legally unsupportable demands for cash and/or threats of punishment, they'd be prosecuted as commercial spam operations. Had I more time in my life, I'd start filing those spammer complaints on behalf of our company - but alas between ensuring our network grows smoothly, and chasing cartels with spam complaints, I must focus on network growth. For now. . .

Fausty

Thank you very much Fausty. It was as you suggested the fact that I had an older version of the software. I installed the latest version and now it's running perfectly.

We can now confirm, per our tech team, that customers can now log in to whichever brand's customer dashboard, irrespective of which brand they call "home." The two customer dashboard login pages are:

- members.cryptocloud.com
- members.torrentfreedom.net

Any customers from "legacy" brands should not have no problems using either of these customer dashboards, as well.

Cheers,

Fausty

How about it. . . Baneki's next GeoChoice location: low-earth orbit

(the scary thing is, we could do it - not the fastest VMlet, perhaps, but still rather tempting)

-the Baneki team

(with a hat-tip to sci-fi master Bruce Sterling - who not only provided the quote included in our cultureghost banner and the name 'cultureghost' itself, but also pointed this little gem out in a Twitter update)

Speaking of new locations I am quite curious myself; are you going to keep expanding just the current three locations or eventually include more? Do you know what those might be?

Oh, we do plan to add more countries as expansion continues - it's not a cost issue due to the way we've architected the network; we can put servers just about anywhere that colos are available.

We haven't scattered VMlets all over dozens of countries just for the publicity value of having a really big list of "servers," mostly because we place only fully-leased servers as VMlets. Putting VPS-created "servers" into production is intrinsically insecure as the VPS is, by definition, subject to intrusion from "below" the VPS layer of virtualization. There are places where using VPS's is acceptable, but for VPN nodes I just can't see how anyone could make an argument that it is acceptable.

As to which countries, the first post in this thread has a poll in it where folks voted on which countries they'd like to see added. I've not checked the results but that's probably what we'd be looking towards for inspiration. If someone really wants to have a specific country added, they'd just need to let us know in this thread and, to really stack the odds, point at a colo/hosting facility in that country that leases machines for decent rates. The actual work of adding servers to our network is quite small, it is mostly automated thanks to many months' effort on the part of our tech team to standardize the process.

Fausty