[AndroTux]

Yes. Let’s take an extreme example: you think you exit in Japan, but you’re actually exiting in China. This means your traffic will be analyzed and censored by China.

The routers don’t care about where the provider says the IP comes from. If the packet travels through the router, it gets processed. So it very much matters if you do things that are legal in one country, but might not be in another. You know, one of the main reasons for using VPNs.

[twosdai]

A more general case is for legal and SLAs. If a company uses one of these vpns to make sure their traffic only travels through a specific legal path, and then it's found that their traffic entered a different territory, there can be a lot of consequences.

The case I can think of most accessible would be anything that streams copywriten video.

[pbhjpbhj]

I've wondered about jurisdiction in copyright for a while -- if I access a USA website from a Swedish server, make a copy on that server, then stream it to a French location for viewing all the while being in UK. Where has any crime/infringement occurred; which courts have jurisdiction?

Anyone know of any caselaw addressing these issues.

[crazygringo]

Are any VPN's getting China wrong? It would be pretty obvious. In fact, common VPN's I'm looking at don't even support China as an option. Obviously no VPN's are mixing countries up where it becomes clear from what you're allowed to browse.

But so "if you do things that are legal in one country, but might not be in another" is what I'm specifically asking about. Ultimately, legality is determined by the laws that apply to you, not the country your packets come out of. So I'm asking for a specific example.

And I already said, that if a site is attempting to determine permissions based on the country, it's doing so via the same list. E.g. when the country is actually Greenland, but you think it's the UK, and Netflix also thinks it's the UK. Which is why I'm saying, at the end of the day, is there any real consequence here? If both sender and receiver think it's the UK, what does it matter if it's actually Greenland?

[AndroTux]

China was just an example. Try to extrapolate on your own.

Take someone from Russia, Iran, wherever, trying to access information they aren't allowed to access, or sharing information they aren't allowed to share. They think they're connected to a neighboring country, but in reality are exiting from their own country. Therefore, the traffic gets analyzed and they fall out a window.

Imagine Snowden sharing information about the NSA while using a VPN that actually exited from the US. Things might have developed differently.

Yes, it won't matter for most services. But as soon as states or ISPs are involved, you're fucked if you get it wrong.