QUESTION Way OT: VPN to hide geo location

[AndyInNYC]

Let's pretend I want to play online poker from NY on my NJ account - let's leave aside the legality - I'm having a theoretical discussion with a friend who works for one of the online NJ (legal) poker sites.

If I configure an old Linksys router to run a VPN to my home PC (in NJ) from NY and pass all traffic through the router, shouldn't the laptop connecting wirelessly to the router get an NJ IP address connected to my home account?

Since there isn't any VPN software running on the laptop, doesn't it completely think that it's in NJ?

My friend claimed that the software tries to connect to 3 other wireless points to verify, but that's not always available (certainly not from my house) and it's illegal for software to try to connect to a wireless account that isn't owned/permitted by the user.

So, I'm not about to go take a router to NY, but am I wrong about this being a simple, invisible way to beat the geolocation software the casinos use?

Andrew

 

[chris_c_]

It depends. Are you saying you're away from home out of state on your laptop, and you're viewing a screen sharing session of your home PC's screen while it's running the poker app?

 

[AndyInNYC]

No, I'm saying I attach wirelessly in NY to the linksys which is running VPN software and tunneling back to NJ. Wouldn't the public IP of the linksys be showing my NJ ip and the PC and software would 'think' it was in NJ?

 

[chris_c_]

You're running the gambling app out of state on your laptop thru the router which is connected as a vpn to your home internet connection. That should work as long as you connect with a wire to your router, disable your laptop's wifi and prevent the app from enabling your laptop's wifi, so that the gambling app can't see any wifi access points around you. When it sees access points around you, it can easily look up where they're located geographically, and therefore, where you're located.

 

[AndyInNYC]

How can it view geo info from an access point unless it's something like xfinity? My wifi only sees neighbors wifi which don't (I think) have fro data encoded into their SSID - do they?

I must attach via wifi for their software to run.

Again, this is an intellectual discussion; not playing a lot of poker from the office or vacation.

Andrew

 

[chris_c_]

How can it view geo info from an access point unless it's something like xfinity? My wifi only sees neighbors wifi which don't (I think) have fro data encoded into their SSID - do they?

Google has used Android phones and Street View cars to do a very controversial thing, which violated many jurisdictions' privacy laws, but they have gotten away with it so far. Google has logged the geographical GPS location of nearly every WiFi access point on earth. So yes, when you allow an app, running on your laptop, to see which WiFi access points are around you, the app can easily ping Google "Location Based Services" to triangulate lookup precisely the GPS location of where you are located.