IP Address

[HackerAtky]

I tried to sign in to National Lottery site this morning and it is telling me that my IP address is outside the UK, with the following suggestions:

Please contact your ISP and ask them to update the registration of your IP address (it may take a few weeks for the changes to take effect).

This issue could also be caused by the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) by yourself or other members of your household.

You may also experience problems accessing your account if you are using a device at work which routes its internet traffic through servers based outside the UK or Isle of Man.

Any advice appreciated

[Mark39]

I assume you have Sky broadband. Switch off your router for half an hour or so, and it should be assigned a new public IP address when you restart it.

[HackerAtky]

Cheers Mark - I will give that a try!

[HackerAtky]

That didn't work I am afraid 😕

[alalalalala]

This has been going on for several days now.

I guess it's not technically Sky's problem nor fault; Geolocation of IP addresses is a really unsound practice, and the fact that significant state backed organisations, such as RTE and the national lottery, use it to restrict access is deeply unsatisfactory. On the otherhand, how else are they to comply with overbearing content protection laws...

Presumably Sky reassigned a batch of their IPs from the UK to Ireland recently (my problems seemed to start around 2 days ago, say 2024-09-05). Some (the better) geo-ip services are correctly reflecting my Irish location, but others and certainly the one used by RTE, think I'm in the UK and are denying me access. Maybe the services that are working aren't relying purely on IPs and are a using smarter but more intrusive methods (e.g. details of local wireless router signals).

I've repeatedly reset my connection and obtained a new IP, but they've all resolved to the UK so I'm locked out. Can't watch the match! It would be decent of Sky customer support to stop fobbing customers off with this instruction and instead simply acknowledge that the change they have made has had a severe impact on its customers, and assuming they are not going to revert the change, ackonwlege that the problem is comlpetely out of their control.

All that said, Sky really ought to be taking some proavctive steps to try and get others to fix the problem that they have precipitated. God knows we pay them enough, so by now someone should have thought to take a couple of minutes to email the major IP geolocation datatbases and inform them en mass of the IP reassignment that has happened.

We can but wait and hope that our rights of access are restored at some point...

[alalalalala]

Hah. Sorry to hijack the thread but I just love this little irony...

We can't watch anything through any of our subscriptions to NOW (a defacto Sky company) because our Sky Broadband subscription makes it think we're outside the EU.  First world problems and all, but how sickening it is to be paying for this nonsense again and again.