Usually yes. In some cases, companies will block access to known VPN IPs outright.

But most of the time, the cost of policing that is way higher than the revenue they’d get from the handful of VPN users that decide to go through proper channels rather than decide not to engage, or worse, spread word of their anti-consumer practices and potentially lose legitimate business.

This is absolutely normal when you first buy the place. I bought my place in 2017 and was super anxious over the first year because I suddenly had basically no savings and all my equity was in this building. I didn’t know anything about home repair and couldn’t afford to hire someone who did.

The thought of something going wrong enough that it would ruin the place gave me an anxiety attack more than once.

Then, after a couple years and a few things needing fixed, I realized that things don’t go wrong that often and most of the time if they do, they are easy to fix.

don’t give a non-answer to someone’s question. Ex. if someone asks how to do X, don’t answer with, “Why are you trying to do X? You shouldn’t want to do X. Do Y instead.” Instead, explain what it would take to do X, and then offer Y as a possible alternative and why it may be a better option. But assume they already know about Y, and it doesn’t fit their use-case.

I can get behind the spirit of this, but often times this is caused by people taking the wrong first steps to solve an issue and then getting lost in the weeds while asking for the solution to where they’re stuck, rather than asking about the original problem. In this case, usually both X and Y are bad answers, and asking why they aren’t doing Y can elucidate more about the whole situation.

I just cleaned up my downloads so I no longer have it, but a couple weeks ago it was a copy of Maid: The Role-Playing Game