It makes me nervous that my VPN isn’t actually working. Generally, I use Tailscale+NextDNS so that all my devices can easily communicate with each other, including my NAS. Makes it a breeze to send items from my Samsung to my iPhone as well. However, I often use a VPN just to mask general internet traffic, even when I don’t need to, just to mix it up a bit more.
I’ve noticed that on some devices, this breaks…just about everything. Brave search will sometimes throw a fit and ask me to do captchas, and Google will always ask me to do so. I can no longer cast to local devices, use my printer, etc.
But this isn’t consistent. On some devices, primarily my Apple devices, for some reason, stuff still works, maybe 70% of the time. On my Android, Windows, and Linux devices, they’ll work maybe 20% of the time. And I’m curious, what causes the inconsistency? Is there a reason why it can get through the VPN? I’m just using the default settings on Proton VPN, so why would it be so random?
Random IP changes when browser cookies don’t identify with the previous activity will do that. Plus, VPN creates an encrypted tunnel so if you unless you use Tailscale + VPN only, it should work. If not and if you keep changing your set up, your issues are common and inevitable as far as I know.
But there could be other reasons for the inconsistency. Tech is always changing. Perhaps someone else will have a better and a more conclusive answer for you.
On Apple Accounts, you are more likely logged in on the device itself so Apple will “forgive” you if you are using a VPN (also the Apple device itself is outside of the VPN unless it is a router level VPN).
The rest of your device isn’t unique enough that it flags you as a bot or worse yet an AI crawler.
Captcha isn’t really the internet/your connection broke, its how sites and services treat their visitors when they can’t confirm whether they’re human or bots due to the very nature of ip sharing between vpn users works. So their threat mitigation system kicks in and they show the captcha.