Agree I love the kill switch. I know I need to ween myself off of the dot. I may need to go to SDA (Safety Dot’s Anonymous) though.
Agreed. I haven’t used Kill Switch in years. For my streaming android boxes, safety dot works as intended. For my PC, there are sites that block VPNs. The Kill Switch, for me, is an option I’ve discarded. That may change in the future, but for now, I feel I have the best of all worlds.
I still maintain that if y’all would just use the @TROYPOINT logo, all your troubles will be gone!!
Enter h1ag3 as your ZUP ID and click Apply.
…been using it all along, and never failed me yet!
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Submitted the following to SS support via chat. @TROYPOINT do you know a different/better way to submit bugs to Surfshark where I can track status? Either way, tech says they reported it to the team. Here’s the verbiage:
“I’m new to your VPN product and use it on both Nvidia Shield Pro and Fire Stick 4K Max. I switched from IPVanish and so far extremely happy. My only issue is the implementation of the Killswitch feature on these Android TV-based devices. I also use an app called VPN Safety Dot (vpnsafetydot.com) which I understand is not under your control. The purpose of the app is to display a colored dot in the corner of the screen that verifies your VPN is connected/working every second or so. When connected the dot is green and when not the dot is red. This is an excellent app that I’ve used for years and it works very well. For some reason when your Killswitch is turned on the dot appears green (indicating a valid VPN connection) even when disconnected from VPN. As in, if the Killswitch is selected and I manually click “disconnect” from within the Surfshark GUI the dot stays green. My thinking is that the way your Killswitch is coded it spoofs a connection when the switch is engaged so that the Android TV OS doesn’t get confused, but then blocks Internet access, i.e., the Killswitch… kills the connection, but not really because clearly Surfshark still knows there’s an active path to the net. My guess is this is “lying” to the VPN Safety Dot app too, basically keeping the dot green even though there is no actual connection to a VPN server. Any help to correct this would be appreciated. I’d be happy to provide any info to help the solution, be that screenshots or a recording in action or logs, etc. Thank you for your time and a wonderful product!”
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Great letter. I am sure many of us will be interested in their view of this and response. Strangely enough, yesterday while we were in the middle of this topic, I switched to my 4k firestick and it had lost connection for reasons I don’t know because my 4k Max had not.
What I saw was exactly what I described earlier. I had no connection, no home screen. A message saying there was no internet and my only recourse was to click on the cog wheel, choose manage apps and get to SS that way to fix it. It was clear the kill switch blocked absolutely everything from the net.
If I’m being completely honest, part of my issue with this is that I simply didn’t understand what I was seeing the first time I engaged the killswitch. I was brand new to SS and having a working killswitch on a fire device. I’ve been an IT consultant for over 20 years and I’m one of those people that’s needs to know exactly how my technology is supposed to behave, and that was challenged here.
I installed SS for the first time. I turned on the killswitch feature. Then I decided to click disconnect from so I could pick/choose the remote vpn server I wanted and boom I was locked out of everything just like you describe. Even clicking connect no longer worked. I had to force quit SS and only then did the Dot turn red. This all seemed highly suspect. At first I was even mad I had paid for years of their service and uninstalled IPV lol
Looking back, I now see what happened and why, but I still think the way it works isn’t the proper implementation.
On IPV I used the split tunnel feature to bypass every single app in the list except the few I need going through the VPN (Syncler, TiviMate, MX Player, Analiti, Cinema, VLC) but on SS I was so happy to be able to set it up in the opposite way. Instead of having to select 100 apps including all the Amazon built in services, I could now just select these six apps I wanted to go through the VPN and everything else is automatically bypassing it. Of course, this added to my troubleshooting. I tried adding the Dot to the split tunnel. I figured there HAD to be a way to get the Dot to work as expected with the killswitch. Nope. lol
So I admit frustration caused a bunch of my response to this, but I work with many good coders and they would be the first to say that that response is exactly what they try to avoid. Their goal is to make technology work seamlessly and they hope it works in a way that meets how people preconceive it to work. People usually have a preconceived notion of how a new piece of software should work before they try it and coders consider it a win if they’ve coded their software to work that way ahead of time.
Maybe if I’d really thought about it I should have expected the killswitch to completely disable my device until I force quit SS, but I never would have expected it to spoof a VPN connection to Dot when there is no VPN connection at all.
I’ll update the forum if I ever hear back!
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Please do not judge me over this question, my coffee hasnt kicked in yet. What would happen if we Bypassed Safety Dot? Just thinking out loud…at first im like well that obviously defeats the point but then i thought well would it distinguish internet connection vs no internet connection that way when you have kill switch on? If not Safety Dot, is there an app that can function that way that is similar?
Safety dot does one thing only and that is monitor if your VPN is active(on) or inactive(off), not whether you have an active internet connection. So VPN on and killswitch triggered stops your active internet connection and the VPN is active and doing it’s job and the Safety Dot is green, also doing it’s job. Force close your VPN with an active internet connection and your safety dot shows red and indicates that your VPN is off, not whether you have an active internet connection or not.
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I figured that was the answer but thinking out loud before my coffee fully kicks in lol. Is there an app out there similar to the safety dot that can detect internet access vs no internet access(aka kill switch has kicked in)?
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Not that will trigger a warning that I’m aware of. There are apps like Analiti that will give you speeds and on say the max if no internet connection you should get an “unable to load home” or something along those lines.
It’s not a dumb question at all. The issue for me is that I don’t know what actual mechanism the Dot uses to determine the VPN connection. I originally thought it checked to see an “active VPN tunnel” existed. This could be achieved by sending a packet to an external server and comparing external IP address to internal IP address, although those could be different without a VPN being the reason or be traffic that is in a split tunnel. Then I thought maybe it’s somehow looking for encapsulated traffic, but that doesn’t seem to be the case either. So now I’m wondering how this exact method works. Does it rely on SS to tell it that all is well? How would that work Considering there’s 100s of VPN apps? Does it look for a running process, daemon, or executable?
There are many ways an App could say that it’s verifying your VPN; some more accurate than others.
I would hope that it’s a wholly separate set of actions that provides a true verification that traffic is being tunneled, but if not I’d like to know how it does work so I posted the question in the VPNSafetyDot Facebook support group. I’ll post here if they reply on that too.
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The issue of the Green Dot and the kill switch kind of sounds like to me what comes first a chicken or the egg. I’ve had surfshark kill my connection with my IPTV provider however I’m still connected to the internet. I have internet connection still working but I cannot get the ipt service streaming. I get a code of 404. Once I force stop surfshark I get service back from iptv. Haven’t figured that one out yet. But I believe in these discussions that Miki is correct about the duty of the green dot.
What constantly amazes me is just how many things we find that could use improvements. Some apps seem to just be rushed and miss out on what we consider to be necessary. VPNs are a perfect example. I’ve had 6 different ones so far and even though a site will rate it as #1 I’ve not found even one VPN deserving of a that designation. To a fault there is not one that does everything, and I doubt there will be and that disgusts me, especially if I have to pay for it. So you learn to check off as many boxs as possible and wait for the one that checks off the most.
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That’s very true but you got to remember these small developers are trying to compete with big companies that have Millions of dollars to to invest and develop programs, apps, etc. I’ve been trying to cut the cord for 3 years and tivimate comes very close however the recording of live programs is still an issue that I’m trying to correct. I guess we just got to deal with what we can get.
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Are you asking surfshark to look into a issue wth an app that they dont own or support?
No not really I think what everybody’s kind of asking for is for ss to develop a light that is on when the VPN is on and if the kill switch ever cuts the internet for the light to go off.
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Hey Miki, LOL
Sounds good to me I love the dot 
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Then msg ss about it. If they have the kill switch that will work. Nothing troy point can do, and running multiple items isnt the best idea. But do what @Miki does with the thumbs up or down really easy to do
I read this post @TXRon and decided to send an email off to ExpressVPN. This was their reply.
I’m hopeful but won’t hold my breath. 
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