The whole point of me getting a VPN was to bypass the blocking of torrent sites.
I’m currently using PIA and am usually connected to the internet via their local servers ( either in Australia or New Zealand).
I’m suddenly having difficulty connecting to some of the more prominent torrent sites/hosts.
Although I manage to perform the security verification on (say) ext.to I’ll encounter a ‘Web server is returning an unknown host error’ message.
Error code 520
If I connect to a Hong Kong server, though, I don’t encounter this error and manage to get through. I initially thought both sites were down but it is as if some local VPN blocking might be now going on.
Is that likely or possible?
My first guess is it’s some sort of DNS problem
I had a problem with DNS over TLS with PIA this sounds very similar. The conflict was DNS encryption type. I use Gluetun infront of PIA and the DNS resolver defaults to DNS-over-TLS on TCP 853. Through PIA’s tunnel, port 853 is blocked or doesn’t work reliably. SO I switched DNS to DNS-over-HTTPS on port 443 (I used Cloud9), which PIA allows and Gluetun can actually use. Not sure if this is you issue at all but if you have a common ARR stack with a vpn through gluetun this very possibly could be
It’s probably the cloud host of the sites themselves marking the addresses of the specific servers you use as questionable because it saw problematic traffic from them before (i.e. other subscribers from your VPN service), not what the other users theorized.
It’s one of the reasons why VPN services move to new server addresses all the time. The goal is not beating deliberate VPN blockers per say (which would be futile, since acquiring updated lists of all public VPN server addresses is trivial, and literally everyone can do it), but to reset the reputation of the servers (measured dynamically by automated systems) because that reputation always goes to shit over time.
this matches what i observe in my usage, but I’ve been having trouble convincing my family member this is the case.
do you happen to know any references/articles that discuss this in more detail, which i can use to improve my explanation?
per say
*per se
If your ISP is blocking them then my guess would be that the local VPN’s ISP has started blocking them as well.
Some countries block(how? Dunno, internet dark magic) some sites/domains so switching vpn locations solves the problem. If your country blocks a domain and you use a vpn server from the same country you wouldn’t be able to access it anyway, if you change the country the server is in you get around the block. This is one reason why VPNs are sold as an anti-censorship tool.
