Piracy shield in Italy - unavoidable even with a VPN?
Well, color me surprised when, with my Proton VPN enabled, I still faced a government-mandated MITM attack while attempting to visit 1337x.to
"AVVISO
L’accesso al presente sito, che diffondeva illecitamente contenuti protetti dal diritto d’autore, è stato disabilitato in esecuzione di un provvedimento dell’Autorità per le garanzie nelle comunicazioni ai sensi del Regolamento di cui alla delibera n. 680/13/CONS
Per maggiori informazioni visiti il sito www.agcom.it"
To be completely honest, I wasn’t aware this was possible when using a VPN. I’ve tried swapping to multiple servers within Proton, but all seem to be returning the same. Is there some commonly known workaround?
Your VPN isn't forcing you onto its DNS and is using your ISP's. I'd assume Proton has some kind of "antitracker" option or similar in the client that would make it use a Proton-provided DNS server. Failing that, you can use a public DNS server located outside of a piracy shield country by setting it manually.
I'm thinking it must be a DNS configuration issue... Every server with ProtonVPN is showing the same, from the US to Netherlands to Switzerland. All of them.
Pretty sure its because of the piracy shield thingy. Secure Core might be an option as long as no Italian servers are used and you're using the VPNs DNS
“[A]ll parties in any capacity involved in the accessibility of illegally disseminated content – and therefore also, by way of example and not limitation – VPN and open DNS service providers, will have to execute the blocks requested by the Authority [AGCOM],” the notice read.
I bet this is ops issue. Either the vpn auto selected the fastest server (probably in Italy) of op defaulted to a local server. Op should change server to a country with more lax rules (Netherlands?).
Nope. Swapped to every other server ProtonVPN has. I'm thinking it might be a DNS configuration issue though, because yeah, I don't understand why a different server wouldn't end run around this.
Search "what is my ip" on your web search engine to see without and with a VPN connection, to see if you're really going through the VPN tunnel. Seems like you aren't.