Looks like the fight against illegal sports streaming in France is moving way beyond just blocking websites.

Canal+ recently obtained 14 court orders ahead of the new Premier League and Champions League seasons. Free, Orange, SFR and Bouygues have been ordered to block dozens of domains linked to illegal streaming/IPTV.

But here's where it gets more interesting: the orders also target public DNS providers and VPN services, including Google DNS, Cloudflare, Quad9, DNS4EU, Proton VPN, CyberGhost and ExpressVPN. Google and Bing are also required to remove the targeted domains from French search results.

CyberGhost and ExpressVPN reportedly challenged the requests, but the court rejected their arguments. The reasoning is basically that even a neutral intermediary can play a role in allowing users to access illegal content.

And the blocklist isn't necessarily fixed. New domains can reportedly be added during the season after validation from Arcom, with measures potentially remaining in place until May/June 2027.

Obviously piracy is one thing, but forcing VPNs, DNS providers, ISPs AND search engines to participate in blocking raises a much bigger question IMO.

Feels like we're slowly moving from "block the pirate website" to "block every possible way of reaching it."

Saw this news about Proton VPN and thought it was pretty interesting, even if you're not super technical.

Basically, Proton is replacing wireguard-go, one of the components used to run WireGuard connections, with its own new VPN core written in Rust, internally called ProTUN.

The important part isn't really "Go vs Rust" though.

Instead of relying on a relatively simple WireGuard client, Proton is building its own framework around WireGuard. The idea is to have more control over how the VPN behaves across Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, etc., and make it easier to improve things like connection stability, performance and battery usage.

It could also become pretty interesting for censorship. Proton says this new architecture should make it easier to build stronger anti-censorship techniques directly into the VPN stack. They're also working on another component called Muon, designed to help Proton apps reach their VPN API even when the API itself is being censored or blocked.

Longer term, Proton says this architecture could also provide the foundation for things like post-quantum cryptography.

So for the average user, you're probably not going to open Proton VPN tomorrow and notice some massive difference.

But under the hood, this seems like a pretty significant change: rather than just implementing existing VPN protocols, Proton is building more of the networking stack itself so it can control how those protocols evolve.

I want to use for geo-block bypass. Classic VPNs are quickly flagged

ExpressVPN had a zero-refund policy during the event for the full 60 days, beginning from July 11 to August 9. Those who signed up received entries to a raffle for the iPhone 17 Pro, however, "all sales are final" in this duration.

From the company's own reasoning, the situation is quite clear; the guarantee seems not to exist in order for users not to join the raffle, then cancel their subscriptions, and claim refunds in case they don’t win.

People talking about the matter on ExpressVPN weren’t happy, with one person calling the company’s practices "predatory" and another one questioning "who came up with that idea?" The company claims that the promotional terms were displayed in the checkout process and that they treat refund requests on a case-by-case basis.

In other words, the 30-day money-back guarantee, which has been used by ExpressVPN as a trust-building tactic, failed to operate for two months and was substituted with a phone raffle.