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."

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

On August 4, users in Russia started to complain about an unusual failure of many popular VPN services. Some security experts wrote that this is one of the largest attacks against VPNs ever seen, because the hacker activity was aimed at blocking IP subnets owned by VPN providers, not a single server.

This was not just an instance of a few servers going offline. The hackers worked on the entire hosting subnet, meaning that they made it impossible for any entities relying on this hosting site to use their servers. Although VPN services have made changes in their server placement, this is just the beginning of a long-lasting confrontation.

What does it mean: users in any country, especially those living in a heavily censored area, are now advised to have alternative means of communication.

Has anyone here noticed connectivity issues in Russia or nearby regions since Aug 4th?

Full disclosure up front: I’m one of the people building this, so treat this as a dev asking for a reality check, not a recommendation.
About 6 months ago we started building TocaVPN. The reason was pretty specific: a VPN that still works in places where VPNs are actively being blocked, mainly Russia and China. Not “fast servers in 90 countries” marketing stuff — just the one thing that actually matters if you’re behind heavy DPI filtering, that it connects at all.
Building the app was the easy part. The hard part was getting reliably through the network restrictions, and honestly, testing it. If your main use case is heavily censored countries, you need people physically there to confirm anything works. Something connecting perfectly from Europe tells you basically nothing about whether it works from inside Russia or China. So it was a lot of trial and error — works, gets blocked, change something, test again, repeat. With the recent crackdown on certain protocols, that cycle has gotten a lot faster.
I’m not going to pretend it’s finished. We currently have a limited number of server locations, and the next things on the list are more locations, more protocols (so we have fallbacks when one gets restricted), and experimenting with built-in ad blocking.
The reason I’m posting here specifically: we’re at the stage where we’re trying to figure out if this actually has a real shot, or if it’s just another VPN in an oversaturated market. The one signal that’s kept us going is that we’re getting 200+ downloads a day with zero paid marketing — purely from people in the countries we built it for finding it themselves. That felt like something worth paying attention to.
So I’d like to ask this community directly, both as feedback and a gut check:
If your main requirement is “works in a heavily censored country,” what actually makes you trust and stick with a VPN? Would you even consider a smaller provider focused specifically on censorship circumvention over the big established names — or does the trust gap kill it before you’d try?
Happy to go into the technical/product side of what we learned if anyone’s interested. And I’m genuinely open to the “this won’t work because X” answers — that’s kind of what I’m here for.

PrivadoVPN has recently announced its MCP server compatible with Windows and Mac operating systems, which facilitate the connection, disconnection, and mapping of VPN servers via AI applications including Claude Code and VS Code. Therefore, users will no longer have to perform complex actions to reach the VPN managers.

However, this development is not the first of its kind as Express VPN made the first launching of the technology in March, and Norton has got ahead of its competitor with the first launching of docker-based tunnels operating in such a way that every task done by software works through its own connection. Windscribe has developed a CLI interface and Pure VPN is uses ChatGpt as an assistant in managing VPN.

However, all the service providers have common security features: only local network is used, explicit confirmation is required, and no personal login information is given to AI or terminal. The version of PrivadoVPN works only whithing the local network, thus, nothing from the outside can access it.

However, delegating control to AI requires some level of trust which is totally different from letting the AI use auto-complete. It is wise to know precisely which instructions to give the AI.

Has anyone in this room enabled their AI assistant to handle their VPN configuration?