"Internet piracy" officially blocked in Australia, need help finding VPN for Linux

Looks like our nanny state has finally put the nail in the coffin when it comes to internet freedom and I hear absolutely no outrage about it.

ThePirateBay, Torrentz, TorrentHound, ISOHunt & more have been blocked.

Anyway, I was looking for a good vpn that can tunnel in Australia (faster connection) and overseas.
I used to use VyprVPN, it was fast, reliable but their privacy was "iffy" and I'm uncertain about their support for Linux.
They have a .deb build of their CLI client but I'm using Antergos (Arch) at the moment.

Any help would be appreciated!

vypr will cut you off if they catch you downloading torrents, stay away from them. I use torguard and am pretty happy with them, PIA is always good ofcourse.

You don't need a VPN to get around this silly government censorship though, all you need to do is change your DNS server from your ISP to anything else (google: 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4 opendns: 208.67.220.220, 208.67.222.222 etc.)

I don't know if many VPN providers have a linux client but they all work with openVPN, so all you need to do is download the openvpn config and run that on linux.

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PIA works just fine on Linux (my Fedora 25 install specifically). As @Dexter_Kane said, just change your DNS to the google public DNS and that will sort it out.

Is this done on an IP basis or actual site basis? Because if it is IP based and you need a new court order to block new IPs of the same site then proxies will pop out immediately. They tried to do the same in the Netherlands some time ago and failed miserably because of proxies..Until the whole thing was cancelled anyway eventually.

They block it at the DNS level, so they just make the domain resolve to something else. But as you say it's virtually impossible to do web filtering at the ISP level. All you have to do to circumvent it is to use a different DNS server, they're not even trying to intercept DNS requests or anything like that, it's just a list that ISP DNS servers won't resolve correctly.

I am more asking on the legal level...In the Netherlands it failed because you could not add to that ¨Block¨ list unless you went through the whole court process again. So even the Intellectually Property organization gave up in taking the time to block the proxies as well...

I'm pretty sure it's the same way here, but it's the domain that gets blocked not the IP. I know it has taken years from when they passed the law to actually 'blocking' some sites. The ISPs don't really want anything to do with it so I doubt they're sitting around looking for proxies or whatever, so if a new proxy pops up it would be up to the copyright people to lodge a request to have it added to the list.

Yeah, in Aus, they don't have free reign to have everything blocked. There is a list of sites and methods employed. This can be updated, but there is a cost associated with that.
At the moment it is DNS redirection, but I am sure that will change as people get around it.

I doubt it, I mean what will they change it to? You can't block it with a firewall because the IPs change all the time and most pirate sites used CDNs anyway, you can't web filter because everyone uses HTTPS. There are some crazy pattern matching things you can do to match encrypted traffic to a particular site, but that's a lot of work which still isn't very effective.And ultimately people can just use VPNs and avoid the whole thing.

The only half way effective way to do anything is to lock it down completely like china does, but that's probably not going to happen... well I guess the government does own all the infrastructure now so that is a distinct possibility.

At least there are some people in the government that recognise that it's a distribution problem, but who knows what will come of it.

We also have to remember that censorship in Australia isn't news.

Well, when DNS redirecting doesn't work, they will have to do IP filtering. That is all I can think of, and the most effective. Won't prevent VPNs of course, but what will?
I am not for it, the internet is hardly outstanding, so I guess I have low expectations!

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It's too hard, you can't block things at the IP level because so many sites could be using the same IP. It would actually be easier to block VPN services at the IP level because they all use known static IPs, but it's pretty much impossible to block a website, especially if it uses a CDN or anything like that.

Plus firewalling and filtering costs a lot more than modifying existing DNS servers, no one is going to want to pay for it.

@McSwaggens Just because it's easy to bypass this stuff doesn't mean you shouldn't also use a VPN however. Currently things are okay in Australia in the sense that anti P2P groups have not been successful in getting a judge to give them downloader's names and details. But that may change, and considering the mandatory metadata retention and that it was recently opened up to civil cases you should probably do something to protect yourself.

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Just in relation to manually setting DNS (to google public as an example) Should we be using IPv4 / IPv6 or both? Cases for and against?

You'd only need to set the ipv6 stuff if you have an ipv6 internet connection.

Plus you're better off changing your DNS settings on the router rather than for each device

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Another useful piece of info that nobody bothered to mention is the fact that qBitTorrent has a built-in torrent browser. Good luck blocking that.

That's the way it's going. They're planning on adding a distributed torrent database to the torrent protocol. So in the future you won't need websites at all for torrents.

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I'm In Aus and I use PureVpn...is linux compatible with guides...used it about a year so far and find it good, I have it on a try boot with 2 instances of Linux Mint and Win 8.1...can also install on Android and Iphone for same subscription, from what I gather it is one of the better VPN services.

https://www.purevpn.com/order

Cheers.

I can confirm the block is on a DNS level, I used googles public 8.8.8.8 DNS and I can reach TPB fine, I naturally had a look at googles DNS privacy statement and it looks really sketchy.
So I'm still looking for vpns at the moment.