Cloudflare starts blocking pirate sites for UK users

Previously, a convenient and low-latency way to bypass UK internet censorship was to proxy via a local datacentre - it's only the residential ISPs that are under pressure to censor traffic, commercial ones less so.

But if the blocking is happening somewhere other than the ISP, this is less effective. A hypothetical TPB user might want to proxy via Luxembourg now (seems like the shortest hop to somewhere with sane legislation)

You didn’t even need to do that. Just needed an /etc/hosts entry for the domain.

My ISP (Virgin Media) does DNS filtering and IP-based blocking and TLS SNI inspection. So you have to use ESNI or domain fronting, which last time I checked my browser could not be easily configured to do.

You may have some success with DPI bypass tools we've been using in Russia for years now, like GoodbyeDPI and Zapret.

Is that common for all ISPs or just Virgin? When I lived in the UK (already a number of years ago) it was all just DNS-based. Running my own DNS resolver unblocked everything. I don't recall which ISP.

I think it's just Virgin doing the SNI stuff, but I wouldn't be surprised if others are doing IP filtering. I'm not sure if anyone's done a good survey of what the different ISPs are doing (it'd be an interesting project).

TalkTalk, Sky, BT & pretty much all domestic mainstream ISPs do DPI down to SNI.

They also exercise an IWF proxy so your already MiTM'd.

https://www.iwf.org.uk/

At this point, what's the difference between the UK and China other than the specific content they block? Some ISPs have even started blocking wireguard here & I've had to resort back to xray/v2ray

Very little difference. But blocking wireguard is huge change, which ISPs are doing that?

I currently live in student accommodation so not sure what they're using upstream. The university network also drops wireguard connections but only to known providers like Mullvad (assuming obfuscation is off)