Latest reports from TorrentFreak indicate that the war against piracy has taken an unusual turn with VPN connections now surprisingly being banned by the torrent sites themselves.
As most of our readers are probably aware VPNs are today widely used by large numbers of people both to help protect users identities and to provide secure, encrypted connections. Because of the aggressive activities of DMCA bots though some of the torrent sites are now fighting back by banning the blocks of IP addresses used by DMCA bots, which includes VPNs.
Apparently it's possible to detect DMCA bots using VPNs and then block the specific group of IPs used by the host VPN service. Needless to say TorrentFreak's source would not reveal how the detection was done although they did reveal that it requires considerable computing power along with other gathered intelligence.
This prevents the bots scanning and monitoring the torrent site's activities but a side effect of all this though is that legitimate users of VPN services which have been exploited by DMCA bots may find that their VPN provider's range of IP addresses has already been banned. So if you're having difficulties accessing your favourite torrent site, try disabling your VPN and see if that works.
Seemingly it's not all doom and gloom though as the bans are only temporary. Short term or not though these bans might still be regarded as a nuisance by some legitimate VPN users.
TorrentFreak discusses this further here.
