In Russia, recently, without sufficient public discussion, a set of laws have been adopted that greatly facilitate the procedure for blocking any website. The Roskomnadzor organization, which directly sends instructions to providers to block their clients’ access to a particular site, willingly uses the vague wording of these laws. The blocking of socially significant sites - large media outlets and blogs - causes a particular public outcry. “Yarovaya’s Law” became the next link in the chain.

Among the sites and services that were blocked and may not be accessible from Russia:

• Grani.ru and other independent media;
• Alexei Navalny's blog and websites of other democratic politicians and independent journalists;
• X-torrents, bobfilm.net, dream-film.net, kinokubik.com, kinozal.tv, kinobolt.ru, rutor.org, seedoff.net, torrentor.net, tushkan.net, tv.serial-online.net, wood-film.ru, rutracker.org (Rutreker!) and other torrent trackers;
• Lurkmore (“Lurk”);
• Dosug.cz (moved to Dosug.so);
• xhamster.com;
• Wikipedia;
• Telegram and the innocent victims of attempts to block it.

Although the initiative to block access comes from Roskomnadzor, the direct executors of its decisions are Internet providers. They are the ones who block access to objectionable pages and write “the resource at this IP address is blocked by decision of government authorities” (quote from Beeline).

Proxy, VPN and other ways to access blocked sites

The blocking by Roskomnadzor is of a very symbolic nature; I can compare it to a barrier in an open field. It works out quite simply. I have collected several ways to access sites that Russian Internet providers simply won’t let you see. Some of these methods, such as VPN and proxies, also help you use services that are not themselves available to Russian IPs. For example, "Pandora".

Browser turbo modes

Many browsers, including Yandex Browser and Opera, have a function for compressing Internet traffic. This was useful in times of slow or limited Internet traffic. When compression mode is turned on, traffic does not go directly from the site to your browser, but passes through a third-party server that compresses it. Roskomnadzor prohibited the provider from showing us the server at the address where the site is located. But, using turbo mode, we receive pages from a special browser server, over which Roskomnadzor has no control.

To watch “forbidden” sites, turn on “Turbo” modes in the Yandex or Opera browser. I heard similar modes exist in Chrome and Firefox.

This is what the turbo mode button looks like in Opera:

This is how it looks in Yandex browser:

Proxy servers

These are servers that, like browser compression servers, redirect traffic through themselves. Unlike VPNs, they do not encrypt it and do not pass through all the data. Unlike turbo modes, they do not compress it. However, if you use a proxy, you will see sites blocked by Roskomnadzor, because your computer will directly connect to the proxy server, and not to the server where the site is located.

Lists of free proxies can be found on sites that collect them. These servers may be down, slow, or short-lived, but they are free. You can also buy access to paid proxies on the Internet. But I don’t focus on this, because I prefer VPN.

Sites that collect free proxies: Hide My Ass, Proxy4Free.com, Proxy-list.org.

To connect through a proxy server, install the FoxyProxy plugin (Firefox, Chrome) or its equivalent in your browser. Enter the proxy server IP address and port in the plugin settings and use it. The window in which you need to enter them looks like this:

If you have not specifically looked for a SOCKS proxy or do not know what it is, do not check the box next to “SOCKS proxy”.

Anonymizers

Anonymizer is a site that opens the page you need in a frame, first loading it onto itself and then showing it to the user. Such services are popular among office workers whose social networks are blocked. This is the fastest available option on my list.

Some anonymizers that I knew before or found for this post:

To open a page with an anonymizer, paste its address into a special field on its website. In addition, one of the Russian proxy services has collected a large list of anonymizers, among which he has identified the best.

Search engine caches

Unlike you and me, most major search engines are based outside of Russia. So do their search bots. This means that they have access to everything that Roskomnadzor has blocked inside Russia. And they store it in cache. In particular, our Dutch Yandex perfectly displays a post from Navalny’s LiveJournal, written after the blog was blocked. To have access to the entire site, you can enter, for example, “kasparov.ru” into the search and see a list of pages. The downside here is that navigating the site can be quite cumbersome, and the home page cache may be out of date and not display recently added content.

Tor Browser

When Roskomnadzor blocked Navalny's blog, for many this was the last straw, and people became interested in Tor technology. This is a decentralized network of Internet nodes in which data travels a long way from the server to the user, making it impossible to track a specific user. To a greater extent, this system is convenient for those who want to hide their true IP for some reason. The ability to read sites blocked by your ISP is a side effect of this feature. Those who have recently installed the Tor browser have found that pages through it open very slowly.

RSS/Email Subscription

If you have a specific site blocked by Roskomnadzor that you want to read, add its RSS feed to Yandex feed, another RSS aggregator, or set up to receive updates by email. In most cases, you can use not the RSS feed address, but the address of the site itself. The service itself will recognize the RSS feed and add it.

Some RSS aggregators:

• https://theoldreader.com/ - successor to the deceased Google Reader

Among the services for sending RSS to email, in addition to Yandex feed, the only one that comes to mind is Blogtrottr. There you will have to insert not the address of a blog or other site, but the RSS address. In the case of Navalny's LiveJournal, this will be. That is, if you are dealing with LJ, you will need to add data/rss at the end. Anton Nosik described his experience with Yandex feed in pictures.

VPN

This abbreviation stands for virtual private network. You are probably already connected to your ISP using this technology. With its help, you can establish one Internet connection inside another (VPN tunnel). The external one may be unprotected, but the internal one, as a rule, is encrypted to a special server. As a result, the user receives the Internet on his computer not directly, but through a remote server, which can be located anywhere in the world and have a non-Russian IP.

I prefer VPN technology to all the methods of bypassing restrictions mentioned in my list, because with it the connection speed is reduced slightly, and the traffic is securely and completely encrypted. Unlike, for example, proxies, which do not encrypt traffic and do not close it on themselves. Encryption to a remote server in another country means that on the way to and from it, no one will be able to know what pages you are looking at. On the opposite side of the wire, no one will be able to find out who viewed the site and from where.

There are many VPN services; only paid ones provide high speed and reliability. However, Alexander Plyushchev found some kind of VPN service for a mobile phone that gives the first 500 MB at full speed.

For myself, I chose the VPN Private Internet Access provider (since I am their client, I will receive a small reward for registrations through the links in this post, but this does not affect the fact that I have been using them for the fourth year).

• First of all, he is American. The USA is one of the few civilized countries that seriously defends the right of people to privacy and confidentiality of correspondence. Europe cannot boast of this, so I have not heard of VPN providers from there.
• Secondly, PIA has mobile client and application for Windows. They are very convenient: they connect automatically, reconnect when the connection is lost (relevant for mobile Internet), and allow you to quickly select one of 20 servers in different parts of the world.
• Thirdly, PIA doesn't store logs for a specific user, but only stores them all together (perhaps now it doesn’t store them at all). And although its rules include a clause about disabling for illegal activities, the provider has deprived itself of the ability to identify the specific user who is engaged in it. As Private Internet Access creator Andrew Lee said, “We don't keep logs, period.”
• Fourth, PIA is serious fights for internet freedom: He openly joined the coalition of Internet companies against the SOPA and PIPA bills. These are approximate analogues of our laws on blocking sites on suspicion of piracy or other illegal activities. In the United States, public organizations, Internet companies and ordinary people forced Congress to vote against these bills, although the majority of its members were initially in favor.
• Fifthly, for PIA you can pay anonymously. I don't use this feature, but now I was glad to see on the website that they began accepting Visa and Mastercard gift cards. These are cards with a fixed amount that can be bought in stores and banks. In addition, there is a whole market for such cards on the Internet. PIA also accepts Bitcoin.

other methods

Other solutions would include the Hola browser extension. This service, as far as I understand, is based on VPN technology and uses its user base to achieve greater anonymity, Thor style. It is free and allows you to manually select the IP nationality. In addition, the service compresses traffic and has applications for mobile phones.

Update: Another similar extension is http://fri-gate.org/ru/.

Conclusion

The most important thing to understand about blocking sites on the Internet is that it does not exist. You can block access to a site using your provider, you can block its hosting or domain, but never the site. Because for every provider there is a VPN, for every hosting - another hosting, for every domain registrar - another domain registrar in another country with different rules. This is the essence of the Internet, this is how it was designed. And he will always be like this. This is Pandora's box, opened in 1991. The only way to ban something here is to turn off the electricity.