Russia prescribes VPN providers what they have to block! According to the will of the Russian authorities, a number of well-known VPN providers are to block various websites whose contents are not desired by the government. They were asked to join the state censorship system, which operates a kind of block list for websites.
TorrentFreak reports that some vendors, namely NordVPN, ExpressVPN, TorGuard, IPVanish, VPN Unlimited, VyprVPN, Kaspersky Secure Connection, HideMyAss, Hola VPN and OpenVPN, have recently received mail from Russia’s state telecommunications regulator for operating servers inside the country – without complying with the state block list.
Implement block list, or withdraw from Russia
Roskomnadzor asked the companies to connect their services to the so-called FGIS database, the system that determines which websites and networks should be blocked for access via Russian Internet connections. Russia’s major search engines and service providers such as Yandex and Mail.ru have all been connected for years and filter their content accordingly.
- The companies now have almost a month to comply with the Russian authorities‘ request. As a consequence, VPN providers are now threatened with nothing other than landing themselves on the blacklist, so that Russian network operators would no longer allow any connections to their services.
- One of the providers, TorGuard, has meanwhile taken appropriate action and withdrawn from Russia. All steps had been taken to remove the company’s servers from Moscow and St. Petersburg and to cut relations with Russian data centers.
Due to the communications supervision approach, the providers of virtual private networks are no longer able to successfully implement the purpose of their services. After all, VPN connections also serve to circumvent censorship and guarantee free access to the Internet.
Hola Extension
The free Chrome extension „Hola Better Internet“ unlocks access to numerous international music and video platforms such as Pandora, Hulu and Netflix. You can also use the BBC iPlayer in this way.
Hola Better Internet VPN Proxy for Chrome
Media usage in Germany is often limited by IP blocks for some portals. Grade international offers, especially on the American and English market, are thus blocked for German users. Actually. Because with the Chrome extension Hola numerous portals can be unblocked automatically. All you have to do is surf to the corresponding websites. The „Hola Unblocker“ then automatically clicks in between and unblocks access by redirecting via corresponding foreign proxies.
The supported portals are currently: CBS, FOX, Hulu, Netflix, Pandorda and the British offers BBC iPlayer, iTV Player. More services will follow shortly.
In our tests the unlocked videos ran smoothly, only with FOX offers there were problems, the unlocking didn’t work here.