Demand for VPN services soared after Russia restricted access to some Western social media after President Vladimir Putin ordered troops into Ukraine in February 2022.

Senator Artem Sheikin said an order from the Roskomnadzor watchdog would come into force on March 1 that would block VPNs.

"From March 1, 2024, an order will come into force to block VPN services providing access to sites banned in Russia," Sheikin was quoted as saying by state news agency RIA.

Phone calls to the number listed by Roskomnadzor as its press service were answered by a voice message with the Bobby McFerrin song "Don't Worry Be Happy".

Sheikin said that it was particularly important to block access to Meta Platforms (META.O), which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

"I would like to note that it is especially important to restrict citizens' access to the products of Meta which is recognised as an extremist organization," Sheikin added.

The original article contains 216 words, the summary contains 152 words. Saved 30%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 2 points 1 year ago

Usually this bot is pretty good, but this time the paragraph

Phone calls to the number listed by Roskomnadzor as its press service were answered by a voice message with the Bobby McFerrin song "Don't Worry Be Happy".

comes out of nowhere, while the original article does provide context.

[–] evlogii@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

March 1st? Right before the presidential elections? No way they're that stupid. Right after the elections, though, it's gonna be inevitable. If people will vote for Putin one more time, Russia will quickly turn into North Korea.

[–] neutronst4r 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You seriously think elections in Russia are not fraudulent? At this point, the only thing that can remove Putin is violence, either through combined effort of the people or by internal power struggle. That later will probably just result in an equally horrible replacement.

[–] bblfrnz 5 points 1 year ago

Well, most of popular in the world VPN services are already blocked. Even such simple things like Cloudflare's warp doesn't work, although it still possible to use it if you generate wireguard config and change endpoint, but there's a possibility that the wg protocol will be blocked in the future. The best way to bypass censorship in Russia right now is to use Chinese solutions for gfw circumvention such as shadowsocks/vmess/vless/trojan/etc. Or one can use self-hosted VPN servers, but it's very hard to find a way for paying for cloud services that are located outside of Russia.

[–] Timbo303@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This should totally be the error they give you when using a vpn in russia. Its a shame russia government is so stupid they are on the brink of booming piracy this will likely stall efforts if every vpn is blocked.