7/7/2023 0 Comments Russian vpn free![]() ![]() But then everything fell apart - nothing works, other apps got hung up, my battery drained like mad, Internet access slowed. “I was happy for about 20 minutes, using all my favorite apps. “If you, like me, downloaded a VPN after all the hype, I congratulate you on being screwed,” the blogger Batya-Goda, with about 46,000 followers, wrote on July 6 in a now-deleted social-media post. Now, activists say, a soft-power initiative has been launched to frighten Russians away from VPNs and herd them back toward government-controlled information resources. Russian President Vladimir Putin (file photo) The government has, however, blocked over 20 individual VPNs. President Vladimir Putin has said in the past that straightforward prohibitions are not the best way to restrict Internet use, saying the state must be smarter and subtler to achieve its aims, and his government has been reluctant to ban VPNs outright, wary of alienating the many Russians who use them to access Western social media and other sites for entertainment purposes.Ī 2017 law made it illegal for VPNs to provide access to blocked sites, but it put the obligation to comply on VPN-service companies, an obligation they have largely ignored. The market-research service AppMagic reported that Russians downloaded VPNs more than 12 million times in the first three weeks of July alone. According to The Times of London, 24 million Russians – about one-quarter of all adult Internet users - employed a VPN in May, up from a pre-invasion figure of 1.6 million. In response, a growing number of Russians have turned to VPNs – virtual private networks that mask Internet users’ locations and enable them to view blocked websites. Last year, that number surpassed 70,000, Internet-freedom activists say, while more than 5,400 sites have been blocked since Russia launched its massive invasion of Ukraine in late February. ![]() A decade ago, 261 websites were blocked by the Russian government. ![]()
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