Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) will soon be banned in Russia as part of a new bill signed into law by President Vladimir Putin. The aim of the law is to prevent citizens from accessing banned websites by using VPNs to circumvent the government censorship.
As CNN reports the Russian government runs a blacklist that contains thousands of websites that are restricted from the public. VPNs allow people to work around censorship by encrypting and disguising their internet traffic.
The blacklist was originally meant to cover websites that related to illegal content such as drugs and child pornography. Some groups worry that the law will be applied broadly to expand censorship to political dissenters. In a statement to CNN, Amnesty International called the law the "latest blow in an assault on online freedom." According to The Verge, Russia briefly used the blacklist to outright ban Reddit and Wikipedia "over single pages that contained content on drug use" in 2015, backing up concerns of potential overreach.
Russia's VPN ban will go into effect on November 1, at which point it will join China, which began restricting VPNs earlier in July, in a recent surge in state efforts to crack down on VPN use.
More VPN resources
For more information about VPNs and privacy in general, be sure to check out the following links.
- Best free VPN services
- 6 good reasons why you really should use a VPN
- 5 major advantages of using a VPN
- 5 uses for a VPN you didn't know about
- What's the difference between a proxy and a VPN?
- How to manually configure a VPN on Windows 10
- How to manually configure a VPN on Windows 10 Mobile
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1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service).
2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad.
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