Some videos are blocked on YouTube in Russia, although they can be watched in other countries. Usually blocking occurs at the request of state authorities (for example, courts). There are also videos with regional restrictions that are only available in certain states due to the peculiarities of content licensing. Such blocks are very easy to bypass, and for this you do not need to change the IP or use third-party applications.
How to remove video blocking:
Go to the web version of YouTube and find any video that is blocked (for example, "Husky - Judas").
Log in to your Google account and click on your avatar at the top right of the screen. Scroll to the bottom of the menu and click on "Country".
Instead of Russia, select any other country and return to the video page. Everything is ready - the video is unlocked, you can watch it.
You can send yourself or someone else a link to a video with a changed country, and it will successfully play in the application on a smartphone or tablet without changing the region. Alternatively, you can open the YouTube app settings and select any country other than Russia as the location. In this case, all videos blocked in our country will become available.
YouTube is once again promised to be permanently blocked in Russia. And while some are holding their fists and putting likes so that this does not happen, others are getting ready. We tell you how to watch YouTube if one day Roskomnadzor gets its way.
You can unblock YouTube through a VPN
Roskomnadzor adds sites to its black list. But direct access is limited by providers who receive information from Roskomnadzor and update their list of resources that are inaccessible to subscribers.
VPN services allow you to pretend that you have changed your country of residence - at least by IP. For the provider, you stay where you were.
But if you want to go to YouTube, then connect to a VPN server (this is allowed). It creates an encrypted tunnel, goes to YouTube for you and transmits traffic from the desired site through the tunnel. Nobody forbade him anything.
How to choose a VPN for YouTube?
Look not only at safety, but also at available speed. Free VPNs are great, but do you seriously want to enjoy videos with squares? In addition, your data may well merge to the left. Read more.
And one more thing: with Roskomnadzor about cooperation with Opera VPN, Kaspersky Lab, 2ip.ru, 2ip.io, cameleo.ru. If Roskomnadzor blocks YouTube, the chances of staying with your favorite videos when using these services are lower than for others.
How to connect to a VPN depends on the service. Typically, developers offer a client application with ready-made settings that connects to a VPN server and redirects all traffic to it. Install, select a country (if the service allows), run. An example can be seen.
Another option is a browser extension. The logic is the same: install, turn on, go to YouTube. Then you turn it off as unnecessary, and the sites start to load faster.
Where extensions are installed:
Chrome:"Customize and manage Google Chrome" (three gray dots on the right in the top bar) - "Additional tools" - "Extensions". Next, at the bottom of the page, click "More extensions" (or follow this link) and drive in the VPN search, select the appropriate one.
Firefox:(three horizontal bars on the right in the top bar) - "Add-ons" - "Extensions" (direct link), also enter VPN in the search bar. And 55 options are in front of you.
safari: menu - "Settings" - "Extensions", and the same three letters in the search. Thanks Apple.
Tor
In the "onion browser" YouTube is tolerable to watch. However, it should be understood that onion authorization in Tor is great, but rather slow.
The YouTube homepage took me half a minute to load. Another ten seconds opened a page with a random video. And watching videos in quality above 480p without pauses did not work.
In general, in the piggy bank. But far from the most comfortable and fastest option.
Proxy
Slow and insecure VPN alternative. Proxy services also create tunnels and act as an intermediary between you and the desired banned site. But they usually only work with web traffic and do not encrypt it. In a word, the method is so-so - outdated and without advantages.
Anonymizers
Theoretically, you can watch YouTube through an anonymizer, but it’s better not to. First of all, the ping and speed are lower, the connection is unstable, freezes.
Many anonymizers (especially free ones) do not work with YouTube. The load when watching the video is too high, it is unprofitable for the owners of the anonymizer.
Finally, anonymizers do not encrypt traffic. They only replace the IP.
findings
If YouTube gets banned, you know how to move on. Take a closer look at a VPN, try YouTube with Tor, compare the prices of paid services and the features of free ones. A local apocalypse can happen at any moment, but you will be ready for it.
Access to the most popular free video hosting YouTube can be blocked for completely different reasons - political, economic or social:
- YouTube is blocked on behalf of system administrators at firms and enterprises, along with other social networks Odnoklassniki, Facebook, Vkontakte, and so on, so that employees do business and not sit back;
- Access to YouTube is blocked by providers on the orders of Roskomnadzor, allegedly due to complaints about videos that violate applicable law;
- The YouTube site is blocked due to a simple DNS server failure, through which your device receives the wrong IP address and this leads to the fact that you cannot access the server.
Roskomnadzor blocked YouTube
The Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation ordered providers of local communication networks to block a video in which Russian radical politicians addressed the inhabitants of Ukraine. Since this video was hosted by YouTube, the providers needed to block access directly to this video, but instead, a number of providers closed access to the entire resource. So, for example, Start Telecom blocked YouTube com on March 7, but angry messages from users quickly brought the providers to their senses and they opened access to the site, explaining the temporary unavailability of the service as technical malfunctions.
The reason why Roskomnadzor made such a decision was the recognition by the Prosecutor General's Office of this video as extremist. Because Konstantin Borovoy and Valeria Novodvorskaya accused the Russian authorities of attacking the eastern regions of Ukraine and called on Ukrainians to fight the aggressor.
Let me remind you that the right to block any sites without trial or investigation, on the mere suspicion of extremist materials on it, appeared in the Prosecutor General's Office on 02/01/2014. Having decided that a project is illegal, the oversight agency reports it to Roskomnadzor, which, in turn, without hesitation, includes it in the list of banned sites.
Russian courts block access to YouTube - fiction? Reality!
When last summer there was talk about banned books and films, and about censorship in general, many thought that these were just regular intellectual kitchen talks, and not one of the top priorities on the agenda of the near future. Most people naively believed that in the 21st century it was almost impossible to fight censorship, because there is a comprehensive Internet, they say it costs nothing to create a copy, and if access to one site is blocked, everything will be easily found on another. But in reality, things are somewhat different.
Why is YouTube blocked?
Not so long ago, there was a rumor about a new precedent - YouTube was blocked on June 22 by one of the providers, at the request of the district court, who received a decree from the prosecutor's office. Why's that? The fact is that video hosting was among the 5 sites on which extremist materials were found, on 4 of them it was possible to download Adolf Hitler's book "My Struggle", and YouTube com was blocked for the video "Creation of the Russian Insurgent Army (RPA)". As you can see, there is a very clear trend - if any site has at least some material that falls under the description of "objectionable", then the prosecutor's office, foaming at the mouth, demands to block access to the entire resource, and "the most humane court in the world" quickly and gladly satisfies this requirement.
As a result, a perfectly well-organized mechanism for censoring the Internet of the following type was formed: the local prosecutor's office, in any region (which does not matter), begins to show increased activity to any resource and looks for a little bit suspicious text on it. Further, in order to find out if he does not contain extremism, he is sent for an “examination”, not far away, to his own “scientific center”, in which “scientists”, of course, will enter those assessments based on the result of the examination, which prosecutors need. After that, the prosecutor's office with this "toilet" paper is sent to the court, which, of course, decides that this sequence of words (exclusively!) is strictly prohibited in the Russian Federation. And this text is included in the corresponding list of extremist materials.
Congratulations, the first part of the play is over, let's move on to the second act.
It may already feature completely different prosecutors from a completely different region, who are extremely carefully examining the vastness of the global network for the presence of materials from the prohibited list and, upon finding, require the provider to block YouTube or any other site. What actually happened: YouTube 06/23/2015 blocked in Komsomolsk.
Such a system is extremely selective, destroying all objectionable Internet projects on absolutely legal grounds confirmed by the court.
Now imagine the situation that you wake up the next morning, and your provider informs you that Roskomnadzor has blocked YouTube, VK, OK, FB, blog, torrent tracker, library, whatever. Because you can “find” extremism on every site. Do you think that this fantasy is a matter of the distant future? So no, it's not even tomorrow, it's happening today - ask the residents of Komsomolsk.
Roskomnadzor blocked YouTube, what should I do?
But suppose that an extremely aggressive extremist video really appeared on the site, which should be blocked, only “skillful” providers block the entire service, because of which everyone suffers without exception. Usually these are ordinary users who don’t even know about this video, but as you understand, Roskomnadzor doesn’t give a damn about this. And what if YouTube is blocked? Fortunately, there are methods to bypass the blocking prohibition, we will talk about them further.
Ways to watch a blocked video on YouTube
Nowadays, it is extremely difficult to ban something, especially on the Internet, there is always a way to get around the ban. Watching YouTube videos is no exception. Let's take a look at the three most effective ways to deal with YouTube blocking.
The first method is how to watch a blocked video from YouTube. Using public DNS servers
If an unfortunate nuisance has occurred and YouTube or another social network has been blocked at work, then you don’t need to immediately fall into depression, there is a way out. The bulk of system administrators block certain resources by replacing website IP addresses at the DNS level. In other words, when you try to reach a project by its IP address, DNS will issue another IP address.
The question may arise, why was YouTube blocked by ip, and not through a firewall? The fact is that when blocked through the Firewall, an entire subnet of addresses will be blocked, which can lead to closure to other services. You can bypass such blocking using public DNS servers. There are a lot of them, I will highlight the main 3:
- (the link describes its configuration in detail);
- DNS Yandex 77.88.8.8;
- OpenDNS 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.
Method two. We use anonymizers to access blocked YouTube sites
Anonymizers are online resources that allow you to surf the Internet not directly, but through such services. In other words, we knock on a blocked site not at the front door, but through hidden, but open slots. The most popular anonymizers in the global network are:
- anonymouse.org
- webwarper.net
- hidemyass.com
- hideme.ru
I usually, if necessary, visit Anonymouse.org, so I will give a screenshot of it:
Having entered the site of interest to us in the line and pressing the “Surf anonymously” button, we can easily go in and surf on a seemingly blocked resource.
The third way is how to watch blocked YouTube. We use browser extensions and "anonymous" browsers.
Various programs and extensions for browsers have long been distributed on the network, thanks to which you can get an anonymous login to any site. And as you already understood, anonymous login means bypassing the lock. The most popular extensions that use proxy servers are FoxyProxy, Stealthy and Anonimox. To install one of them, you should go to Tools in your browser, go to the extension tab, enter the name you want to install in the search bar and, in fact, install it.
The “separate” Tor browser has proven itself very well. It does not work as a standalone program, but based on your favorite web browser. Download it, install it and start working through the huge network of proxy servers it connects to. We can say with full confidence that Tor is a fail-safe method of gaining access to any blocked resource, including YouTube. There are other similar browsers, but less popular: PirateBrowser and Ultraserf.
I will talk about all extensions and browsers in more detail in my next articles, but for now, you can check out the video that describes the use of the Anonimox extension in Firefox.
Youtube is the most popular video hosting not only in Russia but all over the world. Millions of people visit it every day to post their videos, watch other people's work, or even stumble upon a video embedded on the site that is uploaded to Youtube. It is difficult to imagine the Internet without video hosting from Google, but there are problems in which you cannot access it. What to do if youtube is blocked, and how to watch videos on it - we will tell in this article.
Why Youtube is blocked?
Video hosting from Google contains millions of videos, and the corporation has set up special algorithms that allow you to remove all illegal content uploaded, videos of erotic content and videos that receive a lot of complaints. In this regard, it is unlikely that Youtube can be blocked by the relevant authorities. However, there are some confusions that lead to temporary or permanent blocking of Youtube on the user's computer or network. Most often, access to video hosting is closed due to:
- Restrictions on the part of the network administrator who has banned access to Youtube and social networks to increase the productivity of company employees or for other reasons;
- Due to a failure on the computer's DNS, which does not allow you to connect intelligently to the Youtube IP address;
- Due to the blocking of the site by the provider, which can occur when there is a complaint about a video that has not been removed from Youtube for a long time, but contains, according to Roskomnadzor, content that violates the law.
If Youtube is blocked specifically on your network, there are several ways to solve the problem, and we will talk about them below.
Access to blocked Youtube through anonymizer sites
There is a whole group of sites on the Internet that are united under the general name "anonymizers". They are an online proxy through which you can access almost any resource. If you have been blocked by ip-address on a website, forum, blog, or even Youtube, you can access it through the "anonymizer".
This must be done as follows:
After that, the Youtube website will open, which will look as usual, but you may see strange characters in the address bar, since the connection to the hosting was made through a third-party service that hides the ip address.
This method helps when not only Youtube is blocked, but also any other site. In this case, there is no difference - access to the resource is limited by the provider, the administrator of a particular local network, or for other reasons.
Access blocked Youtube using Google's DNS servers
In the event that access to Youtube is blocked at the corporate network level, most likely the restrictions are registered through DNS. This method, unlike the Firewall, allows you to impose a ban on access to a specific site, and not to all Google services. Accordingly, with a strong desire, you can unblock access to Youtube, if you can edit the network connection that is active on the computer.
To access the Youtube website using Google's DNS servers, you need to do the following:
That's it, from now on, even if the network administrator has set restrictions on access to Youtube via DNS, you will be able to use video hosting, thanks to Google's addresses registered directly.
Also, if Youtube is blocked, it can be accessed through an anonymous browser or extension that gives anonymous access to sites. However, if there is a need to go specifically to the blocked Google video hosting, then the two methods described above are more than enough.
