What does it mean that access to a resource is limited? What to do if content is not available in your region

This FAQ is based on personal experience ★ ★ ★ ★ ★. The article went viral, becoming a classic. This guide is intended rather for general development of users and for webmasters. You don't need to use it to access sites of scoundrels like dark junkies - you'll be better off.

What to do if your provider blocks access to the site?

If, when you try to open a website in your browser, the message “Dear users! We apologize, but access to the requested resource is limited...", "Dear subscriber! Access to the Internet resource you requested is limited...”, “The resource at this IP address is blocked...”, “The domain name of this site is blocked...” or similar - this means your Internet provider is blocking a bad site. In addition to the provider that provides your access to the Internet, you may be denied access by the site administrator, browser, system administrator at work, or a virus or antivirus on your computer. The provider is usually easy to recognize by the message; unlike a virus, he will not ask you to send an SMS. Although it happens simply “the site’s certificate is invalid”, “the site is temporarily unavailable”, “the page is unavailable”, “the site was not found” and goodbye. But the site is available to other people. Therefore, it is useful to know how to bypass blocking your access to the site, of course, if various other Internet resources open.
Fast decision: click this link - Chameleon - and enter the address of the blocked site.
A little more detail:
— If you cannot open a blocked resource from Google, the search engine has a “Saved Copy” of the page in its cache. True, without the style of the site and pictures, the text alone is of little interest to anyone.
— If access to a video on YouTube is limited, you can download an mp4 video file, for example, via savefrom.net and watch it on your computer or smart phone.
— If you still need to go to the site, you can try different anonymizers. For example this one. But anonymizers are inferior tools: many do not support the https protocol, violate website design, etc. In addition, Roskomnadzor achieved the adoption of a law limiting the ability of anonymizers to provide access to prohibited sites from November 1, 2017.
— If you want to open the site fully, proxies are provided in stationary browsers. Lists of proxy servers are regularly published on special sites, for example spys.ru or freeproxylists.net. Public proxies do not last long, but there are a lot of them - there is always a choice.
— If you are unable to open the site right away, the safest thing to do is download Tor Browser. Tor is ideal for anonymous work on the Internet, does not require installation on the system, auto-updates and has a .onion domain, where sites are not blocked and real villains live. It will fully open any website and hide all information from your provider. For Android there is, for example, the TOR nado browser, and for iPhones the Onion Browser.
— If you want to hide traffic from your provider on all your browsers, as well as in ICQ and Skype, install the Virtual Private Network (VPN) utility on your computer or smartphone. VPNs are simple, enable them if necessary, and they are also free, such as SecurityKiss. Especially for Android, there is the Orbot VPN application (and the Orfox browser), which will connect your smartphone to the Internet via the Tor network.
— If you are interested in the easiest way, it’s the Opera browser. Just enable VPN in Opera settings and you can go to any blocked site. The browser for mobile devices Opera - Mini has a traffic saving mode. There is even an Opera VPN smartphone app. If you find and enable Turbo mode in the Yandex desktop browser, this also works well.
— If you are used to the Google Chrome browser, you can install the ZenMate VPN extension for Chrome. Encrypts the connection. Opens all sites. When it is not needed, it is turned off via a button so that it does not slow down. There are also versions of ZenMate for Firefox, Opera, Android and iOS. Proxy extensions for browsers anonymoX and friGate are also popular.
More details: how to bypass site blocking - link.

How to check if a site is blocked by others?

It’s very simple, for this purpose there is a free service for checking website accessibility from different parts of the world.
Take advantage - you might discover something interesting for yourself.

Why does the provider block the site?

Most likely, the site contains information the distribution of which is prohibited by Federal Law of July 28, 2012 N 139-FZ “...On the Protection of Children...”. There is also Lugovoy’s law of December 28, 2013 N 398-FZ on sites with extremist content, Federal Law of July 2, 2013 N 187-FZ on the protection of intellectual rights from sites hosting unlicensed products and the laws of October 2015 “On Gambling” and “ About lotteries”, defining the rules for operating gaming services in the network and blocking their violators.
Roskomnadzor obliges Internet providers to block user access to an Internet resource containing information prohibited by law.
Blocking sites without court is possible after a decision by a federal authority if there is:
- materials with pornographic images of minors or advertisements for the involvement of minors as performers to participate in entertainment events of a pornographic nature;
— information on the methods, methods of development, production and use of narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances and their precursors, places of purchase of such drugs, substances and their precursors, methods and places of cultivation of narcotic plants;
— information about methods of committing suicide, as well as calls to commit suicide;
The very fact of blocking sites by decision of “competent experts” of organizations that determine kosher by eye is definitely arbitrariness and censorship on the Internet, fortunately there are plenty of “violators”. For example, in addition to the courts, State NarcoControl used to be responsible for blocking numerous Internet resources with information about drugs. Now the Ministry of Internal Affairs is working in this field with the same tenacity.
In accordance with Lugovoi's law, the decision to block websites that disseminate calls for mass unrest and contain other extremist information can be made by the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation or his deputies. The Federal Tax Service is responsible for blocking online casinos.
Also subject to blocking are sites containing information the dissemination of which is prohibited by a court decision (drugs and online casinos, prostitution, pornography, forgery of documents, etc., including slander and personal data of citizens). The Moscow City Court deals with pirated copies of films, unlicensed music and literature. At first, cases of court blocking were relatively rare, and there were no statistics. Providers blocked sites on a direct order from the prosecutor's office or a court decision in the city of Mukhosransk, in short, chaos. Over time, provincial prosecutors have come to appreciate the delights of fighting the many faces of virtual evil on the Internet without leaving their office. This was facilitated by the centralization of their efforts under the auspices of Roskomnadzor, which ensured the blocking of nefarious sites throughout the country. It’s clear that the law is the law, and work is work, although, for example, the legality of blocking anonymizers until November 2017 was questionable.
Now, already at the stage of the process, a representative of Roskomnadzor is often present in court, and it is impossible to do without the Unified Register. Roskomnadzor itself files lawsuits in the interests of organizations (the FSKN case against the Krovostok website) and even individual citizens who are offended and injured on the Internet (Syutkin against the Lurkomorye website). There is nothing to argue with here; this option for combating information is by far the most legitimate and fashionable.
Despite the fact that censorship is prohibited by the Constitution of the Russian Federation, this movement has taken on serious proportions and in 2015 the Internet community even introduced error code 451 specifically to indicate pages rejected by censors. To be fair, I note that such activity is not a unique phenomenon for Russia; for example, copyright holders and copyright defenders are active in other countries. But only in the Russian Federation were lobbyists of copyright holders, with the support of Roskomnadzor, able to push through a law on anonymizers.

What is the Unified Register of Prohibited Sites?

A unified register of domain names, indexes of pages of sites on the Internet and network addresses that allow identifying sites on the Internet containing information the distribution of which is prohibited in the Russian Federation - an automated information system and database of sites containing prohibited distribution in Russian information.
The register is managed by Roskomnadzor. The register was created by the Federal Law of July 28, 2012 N 139-FZ “...On the Protection of Children from Information...”, which amended the Federal Law of July 27, 2006 N 149-FZ “On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection”. Subsequently, this law was supplemented more than once.

Does this miracle have an official website?

To access the registry, a special website was set up: zapret-info.gov.ru.
Alas, the average user will not find prohibited sites on the Roskomnadzor website. Only Russian Internet providers and some other categories of “initiates” can and should receive a complete list of prohibited sites. In theory, anyone can find out there whether the site or individual pages of the site they are interested in are in the registry, even before sending this information to providers. This would make sense, for example, for website owners if the information there was reliable.
Although sites blocked by Roskomnadzor by decision of the Prosecutor General's Office and for copyright infringement are on other lists, they are often collectively called the registry of prohibited sites.
In addition, Roskomnadzor maintains the Register of Information Dissemination Organizers and the Register of News Aggregators, but sites from these registers are not prohibited or blocked.

Where can I find a list of all banned sites?

You can view the full list of prohibited sites that Internet providers receive, the history of adding and deleting Internet resources from it, and also find all prohibited sites (including those blocked by Roskomnadzor by court decision) here: rublacklist.net.
At the same address you can view other Roskomnadzor registers. All this is on the Roskomsvoboda website, I publish messages on it under the nickname Leonid Balagurov.

How does an ISP block a site?

First, someone must ban the site and notify Roskomnadzor, which adds the following to the list of prohibited sites:
- usually the so-called uniform resource locator - site page URL,
- sometimes the entire site (domain name),
— in addition, the IP address of the site is entered (which is the same for any page of this site).
Roskomnadzor then informs the hosting provider and, if available, the site owner that non-kosher content must be removed. If it is not removed, the site included in the list of prohibited sites is transmitted to all telecom operators (including your Internet service provider). It should limit your access to the Internet resource. In this case, the provider himself chooses the method of limiting access to prohibited information, depending on the technical means available to him.
Previously, providers widely practiced IP blocking. As a result, other innocent sites that had the same IP address were also blocked. This caused serious criticism and forced most providers to abandon this bad practice. Today, most providers are technically capable of providing page-by-page blocking of http sites by URL and have even begun to use it instead of the simpler blocking of any entire site. But according to the https protocol, a site’s entire domain is blocked if at least one of its pages is blocked.
Please check with your provider for details once you have chosen it. At the very least, do not hesitate to email the provider’s support service and find out if the reason for blocking a site is not clear to you. This is the question of what to do if the site is blocked... You can first check whether the site is on the list of prohibited sites (link above).
Foreign Internet providers, in principle, should not block access to citizens of other countries to sites banned in the Russian Federation, but there have been precedents.

Who exactly censors the Internet?

When compiling a list of prohibited sites, Roskomnadzor is guided by the decisions of the following bodies:
Ministry of Internal Affairs (drug trafficking) - 2%
State Drug Control (drugs) - 20%
Roskomnadzor (child porn) - 10%
Rospotrebnadzor (suicide) - 1%
Moscow City Court (copyright) - 9%
Courts (all) - 28%
Prosecutor General's Office (extremism) - 4%
Federal Tax Service (online casino) - 26%

Also, according to the law on mirrors of pirated sites, the decision to restrict access to them can be made by the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications.
Probably, in most cases, the censors themselves begin the process of blocking the site in order to report on their useful activities for society. But basically, the procedures for adding a non-kosher site to the list of prohibited sites and removing it from the list are followed.
Legal proceedings are generally dreary, so pages blocked by courts are rarely removed from the Register; the Lurkomorye website is a pleasant exception for now. And when the main page of a resource is banned, this is almost equivalent to a domain ban... However, the practice of changing the domain name by website owners after they are blocked has also become widespread. Therefore, a law was passed on the prompt blocking of mirrors of pirated sites, that is, their copies that have a different domain name.

Material from Rulus

Sites are blocked at the request of Russian government agencies. Roskomnadzor maintains a list (registry) of prohibited sites, and providers are required to block people's access to them. For example, the Prosecutor General's Office can, without a court decision, restrict access to sites that call for mass unrest, illegal demonstrations and marches, incitement to hatred, and participation in extremist and terrorist activities (Law 398-FZ). Also included in the register are sites (pages) that violated the law “On the Protection of Children from Harmful Information.”

In Russia, in particular, the sites Grani.ru and Kasparov.ru are blocked (more details below:). When you try to open any of the blocked sites, a message appears "Dear users! We apologize, but access to the requested resource is limited."

On November 9, 2015, the Moscow City Court decided to “permanently block” the popular torrent tracker RuTracker (the decision should come into force on December 9). This was done at the request of copyright holders. On December 4, a second decision was made on permanent blocking.

How to bypass the blocking?

On the computer

• The Tor Browser Project is an easy and popular way. You need to download and install the browser (you can choose the Russian version). Be prepared for the fact that pages will open noticeably slower than usual. There are versions for Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
• Roskomsvoboda OpenRunet project - open the site and you will be prompted to install an extension that matches your browser.
• Browsec extension for Chrome, Firefox, Opera browsers. There are free and paid versions (the paid version has faster servers).
• ZenMate extension for Chrome and Firefox browsers (there is no version for Internet Explorer). Widely known. Upon activation, you will be asked for an email address.
• friGate extension for Mozilla Firefox and Chrome. Quite convenient, does not require preliminary configuration. The developer claims that there is no loss in website opening speed.
• Opera browser with built-in VPN (appeared in version 40). At first, the VPN function will be turned off; you will need to activate it in the browser settings in the “Security” section. After this, a VPN icon will appear in the browser; clicking on it will turn the VPN function on and off.
• Opera browser old version 12 with Opera Turbo mode enabled. You can enable this mode in the status bar (usually at the bottom) or with the Ctrl-F12 key combination.
• Alternative DNS network Emercoin - requires setting up a network connection on your computer, allows you to access blocked sites whose owners have registered alternative addresses in this network (for example, rutracker.lib). Description | Setup instructions with pictures.
• Web proxies (proxy servers available through web services) - you open the website of a particular service, insert the link you want to open there, and the service opens it. One of the easiest to use is ProxFree, it does not add advertising on its own. You can also try ProxyWeb or Hide My Ass! (Russian equivalent - Hideme.ru).
• VPN (virtual private network) - this is usually paid, but you can pay for a month to try it out. Well-known are NordVPN (from $3 per month), AltVPN, Hide My Ass! Pro VPN, SecureVPN, PureVPN, Witopia, Overplay, Strong VPN. Pay attention also to the interesting free project SimplyVPN.AntiBan - it can be used both as a proxy server and as a VPN (gives access to blocked sites, and you access the rest as usual). They also have VPN access for $1 per month.

Why is the site blocked?

On March 13, 2014, Roskomnadzor blocked the websites Grani.ru, Kasparov.ru, Ezh.ru and Echo of Moscow (grani.ru, kasparov.ru, ej.ru). Also, access to Live Journal (livejournal.com) and the Echo of Moscow website (echo.msk.ru) was closed for some time.

As Roskomnadzor press secretary Vadim Ampelonsky told Interfax, the websites Grani.ru, Kasparov.ru, Ezh.ru contain calls for illegal activities and participation in mass events held in violation of the established order.

The temporary blocking of LiveJournal and the Echo of Moscow website was associated with the request of the Prosecutor General's Office to block Alexei Navalny's blog on LiveJournal, copies of entries from which were posted on the Echo of Moscow website.

As of March 14, LiveJournal no longer provided access to Navalny’s blog in Russia; Echo of Moscow stopped hosting it. Access to both sites is now allowed.

Grani.ru was initially blocked at the request of the Prosecutor General’s Office for “illegal appeals,” but prosecutors never reported exactly what materials on Grani contained these “appeals” (thus, the prosecutors themselves violated the law). In January 2015, Grani.ru received a second warning from Roskomnadzor in six months, and now the publication can be closed by court, in accordance with media legislation. The second warning was related to a publication illustrated with a photograph of the cover of Charlie Hebdo magazine with a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad.

Unfortunately, completely harmless sites are often blocked, which, by an unfortunate coincidence, are hosted on the same server as a site that is disliked by the authorities. This happens because they have the same IP address, and providers (Rostelecom and others) have the right to block a site not by domain name, but by IP address. In Russia, 93% of all blocked sites (about 70,000 pages) were banned for no reason, along with prohibited materials. In this case, it is recommended to simply use one of the methods to bypass the blocking listed above (as long as they work).

In the summer of 2015, Roskomnadzor demanded that Wikipedia remove information from an article that was declared prohibited by a Russian court. The Wikipedia community refused to do this because the article complied with the rules of the project. Then Roskomnadzor instructed Internet providers to block the article, but since Wikipedia uses a secure connection (HTTPS), the providers could not block just one article, and began to block the entire Wikipedia site. On the same day, Roskomnadzor excluded the article from the register of prohibited information, saying that the article had been edited and they were satisfied with it. Since the article hasn't actually changed, we can conclude that something else influenced Roskomnadzor's decision.

In general, it should be recognized that at the moment the Russian authorities have every opportunity to block any site, and they do not even need to explain to anyone the reasons for the blocking. Without the use of special means, access to such a site on the territory of Russia will be impossible.

The human rights group "Agora" released a report, "Internet Freedom 2015: The Triumph of Censorship," dedicated to restrictions on Internet freedom in Russia. During this year, more than 9,000 acts of censorship were counted.

Why is the site unblocked, but you can’t access it?

If you know that a previously blocked site has already been unblocked, but you still cannot access it (the message “access is limited”), try completely refreshing the page using the key combination Ctrl-F5.

Access to the requested resource is limited by Roskomnadzor. A cruel joke with the normal operation of a simple website that does not violate the law.

For about six months now, my subscribers have periodically complained that they cannot watch the video lessons they signed up for in the email newsletter. The messages were of a different nature, but in meaning they were very similar.

Subscribers wrote that the site simply does not open or that when clicking on a link from an email, the following message appears:

Dear users! We apologize, but access to the requested resource is limited.
Possible reasons for restricting access:

Here is a screen with “Access to the requested resource is restricted.”

1. Access is limited by court decision or on other grounds established by the legislation of the Russian Federation.
2. A network address that allows you to identify a site on the Internet is included in the Unified Register of domain names, page indexes of Internet sites and network addresses that allow you to identify sites on the Internet containing information the distribution of which is prohibited in the Russian Federation.

You can check the availability of a network address in the Unified Register in the “View the Register” section on the website http://eais.rkn.gov.ru

1. A network address that allows you to identify a site on the Internet is included in the Register of domain names, indexes of pages of sites on the Internet and network addresses that allow you to identify sites on the Internet containing information distributed in violation of exclusive rights.

   You can check the availability of a network address in the Register in the “View the Register” section on the website nap.rkn.gov.ru.

Having checked your website in the ROSKOMNADZOR register, the website and the IP address on which it is located are not listed in the register of prohibited ones.

A letter to the support service asking to explain the reason for blocking the site did not yield any results. Below I attach the correspondence.

"Hello.

My name is Alexander Novikov, my personal website with my video tutorials located at http://just-sites.ru is mistakenly issued in some areas as “RESTRICTED ACCESS”. Here is a photo that my subscribers sent me:

I checked my site in the register of prohibited sites http://nap.rkn.gov.ru/reestr

The site is not listed as a page in the register on the grounds provided for in Article 15.2 of Federal Law No. 149-FZ of July 27, 2006

I am attaching screenshots.

I didn't have any restrictions, the site worked perfectly without any problems.

Now I have taken 2 steps that should solve this situation.

1) I purchased a new domain for the site and a full copy of the site works at http://izi-site.ru The site is located on a different hosting, which means a different IP address of the site.

2) A letter was sent to the support service of OJSC Rostelecom http://www.rostelecom.ru/contacts with a request to resolve the problem with blocking the site in various regions, a response has not yet been received.

I contacted Rostelecom through correspondence with clients and my subscribers who had my site blocked, most of them had one provider, in 70% of cases it turned out to be Rostelecom, some had a local provider, which was most likely an intermediary .

I hope my article will help you solve a similar situation if your site experiences similar blocks from providers.

As soon as I receive a response from Rostelecom, I will immediately write in the comments.
I apologize to everyone who was unable to get to the lessons page after subscribing.

Quick creation of a simple website: http://izi-site.ru

One “fine” day, when you try to access a website, you may see, instead of this site, a page with the following message: “ Dear users! We apologize, but access to the requested resource is limited”, or with this: “ Blocked by decision of federal executive authorities”, and like this: “ The resource at this IP address is blocked by decision of government authorities”.

If your provider Beeline, then this message might look like this:

If you have ErTelecom or Home ru, you might see something like this:

Rostelecom gives this:

Most often, this means that this site has in some way violated the legislation of the Russian Federation, and upon request Roskomnadzor your Internet service provider has blocked access to it.

But it may also be that this site is blocked illegally. Perhaps it is located on the same server with the “law-breaking site” and they have . And Roskomnadzor or your provider, without understanding who is right and who is wrong, simply blocked access to this IP.

If you want to find out the reason for the blocking, you need to go to the website Roskomnadzor, where the Unified Register of Prohibited Sites is located.

Here we enter the name of the blocked site into the search bar, then enter the captcha and click the “Find” button:

If the blocked resource is not found simply by the domain name, do not rush to rejoice. You also need to check URL, and by IP address(see how to find out the IP address of a site).

In my case, when I entered the full site URL (this is when with http://www.), it turned out that he was indeed included in the register. It was also found by IP address.

This means that the provider has rightly blocked access to this resource. The specific reasons for blocking should already be understood by the owner of this site - your authority ends there.

If you have checked the site in all ways (by domain name, IP address, and URL), and it is not in the registry of prohibited sites, then you need to contact your Internet provider. This can be done by calling tech. support, or better yet, write to the official forum for subscribers. Almost all providers, even the smallest ones, have their own forum. Let them explain to you the reason for blocking the site.

What to do if you encounter an unpleasant surprise: the site you need is blocked by your provider? First of all, there is no need to worry, swear or give up. Even an inexperienced user can gain access to a site blocked by an ISP in a matter of minutes if he uses one of the four main ways to overcome blocking.

Often, users visiting their favorite site see something like this: “Dear users! We apologize, but access to the requested resource is limited.” At the same time, the site does not open in any browser: Yandex, Chrome, Opera, Firefox, etc. What options do you have in this case?

Method one: anonymizers.

Anonymizers are intermediary sites, thanks to which you can go to any page without revealing your IP (for example: http://cameleo.ru; http://noblockme.ru/; http://2ip.ru/anonim/ and so on .). On the main page of the anonymizer there is an address bar in which you just need to enter the address of the “forbidden” site and it will open. The advantage of this method is ease of use and accessibility. Cons: 1) many pages load slowly; 2) the owners of the anonymizer can intercept personal data and use it to their advantage (not realistic, but possible).

Method two: change the browser extension.

If access to a resource is limited, you can try to get it by installing the friGate extension in your browser. To install it on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera browsers, just go to the developers’ website https://fri-gate.org/ru/, select a browser and click on the “Install” button. The application installs instantly; after installation, an icon appears on the browser panel indicating that it is working. Unlike anonymizers, the use of friGate does not in any way affect the speed of page loading, but it automatically opens only those sites that are included in its list, and the user must add all others to the list independently.

Method three: connect a VPN.

The essence of how a VPN private virtual network works is easiest to understand by imagining a wide and clearly visible highway, under which an invisible tunnel is laid. The highway is a public Internet channel, the tunnel is a VPN through which you can access any website. VPN not only provides anonymity, but also encrypts the transmitted data. You can connect to it here: http://hideme.ru/vpn/, however, on a paid basis.

Method four: Tor.

The program, created by supporters of Internet freedom and distributed free of charge on the website www.torproject.us, will not only eliminate the question “How to unblock a site?”, but will also make the user elusive to intelligence agencies. Tor Browser provides a level of anonymity unattainable by other options; it opens all sites, but its installation requires a separate browser and certain skills. You can't count on high speed either.

Having discovered that your favorite site has been blocked, you can use other methods besides those described above, in particular, try to change the network connection settings yourself, setting 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as DNS servers, or use the Ultrasurf or JAP programs.