In the Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia, along with a significant restriction of access to YouTube, some VPN services have stopped working. This was reported to Donbas Realii by local residents, UNN reports.
Details
According to the publication, it is currently impossible to open YouTube with many free VPN services in Donetsk and Luhansk.
The monitoring of Lantern, NTHLink and Psiphon conducted by local residents for Donbas Realities showed that Lantern and NTHLink services are not fully operational.
Currently, both the paid and free versions of Psiphon provide access to YouTube (but it is no longer possible to download the free version of the developer, only Psiphon Pro is offered).
In addition, residents report that VPN Clear, Planet VPN, VPN Ukraine, and Super VPN are still working. Clear is developed by the Ukrainian company MacPaw, and Planet VPN is developed by the Romanian Free VPN Planet. The other two services do not have clear information about their developers: "VPN Ukraine is owned by AltApps, whose country of registration is unknown, and Super VPN is owned by SuperSoftTech, also with an unknown registration, and in 2020, this VPN was involved in a large data leak.
Donbas Realiy's subscribers also write about the VPN shutdown in their comments, in particular, they refer to the NTHLink service, on the basis of which an exploit was developed for residents of the occupied territories.
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The ZaTelecom telegram channel, authored by IT expert and executive director of the Society for the Protection of the Internet Mikhail Klimarev, recorded a record drop in YouTube traffic in Russia on December 23. He analyzed traffic data through Google's monitoring service and based on it made a graph of YouTube's slowdown, which shows that access to the video hosting service had been significantly restricted for several days before. The channel stated that "YouTube is de facto blocked in Russia.
The Internet in the occupied territories of Ukraine is controlled according to the same principle as in Russia.