Speaker A
Hi. Over the past year, Russia has seen so many blocks, throttles, and other nonsense that a sane person can hardly believe this is happening in a country with such a great history. And naturally, in response to all these blocks, as many ways to bypass them as possible have appeared. There are free ones, paid ones, ones you can trust, and ones you should avoid. Today, I want to test the most popular ways to bypass blocks in Russia using my own personal experience. Every method someone comes across when they need to bypass, say, Telegram. Before we start, like this video and subscribe to my channel. Let's go. Today, we have three paths for bypassing blocks. These are free VPN apps from app stores like the Play Store or App Store. VPN extensions for PC browsers. That's exactly how I bypassed blocks when it first started, about a year and a half ago. And the third way, the most popular among citizens, is paid VPN services. These can be found on Telegram, and some have their own websites. Of course, each of these methods has its pros and cons, but some have more than others. Our task today is to identify which of these is best and most comfortable for bypassing blocks. We'll start with free VPN services from the Play Store or App Store. In my case, I'm afraid to download such things on my phone, so we're using a cheap Android burner for a couple of thousand rubles. Also, I'll say right away that I will only buy a subscription to VPNs that initially satisfy me and don't scare me off, at least with their price or design and free servers. We type "VPN" into the Play Store and get a bunch of copy-paste apps, diluted with a few exclusives. But most of them are inflating their ratings and review counts one way or another. Out of everything here, I've selected only two VPNs. One is Hero VPN. I saw a video about them on YouTube, and that’s at least some kind of so-called reputation. And the second is Fire VPN, just because it’s popular. And some people in the comments wrote that they use it specifically. Let's start by opening Fire VPN, wait for the calibration, and that's it, we're ready to bypass all the blocks. On the free subscription, we have access to four servers and an auto-select feature that will automatically choose the best server. In the list of countries for the paid subscription, I don't see a whitelist bypass, but if you click to buy a subscription, they claim it's there and you can bypass whitelists. But I’ll be surprised if this VPN even handles YouTube properly over Wi-Fi. So, we choose the fastest server, tap the fire icon, and connect to the VPN. I go to YouTube, and in principle, I’ve logged in, but the loading speed leaves much to be desired. It feels like about a megabyte per second here. I also decided to check if this server might bypass whitelists, but no, it didn't. By the way, yes, a paid subscription costs 250 rubles a month here. Well, when they claim on a free server that it loads at full speed, but in reality, it barely loads YouTube, I don't really want to buy a VPN with such download speed measurements. In general, it's better to steer clear of this VPN. Next, we launch Hero VPN and go through some tutorials, like in a game. We skip authorization and allow notifications. They give us a free one-week subscription, which is actually quite nice. Then they suggest logging in again and for some reason ask to turn on notifications again, even though we already did. Also, the design of this VPN, honestly, is like the games I played on my tablet when I was about 10, back around 2013. For free, we have a couple of servers for regular bypassing and one server for bypassing blockers. As I understand it, that's for whitelists. To start, we just choose the fastest server to bypass YouTube on Wi-Fi. We connect and go to YouTube. Successful again. And yet again, the speed is absolutely terrible. It’s simply impossible to watch Shorts. Even though the VPN claims 600 Mbps, which should be more than enough to watch 4K video. But I can barely watch Shorts. Okay, let’s test the blocker bypass. They only give a gigabyte of traffic for free, but it's still nice. At least it will be enough for something. We turn on mobile data. We connect to the so-called anti-blockers. Or rather, we try to connect. We just have an infinite connection loop here, which just frustrated me. And I don't want to buy a paid subscription for an app like this either. Oh come on, I just couldn't test this anti-blocker at all. What are we even talking about? Clearly, an ordinary user who isn't making a video would also get annoyed, delete it entirely, and look for something else. Of the two free VPNs from the Play Store, it turned out that both drowned in their own incompetence. All sorts of criteria for evaluating VPNs are a negative for these two. The only plus is the convenience of installing the app. Because nowadays, VPN clients like Hub or Vitu are not that easy to download. They are actively being blocked in the Russian App Store. So, in the rest of the video, I will give instructions to users of phones and Apple devices in general on how to download anything you want from the US store that has been blocked in the Russian App Store. Next up is the method I used to use to bypass blocks. This is a browser extension for PC. An immediate downside. It's only for PC and laptop, meaning for your phone... you'll need some other solution to bypass blocks. Well, okay, but it’s easy to launch. Just move the cursor to the right and click once to turn it on. Let's go to the extension store in Google Chrome. To start, I'm downloading the Browsec VPN, which I personally used over a year ago, but stopped when it started failing every day. There is a free subscription and a paid one. The paid version costs a crazy amount for the VPN market—that's 700 rubles per month. Or you could buy a year or two for a much better price, but personally, I don't really see the point of buying for a year. After all, who knows what will happen by then. The timeframe is just too long. Connecting to a free server. Got Lithuania. I enter Instagram with it, and the speed is even worse than it was just now on my Android phone. It’s a complete no-go. But after about two minutes, I finally got into Instagram, and all that was left was to wait, well, maybe an hour for the first posts to load. Basically, it is absolutely impossible to use the internet with this specific VPN. And apparently, free VPNs have their own speed tests, because this Browsec also shows full bars and doesn't load a damn thing. In short, Browsec, just like a year ago, has stopped working, and it’s just impossible to use it now. Sure, maybe if I paid 700 rubles for a month of subscription, it would load fine, but damn, it’s only for the desktop browser. That’s way too expensive. I decided to test one more extension. One just isn't enough. And I found some "VI" VPN at the top of the list. Downloading it. It has a good rating and quite a lot of reviews, which, as I understand, can be bought absolutely anywhere, in any store for games, apps, or extensions. A huge amount. There is also a free and a paid subscription here, with prices starting from 2.5 dollars per month. It’s already alarming that the price is in dollars. Most likely, the target audience is not Russia. Launching the extension. And I gather I was given a full subscription for free for 3 days. That's nice. The Amsterdam server was selected automatically. Trying to connect to it, and it won't connect at all. Just like with the VPN earlier that wouldn't connect to the anti-jamming servers. And here, an "optimal location" is selected. But it's also just an endless connection loop. Also, in general, a crappy method that apparently nobody has used for a long time. But I guess I'm an old man and I remembered it. But even for this garbage, I'm sure some poor sucker logs in once a day or week and pays for it, hoping to bypass blocks, but gets this total piece of crap instead. It’
