{"id":1014393,"date":"2026-06-15T07:39:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T02:09:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/?p=1014393"},"modified":"2026-06-15T07:44:06","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T02:14:06","slug":"two-phones-and-an-app-how-russians-skirt-putins-digital-iron-curtain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/2026\/06\/15\/two-phones-and-an-app-how-russians-skirt-putins-digital-iron-curtain\/","title":{"rendered":"Two phones and an app: How Russians skirt Putin&#8217;s digital iron curtain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>MOSCOW: In a quiet cafe popular for its free Wi-Fi and good coffee, a Russian interior designer logs onto a virtual private network so she can chat with friends abroad using the U.S. messaging service WhatsApp, which is blocked inside Russia. <\/p>\n<p>Later, she toggles off the VPN to buy a ticket on the Russian Railways website, which bars anyone using the tools to obscure their location. She then picks up a second phone to check for messages from clients on the state-controlled app MAX. Since the Kremlin ratcheted up control over the internet this year,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>MOSCOW: In a quiet cafe popular for its free Wi-Fi and good coffee, a Russian interior designer logs onto a virtual private network so she can chat with friends abroad using the U.S. messaging service WhatsApp, which is blocked inside Russia. Later, she toggles off the VPN to buy a ticket on the Russian Railways website, which bars anyone using the tools to obscure their location. She then picks up a second phone to check for messages from clients on the state-controlled app MAX. Since the Kremlin ratcheted up control over the internet this year,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,60,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1014393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newspapers","category-telecom-the-economic-times","category-the-economic-times"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1014393"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1014410,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014393\/revisions\/1014410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1014393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1014393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1014393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}