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Opera Browser Asked to Blacklist Pirate Sites in 'Turbo Mode' (torrentfreak.com)
Opera web browser's 'Turbo Mode' is designed to speed up browsing. As a side effect, it also bypasses website blocks, something popular with pirates. However, it appears that the company has been in talks to integrate a blacklist which could stop access to blocked domains. From a report on TorrentFreak: It transpires that earlier this year, Opera's owners were approached by Russian telecoms watchdog Roskomnadzor who aired concerns about the browser's ability to unblock banned sites. It was suggested that Opera should introduce some kind of filtering/blacklist mechanism to disallow blocked sites from accessing 'Turbo Mode.' Russian publication Kommersant says that it was able to confirm the nature of the discussions with sources within Opera. And according to Roskomnadzor's Vadim Ampelonsky, a meeting took place between the parties early in the fall. Ampelonsky says that discussion surrounded the technical issues of keeping blocked sites inaccessible when 'Turbo Mode' is activated. Representatives from Opera reportedly confirmed that this kind of filtering is possible. "We are ready to periodically send a list of sites to enter into such a filter at the conclusion of a bilateral agreement [with Opera]," Ampelonsky says, adding that discussions continue.
Turbo Mode, by it's very nature, also functions as a proxy, since the data needs to go through Opera's servers first to get compressed.
It defeats it by using a proxy to request the page and compress it. Essentially an un-encrypted but compressed VPN. That kind of thing defeats much of the "blocking" today unless the location of the server is also blocked. The easy fix is regional servers, but that has a non-trivial cost.