Wallstreetoasis.com is blocked in Russia

So, last couple days trying to access WSO, I got the message from my ISP (short translation):
Dear users!

We apologize, but access to this website is forbidden. Possible reasons for this might be:
1. Address of the website is included in the List of Forbidden Websites.
2. Access to the website is forbidden upon the decision of the Russian court or other reasons prescribed by the Russian legislation.

Yes, there is List of Forbidden Sites in Russia, maintained by governmental bodies. It was introduced last year and official reason for it was "limiting the access to propaganda of suicide, drug taking and extremism".

Since the introduction there were a lot of websites / webpages added to the List, among which these:
- Page with strip comics making fun the List
- Video from Australian metro authorities "Dumb Ways To Die"
- Page with description of virtual drugs in some online game.

And many more. And this (wrongly picked content to ban) is only first problem with the List. Another one is the way how the ban works. In short (at least as I have learnt): bodies maintaining the List send to all major ISPs the notification that the following site should be banned for all the users. I am not sure how ISPs do this, because in last months I have seen various situations. Quite often ISP bans just IP address or even range of IP addresses associated with the bad (let's assume it's fairly bad, not like examples above) website, and all other sites that are hosted in the same range become unavailable. I guess this is what happened to WSO, too. It just shares IP range with some site that was added to the List recently. Not all ISPs block WSO (e.g. I am able to access the site from the office), but at least major Russian ISP "Rostelecom" (and its subsidiaries) ban it for sure.

Of course, experienced PC users easily find workarounds (the easiest is to use Opera browser with "Opera Turbo" mode on - it just streams traffic through their server, works kinda like proxy but without much effort from the user). But this is just sad how it works. Wanted to share. Peace!