News Blocking
 

Currently in London, the link below was blocked both by Project Fi mobile hotspot and Sprint mobile hotspot (they do not overlap). Booted up Witopia VPN using Austin server via project FI and was able to see it. Consider this a thread of news blocking and ways around it. Mods move if I missed an older thread. Ignore if you don't care about news blocking that you can work around. Just for more detail I was using Verisign DNS servers, and I have Blokada and Netguard, no root, on my Moto X4. Those may have caused the issue, but likely not.

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/lat...es-homes-shops

FWIW I just tried accessing that article using a hotspot with a Fi SIM card and was able to load it without issue. However, I'm in the US using a MacBook Pro with default DNS settings, so that may be a factor too (though my understanding is that roaming usually causes all data to go through the home country anyway).

As for getting around blocks, VPN is probably one's best bet. That's not 100%, however; I've heard of Netflix and similar being able to determine the country you're in even when connected to one.

I suspect that Blokada or netguard are the root of the problem. I've never experienced any "blocking" on Fi whilst in London.

Are you able to access other pages on that same website, or is the entire website unavailable?

if it's just that one link, then it's something on your device or the target website that's doing the blocking. The URL is HTTPS, so it's encrypted, which means that nobody other than the two endpoints knows which actual page on the website you're attempting to access, and thus can't selectively block it.

So yeah, my money would be on Blokada and Netguard.