I found the premise of this article [0], that throttling connections (based on SNI) is new, a little amusing. It reminds me of how Iran implemented a very similar technique almost a decade ago [1]. I don't know of earlier uses of throttling as a censorship mechanism, at this scale, before the early-2010's (but I'd be interested in learning about them, if anyone knows).
An earlier article about Roskomnadzor's implementation is interesting [2], for those who missed it.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/russias-twitter-throttling-may-give-... [1] https://ooni.org/post/iran-internet-censorship/#reported-cases-of-internet-c... [2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/a-russian-isp-confirms-roskomnadzors...
I agree that SNI-based throttling is not new. The new things are: 1) throttling in Russia, 2) distributed while centralized setup of the throttling equipment. The second is different from the previous state of the filtering in Russia and is somewhat different compared to previous reports on China and Iran.
On Wed, Apr 07, 2021 at 05:59:07PM +0300, Leonid Evdokimov wrote:
I agree that SNI-based throttling is not new. The new things are:
- throttling in Russia, 2) distributed while centralized setup of the
throttling equipment. The second is different from the previous state of the filtering in Russia and is somewhat different compared to previous reports on China and Iran.
Yes, that is a good clarification, thanks. The article mentions that the middleboxes are deployed at the ISPs but the filters are centrally maintained and updated - and this is different from our (my?) understanding of filter lists used in China (ad hoc?) and Iran (unknown?).
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Leonid Evdokimov -
Matthew Finkel