Hello,
Over the next year, the OONI team will be building native OONI Probe
apps for Windows and macOS. Hopefully this will make it easier to
install and run OONI Probe, and to engage others with censorship
measurement research.
To implement these apps, OONI started off by carrying out research to
decide what technology stack to use, and the high-level architecture.
The OONI team experimented with various solutions and documented their
advantages and disadvantages. OONI's Arturo published a blog post
outlining the architecture and design considerations that we made for
the implementation of OONI Probe desktop apps, as a result of research
and experimentation with a variety of libraries and approaches.
This document, outlining the rationale behind our choices for the apps,
is available here:
https://ooni.torproject.org/post/writing-a-modern-cross-platform-desktop-apā¦
Always open to your feedback and suggestions.
~ The OONI team.
--
Maria Xynou
Research and Partnerships Coordinator
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.torproject.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E
Hello Oonitarians,
Today the Data Driven Journalism project published our article on
"Investigating internet censorship with OONI data", which you can read
here: http://datadrivenjournalism.net/resources/ooni_data
Cheers,
Maria.
--
Maria Xynou
Research and Partnerships Coordinator
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.torproject.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E
Hello Oonitarians,
The OONI team met in Montreal for a 4-day meeting (right before the Tor
meeting) between 7th-10th October 2017.
We published a post where we share:
* The main things we're working on these days
* Information about the sessions we held at our meeting and session notes
* Meeting outcomes
You can read this post here:
https://ooni.torproject.org/post/ooni-team-meeting-montreal-2017/
We'd love to hear your thoughts and address any questions you may have.
Cheers,
Maria.
--
Maria Xynou
Research and Partnerships Coordinator
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.torproject.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E
Hello Oonitarians,
Today, in collaboration with Bytes for All Pakistan, the Open
Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) published a research report
examining internet censorship in Pakistan over the the last three years.
The report, titled "*Internet Censorship in Pakistan: Findings from
2014-2017*", is available here:
https://ooni.torproject.org/post/pakistan-internet-censorship/https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/920588717508751360
This study includes an analysis of thousands of network measurements
collected (through the use of OONI Probe) from 22 local vantage points
in Pakistan over the last three years.
We *confirm the blocking of 210 URLs in Pakistan*. Explicit blockpages
were served for many of those URLs, while others were blocked by means
of DNS tampering.
In many cases, Pakistani ISPs appear to be applying "smart filters",
selectively blocking access to specific webpages hosted on HTTP, rather
than blocking access to entire domains. Overall, we only found ISPs to
be blocking the HTTP version of sites, potentially enabling censorship
circumvention over HTTPS (for sites that support encrypted HTTPS
connections).
We found a wide range of different types of sites to be blocked,
including LGBT sites, communication tools, and pornography, amongst others.
Notably, most of the blocked URLs include:
* Sites hosting content pertaining to the controversial "Everybody
Draw Mohammed Day"
* Web proxies
The blocking of sites related to "Draw Mohammed Day" is legally
justified under Pakistan's Penal Code, which prohibits blasphemy.
Similarly, the blocking of other sites (such as pornography and other
sites promoting provocative attire) can be justified under Pakistan's
laws and regulations.
However, we also found the *sites of the Baluch and Hazara ethnic
minority groups to be blocked *as well. According to human rights
groups, these minorities have experienced discrimination and abuse by
authorities. These censorship events may be politically motivated.
On a positive note, we found popular communication tools, like WhatsApp
and Facebook Messenger, to be accessible. Quite similarly, the Tor
network was accessible in most networks throughout the testing period.
All data collected from Pakistan is publicly available here:
https://api.ooni.io/files/by_country/PK
~ The OONI team.
--
Maria Xynou
Research and Partnerships Coordinator
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.torproject.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E
Hello Oonitarians,
Today, in collaboration with our friends at Virtual Road, OONI published
a post on the blocking of Catalan referendum sites.
You can read our post here:
https://ooni.torproject.org/post/internet-censorship-catalonia-independenceā¦
This report links to network measurements collected from three local
networks over the last week, examining the blocking of domains
associated to Catalonia's independence referendum.
*Our findings confirm the blocking of 25 Catalan referendum sites
between 25th September 2017 (when OONI Probe testing started) to 1st
October 2017 (referendum day).*
France Telecom Espanya (AS12479) and Euskaltel (AS12338) blocked these
sites by means of DNS tampering, while Telefonica/Movistar (AS3352)
served block pages through the use of HTTP transparent proxies.
While Telecom Espanya and Euskaltel were not found to be blocking seized
.cat domains, we found Telefonica to be serving block pages even for
.cat domains already seized.
This case highlights the need to measure internet censorship everywhere,
even in countries that we consider to be less likely to censor information.
We can't go back in time and run measurements, but we can always be
prepared. ;)
You can consider running OONI Probe in your country through our
installation information here: https://ooni.torproject.org/install/
You can also explore OONI data further here:
https://explorer.ooni.torproject.org/world/
All the best,
Maria.
--
Maria Xynou
Research and Partnerships Coordinator
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.torproject.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E