Hello,
Today we published a report on the blocking of social media in Burundi
amid its 2020 general election.
You can read the report here:
https://ooni.org/post/2020-burundi-blocks-social-media-amid-election/
OONI measurements collected from Burundi reveal the blocking of 18
social media platforms on 20th May 2020 (election day), including
skype.com, youtube.com, whatsapp.com, twitter.com, facebook.com,
instagram.com -- among many others.
These sites appear to be blocked -- on Econet (AS37336) and Viettel
Burundi (AS327799) -- through the use of some form of Deep Packet
Inspection (DPI) technology, as the blocking only occurs when we attempt
to establish an HTTPS connection (resulting in connection reset errors),
as opposed to the IPs being blocked or the DNS queries being interfered
with.
OONI data also shows the blocking of the WhatsApp and Telegram apps, and
suggests that access to Facebook Messenger was blocked too.
Interestingly, the blocking of Facebook Messenger on the Lacell Burundi
(AS327720) network was implemented on a DNS level by returning an IP
address in the DNS answer which is in the “reserved for future use”
240.0.0.0/8 netblock.
As OONI measurements have been collected from multiple local networks in
Burundi since 2016, we were able to compare measurements over time.
This is the first time that we are observing the blocking of social
media in Burundi, and the blocking clearly appears to have started in
the morning of 20th May 2020, on election day.
You can expand upon this study through the use of OONI Probe
(https://ooni.org/install/) and OONI data (https://ooni.org/data/).
All OONI measurements collected from Burundi are available here:
https://explorer.ooni.org/search?until=2020-05-22&probe_cc=BI
Please help share the report with your networks:
https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/1263488638924587009
Thanks,
~ OONI team.
--
Maria Xynou
Research & Partnerships Director
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E
Hello,
In collaboration with multiple people, we published a report on Women on Web
website blocking in Spain.
The technical report is available here:
https://blog.magma.lavafeld.org/post/women-on-web-blocking/
In this article we describe how the major ISPs in Spain are blocking
womenonweb.org’s website. Spanish ISPs have been blocking this website by means
of DNS manipulation, TCP reset, HTTP blocking with the use of a Deep Packet
Inspection (DPI) infrastructure. Our data analysis is based on network
measurements from OONI data. This is the first time that we observe Women on Web
being blocked in Spain.
Stay safe.
Best,
~Vasilis
--
PGP Fingerprint: 8FD5 CF5F 39FC 03EB B382 7470 5FBF 70B1 D126 0162
PGP Public Key:
https://keys.openpgp.org/vks/v1/by-fingerprint/8FD5CF5F39FC03EBB38274705FBF…
Hello,
In collaboration with OTF Fellow Phyu Kyaw, we published a report on the
recent blocking of 174 domains in Myanmar.
This report is available here:
https://ooni.org/post/2020-myanmar-blocks-websites-amid-covid19/
In March 2020, ISPs in Myanmar received a directive from authorities to
block access to 230 websites, but this list of sites hasn't been
publicly disclosed.
Telenor Myanmar revealed that this list includes websites that are
considered to spread "fake news" around COVID-19.
We analyzed OONI measurements collected from Myanmar and confirmed the
DNS based blocking of 174 domains on Telenor Myanmar (many of these
sites are blocked on other local networks too).
The blocking appears to be implemented at the DNS level because OONI
measurements show that Telenor Myanmar returned the IP addresses of a
Digital Ocean machine hosting a block page, instead of the real IP of
the host.
Many of the blocked domains include news outlets, some of which are
based in Rakhine. Several ethnic media websites are among those
confirmed blocked.
Under the "blocked news outlets" section of our report, we compare the
confirmed blocked news websites with the Myanmar Press Council's "fake
news" list, to see how many of the blocked sites were included in that list.
As most of the blocked news websites are not included in the official
"fake news" list, transparency around which URLs are specifically
blocked (especially when they involve the sites of vulnerable
communities) and why/how they are viewed as “fake news” is essential,
particularly amid a global pandemic when access to information is crucial.
In our report, we list the full list of blocked sites in the appendix,
we share relevant OONI measurements for the blocked news outlets, and we
link to a CSV file that contains all of the raw OONI measurements pertaining
to all of the blocked sites (which can otherwise be found through OONI
Explorer:
https://explorer.ooni.org/search?until=2020-05-07&probe_cc=MM&test_name=web…).
Please help share this research:
https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/1258042964040876032
Thanks,
~ OONI team.
--
Maria Xynou
Research & Partnerships Director
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E
Hello friends,
Hope you're all staying safe and healthy.
I'm reaching out because we'd like to improve OONI Run
(https://run.ooni.io/) and we need your feedback!
Please take a few minutes to complete our survey:
https://ooni.typeform.com/to/r9c5ee
Completing the survey should take no longer than 15 minutes.
We kindly request that you complete the survey by Sunday, 10th May 2020.
If you're interested in discussing your feedback further over a call,
please consider participating in a 15 minute interview as well:
https://ooni.org/post/2020-ooni-run-survey-and-interviews/
OONI Run is a tool used by researchers and human rights defenders to
coordinate censorship measurement testing, particularly during political
events (such as elections and protests) and in response to emergent
censorship events.
Your feedback will go a long way in helping us better understand the
challenges in using OONI Run and how we can make it more useful for you.
Please help spread the word:
https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/1253376570904936451
Thanks so much for your time and feedback! Hugely appreciated!
~ OONI team.
--
Maria Xynou
Research & Partnerships Director
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E
Hello folks,
SNI based filtering is increasingly being observed around the world, so
the OONI team worked on writing a new SNI blocking experiment.
This experiment was run in Iran, where SNI based blocking is carried out
and where we were able to check if our experiment works as expected.
In this blog post, we document the measurement of SNI based blocking in
Iran based on our new SNI blocking experiment:
https://ooni.org/post/2020-iran-sni-blocking/
Best,
~ OONI team.
--
Maria Xynou
Research & Partnerships Director
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E
Hello,
The OONI team warmly welcomes you to join us next Tuesday for our
monthly community meeting.
=> Where? OONI Slack channel: https://slack.ooni.org/ (bridged with IRC:
ircs://irc.oftc.net:6697/#ooni)
=> When? Tuesday, 28th April 2020 at 14:00 UTC (for 1 hour)
Please add topics that you'd like to discuss during the meeting in this
pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/ooni-community-meeting-keep
The monthly OONI community meetings aim to:
* Collect community feedback on OONI tools & methodologies
* Address questions in relation to the use of OONI tools and OONI data
* Foster discussions on internet censorship issues
* Receive updates from the community
We'd love to meet you and hear from you, and we hope you can join us!
All the best,
~ OONI team
--
Maria Xynou
Research & Partnerships Director
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E
Hello,
The OONI team is thrilled to announce the public launch of the new OONI
Probe desktop app for Windows and macOS!
You can download & install the new app here:
https://ooni.org/install/desktop
Learn all about the new OONI Probe desktop app here:
https://ooni.org/post/2020-ooni-probe-desktop-app/
We are super excited because this is the first time that we're
officially supporting Windows, and it's the first time that we're
releasing a native OONI Probe desktop app.
Along with the new OONI Probe desktop app, we're excited to release 2
new tests:
1. Tor test (https://ooni.org/nettest/tor/) => For measuring the
blocking of Tor (https://www.torproject.org/)
2. Psiphon test (https://ooni.org/nettest/psiphon/) => For measuring the
blocking of the Psiphon app (https://psiphon.ca/)
With these new tests, measuring the blocking of circumvention tools
becomes easier than ever before!
The new OONI Probe desktop app also allows for more comprehensive
website testing (in comparison to the OONI Probe mobile app), as you can
test more than 1,000 websites in one run!
Thanks to the amazing Localization Lab community, the new OONI Probe
desktop app is translated into 12 languages: Chinese, Russian, Spanish,
French, Thai, Turkish, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Slovak, Catalan, and
German. The Arabic and Farsi translations will also be released soon!
Warm thanks to the OTF for supporting the development of the OONI Probe
desktop app.
Special thanks to community members for testing and translating the new
OONI Probe desktop app, and for sharing extremely helpful feedback!
We hope you all find the new OONI Probe desktop app useful!
For any further feedback or bug reports, please consider filing tickets
(https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues) or writing to us
(contact(a)openobservatory.org).
Please help spread the word:
https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/1252594768330309632
Thank you for helping us measure the Internet! Stay safe!
~ OONI team.
--
Maria Xynou
Research & Partnerships Director
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E
Dear all,
The OONI team has been using the Measurement Kit
<https://github.com/measurement-kit/measurement-kit> (MK) library since
2017 as its network measurement engine. Because every measurement run using
MK by default also submits measurements to the OONI collector, we know that
there are several people who have also integrated MK into their network
measurement tools and apps.
If you are one of those folks using MK, we’d like to thank you for using it
and inform you that it is now deprecated. At OONI, we are now switching to a
new engine <https://github.com/ooni/probe-engine> written in Go which will
be easier for us to maintain in the long-term. We encourage you to consider
adoption of the new Go probe-engine for your tools.
We will keep maintaining MK for roughly one year and we will stop producing
builds and applying fixes after March 14, 2021.
We articulated an upgrade path in the new README of the Measurement Kit repo
<https://github.com/measurement-kit/measurement-kit/blob/master/README.md>
for all the MK use cases that we know of. If you have questions, comments,
suggestions, or use cases that we didn’t consider, please let us know,
either here or on GitHub
<https://github.com/measurement-kit/measurement-kit/issues>.
Thank you, best,
Simone & the OONI team
Hello friends,
Hope you're all staying safe and healthy.
I'm reaching out to let you know that we have updated the OONI Data Policy.
The latest version of the OONI Data Policy is available here:
https://ooni.org/about/data-policy/
In the updated policy, we share the principles that govern our data
practices, and we explain what data we collect, process, store, and
publish when you use OONI Probe.
We also share which analytics we use for the OONI website, OONI
Explorer, and the OONI desktop app, and we explain how you can opt out
from analytics all-together.
Throughout the Data Policy, we also explain how you can opt out of the
various forms of data collection and publication.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please don't hesitate to reach
out.
Warm regards,
Maria.
--
Maria Xynou
Research & Partnerships Director
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E
Hello friends,
To improve the monitoring of website censorship around the world, OONI
aims to create a "smart URL list system", which would prioritize the
testing of certain URLs over others.
In every case, the smart URL list system would only prioritize URLs that
are already included in the Citizen Lab test lists and which have
therefore been reviewed by the community and vetted in terms of safety.
We have published a document that describes the smart URL list system,
the goals and criteria for URL prioritization, and how you can
contribute (by reviewing the Citizen Lab test lists):
https://ooni.org/post/ooni-smart-url-list-system/
A summarized version of our Policy for URL prioritization is available
here:
https://ooni.org/post/policy-url-prioritization/ooni-policy-url-prioritizat…
As we're in the initial stages of design and development, any feedback
you may have would be greatly appreciated!
We also welcome any questions you may have.
Kind regards,
Maria.
--
Maria Xynou
Research & Partnerships Director
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E