- ooni-talk - lists.torproject.org

Spanish government is censoring websites regarding Catalan referendum
by Pablo Castellano 25 Sep '17

25 Sep '17

Hi all, The Spanish government is blocking websites that contain information about the referendum that will happen in Catalonia next 1st October (along with other repressive measures) and is suing people that keeps publishing web mirrors. Note that the .cat domains seem to be seized (last week Police raided the offices of the .cat domain registry, seized some computers and arrested their head IT) while other TLDs are just DNS hijacked by the Spanish Internet providers. I've made a pull request to include some of these urls in the list of domains checked by OONI. You can read more about it in the following links: - https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/issues/221 - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/cat-domain-casualty-catalonian-indepe… - https://medium.com/@josepot/is-sensitive-voter-data-being-exposed-by-the-ca… Thanks for your work! Pablo

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New report on internet censorship in Cuba
by Maria Xynou 29 Aug '17

29 Aug '17

Hello, Today the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) project published a new report, titled: "*Measuring Internet Censorship in Cuba's ParkNets*" You can read the report here: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/cuba-internet-censorship-2017/ https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/902229490495053824 Last May we traveled to Cuba and performed a variety of network measurement tests across eight vantage points in Havana, Santa Clara, and Santiago de Cuba, with the aim of measuring internet censorship. As part of our study, we were able to confirm the *blocking of 41 websites*. Many of these sites include news outlets and blogs, as well as pro-democracy and human rights sites. Many of the blocked sites, directly or indirectly, express criticism towards the Cuban government. Interestingly enough though, various other international sites which also express criticism were found to be accessible. Web proxies, like Anonymouse, were amongst those found to be blocked, potentially limiting Cubans' ability to circumvent censorship. The Tor network though was found to be accessible across the country, likely because Cuba has relatively few Tor users. *Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology was found to be resetting connections and serving (blank) block pages.* Through latency measurements, we were able to confirm that the blocking server is most likely located in Havana (and in any case, for sure in Cuba). Only the HTTP version of sites was found to be blocked, potentially enabling users to circumvent the censorship by merely accessing them over HTTPS. Most blocked sites, however, do not support HTTPS. *Skype was found to be blocked. *By examining packet traces, we were able to determine that the DPI middlebox blocked Skype by means of RST injection. Other popular communications tools, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, were found to be accessible. *Chinese vendor Huawei was also found to be supporting Cuba's internet infrastructure.* The server header of blocked sites, for example, pointed to Huawei equipent. It remains unclear though whether they are actually implementing internet censorship in the country. Lastly, we accidentally discovered that *Google is blocking Google App Engine from Cuba (when trying to run NDT).* Overall, internet censorship does not appear to be particularly sophisticated in Cuba. The high cost of the internet and the limited availability of public wifi hotspots across the country remain the main barriers to accessing the internet. But as Cuba's internet landscape evolves, so might techniques and practices around internet censorship. Therefore, we think it's important to continue to measure networks with ooniprobe in Cuba and elsewhere around the world. Thanks for reading our latest report - happy to address any questions you may have! ~ 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

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Report - OONI Partner Gathering 2017
by Maria Xynou 24 Jul '17

24 Jul '17

Hi Oonitarians, Two weeks ago we hosted the*first OONI Partner Gathering*! :) The event was hosted at the University of Toronto on 10th & 11th July 2017. The aim of this two-day event was to bring our international partners together to share skills, knowledge, and research findings. We reflected on our collaboration over the last year, and we brainstormed on future goals and priorities to improve our collaboration on the study of internet censorship. Today we published a report which provides an overview of the event, its sessions, partner challenges and needs, future goals and priorities, and event outcomes. *Read the report here: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/ooni-partner-gathering-2017/* You can also find the event's agenda and all of the session notes here: https://github.com/OpenObservatory/gatherings/tree/master/partner-gathering… 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

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OONI community meeting, tomorrow 25th July
by Maria Xynou 24 Jul '17

24 Jul '17

Hello! The OONI team warmly welcomes you to join us**for our *monthly **community meeting tomorrow**on Tuesday, 25th July 2017, at 14:00 UTC.* We'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on how to improve research on internet censorship. Please join us on *https://slack.openobservatory.org* and add topics that you would like to discuss as part of the meeting in this pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/ooni-community-meeting If you're not able to join us, please feel encouraged to join us on slack any other day! Looking forward to connecting with you soon! All the best, ~ 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

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Reminder for weekly OONI IRC meeting: Monday 2017-07-03, 16:00 UTC in #ooni
by Vasilis 03 Jul '17

03 Jul '17

Hello everyone, This is a reminder for today's weekly OONI IRC meeting. It will happen as usual on the #ooni IRC channel (irc.oftc.net) at 16:00 UTC. Meeting times around the world: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20170703T16 In case that you have no IRC client you can join from the web at: https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.oftc.net/ooni or in slack at: https://slack.openobservatory.org/ Everybody is welcome to join us and bring their questions and feedback. Please use the meeting agenda pad if you want to propose any topics: https://pad.riseup.net/p/ooni-irc-pad You can always find previous meeting logs at: http://meetbot.debian.net/ooni/ Cheers, ~Vasilis -- Fingerprint: 8FD5 CF5F 39FC 03EB B382 7470 5FBF 70B1 D126 0162 Pubkey: https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x5FBF70B1D1260162

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Re: [ooni-talk] [OONI-operators] OONI on Next Thing Co's C.H.I.P
by Arturo Filastò 03 Jul '17

03 Jul '17

Thank you so much for publishing an article on installing ooni-probe it’s great stuff! I am moving this thread over to ooni-dev as ooni-operators is actually meant for just important communications to operators of ooniprobe instances. What Vasilis says is mostly correct, just a couple of minor corrections. On July 1, 2017 at 3:14:24 PM, Vasilis (andz(a)torproject.org) wrote: Hi Snehan, Snehan Kekre: > Hello excellent ooni people, > > I've written a blog post (https://snehankekre.github.io/anti-censorCHIP) > about installing ooniprobe on a $9 computer called CHIP that runs a flavor > of Debian. Thank you for your good words and publishing a blog post about installing ooniprobe on CHIP. > I would appreciate any feedback, suggestions, or comments. I'll > use them to make necessary changes to reflect accurate delivery. I've used > some images and a lot of lines from the ooni website. The 4th step in the install section of the blog post (https://snehankekre.github.io/anti-censorCHIP#installing-ooniprobe-on-chip) is not needed since Step 3 will get all the available dependencies. However given that are a number of bugs (https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe/issues?q=label%3Adebian+is%3Aop…) in the Debian ooniprobe packages, I will suggest you instead to install ooniprobe with pip and use the following install guide: https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe#unix-systems-with-pip As Vasilis points out you don’t actually need to install those extra dependencies via pip and are already part of the package installation, however you should NOT install ooniprobe via pip as it’s not the best way to install packages that will run as root. The issues with the debian package are being actively worked on and I have some sample debian packages if you would like to try them out (https://github.com/hellais/ooniprobe-fpm#debian) and as soon as they are ready the canonical torproject debian package will be updated and all the outstading issues should be resolved. In the Step 5. you don’t actually need to run oonideckgen, but you can directly find the location of your decks by running ooniprobe --info ,it should be in /var/lib/ooni/decks. Usually ooniprobe is more useful when it performs regular (scheduled) network measurements, I will suggest you to add the following steps to the install guide: 1. Configure ooniprobe (https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe#configuring-ooniprobe) either via the GUI (setup wizard) or from the shell (ooniprobe initialize) 2. Add ooniprobe system service (https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe#run-ooniprobe-as-a-service-syst…) Yes this is indeed the recommended way of running it, in theory that should already be setup for you by using the debian package (but due to the debian package bugs vasilis pointed out is currently not happening). > Is there a standard format to provide credit to ooni devs? Everything published on the website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC BY 3.0). ~ Arturo

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Save the date! OONI community meeting on 28th June
by Maria Xynou 27 Jun '17

27 Jun '17

Hello! The OONI team warmly welcomes you to join us**for our *monthly **community meeting**on Wednesday, 28th June 2017, at 13:00 UTC.* We'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on how to improve research on internet censorship. Please join us on *https://slack.openobservatory.org* and add topics that you would like to discuss as part of the meeting in this pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/ooni-community-meeting If you're not able to join us, please feel encouraged to join us on slack any other day! Looking forward to connecting with you soon! All the best, ~ 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

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New report: Evidence of recent censorship events in Egypt
by Maria Xynou 20 Jun '17

20 Jun '17

Hi Oonitarians, Today OONI, in collaboration with Access Now, published a research report on our findings on *recent censorship events in Egypt*. You can find the report here: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/egypt-censors/ The key findings of our study include: * We were able to confirm the *blocking of 10 news websites*, including madamasr.com and aljazeera.net. It remains unclear to us though if all of these sites were blocked under the Egyptian government's recent censorship orders. * *Link Egypt appears to be blocking access to the Tor network.* On a positive note, the Tor network appears to be accessible from the Vodafone Egypt and TE networks. * Link Egypt and Vodafone Egypt are *blocking access to torproject.org, bridges.torproject.org....and even ooni.torproject.org* (our own site). Through the collection and analysis of network measurement data, we were able to determine that Egyptian ISPs are using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology to RESET connections. You can find the network measurement data collected from Egypt through the following links: * https://measurements.ooni.torproject.org/files/by_country/EG * https://explorer.ooni.torproject.org/country/EG Please contact us with any questions you may have. 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

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Specifying the term "vendor" on OONI Explorer
by Anatol 07 Jun '17

07 Jun '17

Dear Oonitarians, I would like to discuss wether the vagueness of the term 'vendor' on http://explorer.ooni.torproject.org/ is potentially taking some impact from understanding OONIs test results for new users. I personally recall thinking it meant something like "vendors of internet infrastructure" the first time I visited the explorer, and the only place to figure it out is in one of the boxes in /highlights/. I'm not entirely sure what an appropriate specification should look like, I guess it's a balance between correct definition and convenience in length - with a focus on the first my proposal would be "vendors of [potentially] traffic manipulating software" - but that's so long it will probably break the design of the front page. Maybe if someone knows a shorter, appropriate synonym for "[potentially] traffic manipulating software" ? Best wishes, Anatol

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[ooni-dev] Reminder for weekly OONI IRC meeting: Monday 2017-06-05, 16:00 UTC in #ooni
by Vasilis 05 Jun '17

05 Jun '17

Hello everyone, This is a reminder for today's weekly OONI IRC meeting. It will happen as usual on the #ooni IRC channel (irc.oftc.net) at 16:00 UTC. Meeting times around the world: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20170605T16 In case that you have no IRC client you can join via the: - Web irc client: https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.oftc.net/ooni - Slack: https://slack.openobservatory.org/ Everybody is welcome to join us and bring their questions and feedback. Please use the meeting agenda (pad) if you want to propose any topics: https://pad.riseup.net/p/ooni-irc-pad You can always find previous meeting logs at: http://meetbot.debian.net/ooni/ Cheers, ~Vasilis -- Fingerprint: 8FD5 CF5F 39FC 03EB B382 7470 5FBF 70B1 D126 0162 Pubkey: https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x5FBF70B1D1260162 -- Fingerprint: 8FD5 CF5F 39FC 03EB B382 7470 5FBF 70B1 D126 0162 Pubkey: https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x5FBF70B1D1260162

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