Hello,

In collaboration with community members in Egypt, OONI just published a report on the blocking of BBC and Alhurra in Egypt: https://ooni.org/post/2019-egypt-blocks-bbc-and-alhurra/

We share network measurement data on:

* Blocking of BBC: https://explorer.ooni.org/search?until=2019-09-26&domain=www.bbc.com&...

* Blocking of Alhurra: https://explorer.ooni.org/search?until=2019-09-26&domain=www.alhurra.com...

We corroborated OONI measurements by performing manual curl tests with the help of our local partners, the findings of which we share in the report.

We found that Egyptian ISPs are using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology that is aware of TLS and which is most likely fingerprinting the SNI field of the TLS handshake.

Both bbc.com and alhurra.com could therefore benefit from supporting Encrypted SNI on their backend servers to enable censorship circumvention (at least for Firefox users).

As more protests are planned tomorrow, there is the risk that further censorship events may be triggered in Egypt.

You can track any potential new censorship events by digging through measurements contributed by OONI Probe users in Egypt: https://explorer.ooni.org/search?until=2019-09-26&probe_cc=EG

To check for blocked sites in Egypt, here are all the ones that present anomalies: https://explorer.ooni.org/search?until=2019-09-26&probe_cc=EG&only=a... => this is automatically updated every day with new results (but there may be some false positives)

Please share with your networks: https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/1177294075948650499

Thanks,

~ OONI team.