Hello Tor people,
Below is an update on what the OONI team has been up to in March 2017:
# OONI Monthly Report: March 2017
The OONI team made steady progress in March 2017. We published research reports in collaboration with our Southeast Asian partners and we participated in outreach and community engagement efforts. We released ooniprobe 2.2.0 which features our new web UI, improvements based on community feedback, and translations for 4 languages. We also developed and released a new test that examines the reachability of Telegram.
Below we provide some highlights from OONI's activities in March 2017.
## Publication of research reports
Over the last months the OONI team has been collaborating with digital rights organizations on the study of internet censorship in Southeast Asia. In collaboration with our partners, we published the following research reports in March:
1. The State of Internet Censorship in Thailand: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/thailand-internet-censorship/ (OONI, Sinar Project, Thai Netizen Network)
Over the last 4 months, ooniprobe was run across 16 local vantage points in Thailand, through which we collected and analyzed thousands of network measurements with the aim of examining and uncovering recent censorship events in the country. Our study also includes an examination of Thailand's legal environment and network landscape.
The key findings of our study confirm the blocking of 13 websites in Thailand across 6 different ISPs, including the following types of sites:
* News outlets (nypost.com and dailymail.co.uk)
* wikileaks.org
* Circumvention tool sites (such as hotspotshield.com)
* Pornography
Thai ISPs appear to primarily be implementing censorship through DNS hijacking and through the use of middle boxes (HTTP transparent proxies) which serve block pages. Since sites were not found to be blocked across all networks, Thai ISPs appear to be blocking websites at their own discretion.
On a positive note, the Tor network, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger were found to be accessible across all 16 networks in Thailand where tests were run during the testing period (6th November 2016 - 27th February 2017).
2. The State of Internet Censorship in Myanmar: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/myanmar-report/ (OONI, Sinar Project, Myanmar ICT for Development Organization)
As part of our study, OONI software tests were run across 6 local vantage points in Myanmar between 25th October 2016 and 28th February 2017. These tests are designed to measure:
* Blocking of websites; * Blocking of Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger; * Blocking of Tor; * Presence of middle boxes (i.e. systems that could be responsible for censorship or surveillance).
Upon analysis of thousands of network measurements, we did not detect any block pages that could confirm any cases of internet censorship. Five sites, however, including those of the U.S. embassy in Myanmar and of the Organization of American States (OAS) presented signs of TCP/IP and HTTP blocking.
While OONI software tests detected the presence of Blue Coat software (some types of which can potentially be used for internet censorship and surveillance) in Myanmar back in 2012, we did not detect the presence of this software in any of the 6 networks where tests were performed. On another positive note, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and the Tor Network were found to be accessible in all 6 networks in Myanmar throughout the testing period.
3. Examining internet blackouts through public data sources: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/examining-internet-blackouts/
In response to community requests for the need of a methodology for measuring internet blackouts, OONI released a post which explains how we examine internet blackouts through public data sources.
This post also includes an ipython notebook which shows how to automatically analyze Google traffic data with the aim of identifying internet blackouts: https://ooni.torproject.org/notebooks/internet-blackouts-google-traffic.html (https://ooni.torproject.org/notebooks/internet-blackouts-google-traffic.ipyn...)
## Stable release of ooniprobe 2.2.0
The OONI team worked towards the release of ooniprobe 2.2.0 in March. The latest version of ooniprobe includes:
* Re-designed web UI
* New IM test for Telegram
* Improvements to ooniprobe based on community feedback
* Translations in 4 languages: Spanish, French, Italian and Hindi
Full release notes can be found here: https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe/releases/tag/v2.2.0
## Progress on data processing pipeline
Throughout March OONI made a lot of progress on our data processing pipeline. We have been running the new iteration of the pipeline in parallel to the current pipeline and fixing various issues that we have been encourtering along the way.
## Outreach and community engagement
The OONI team participated at the following events in March as part of its outreach and community engagement efforts:
* Vietnam Cyber Dialogue (VCD) -- Valencia, Spain: 5th March 2017
* Internet Freedom Festival (IFF) -- Valencia, Spain: 6th-10th March 2017
* Iran Cyber Dialogue (ICD) -- Brussels, Belgium: 27th-28th March 2017
* RightsCon -- Brussels, Belgium: 29th-31st March 2017
As part of these events, the OONI team facilitated the following OONI sessions:
1. OONI Knowledge-sharing session -- Vietnam Cyber Dialogue (5th March)
2. OONI Skill-sharing session -- Vietnam Cyber Dialogue (5th March)
3. "Investigating Information Controls with OONI" -- Internet Freedom Festival (7th March)
4. "Building Community Resources for Censorship Measurement Research" in collaboration with the Citizen Lab -- Internet Freedom Festival (9th March)
5. "Measuring internet censorship during the Iranian elections" -- Iran Cyber Dialogue (28th March)
6. "Advances in measuring internet shutdowns" --- RightsCon (29th March)
7. "Collecting evidence of internet censorship in Southeast Asia and beyond" in collaboration with Sinar Project -- RightsCon (30th March)
We published a blog about the above here: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/ooni-iff-rightscon/
In addition, the OONI team also attended the Tor Meeting in Amsterdam between 23rd-26th March. This provided the OONI team with the opportunity to work on its roadmap for the next 6 months.
Finally, the OONI team hosted an OONI Community Meeting on https://slack.openobservatory.org/ on 21st March. As part of the meeting, the following agenda items were discussed:
1. How to set up a script to check websites accessibility via Tor Browser. It would be great to store the records on a website to stress the importance of a smooth and troubleless Tor user-experience online, pushing websites to allow Tor-users more access.
2. Brainstorming on ways to improve measurements in at-risk countries.
3. Discussion on how one can run custom tests, decks and inputs via ooniprobe.
4. Discussion on setting up a large deployment in India to detect region-specific mobile censorship.
## Userbase
In March 2017 ooniprobe was run 84,829 times from 2,271 different vantage points across 170 countries around the world.
This information can also be found through our stats here: https://measurements.ooni.torproject.org/stats
~ The OONI team