Hello,

The OONI team made steady progress in April 2019.

## Report on social media blocking and internet blackout in Benin

In collaboration with CAIDA's IODA project, we co-published a research report that shares network measurement data on the blocking of social media (and the subsequent internet blackout) in Benin, amid the country's 2019 parliamentary elections.

Our report is available here: https://ooni.io/post/2019-benin-social-media-blocking/

## OONI Probe mobile app

Throughout April 2019, we improved testing coverage (https://github.com/ooni/probe-ios/pull/263) and we did a lot of development work on the OONI Probe mobile apps (in preparation for the upcoming 2.1.0 release).

We worked on adding support for re-uploading non-uploaded measurements manually. This will allow users to submit measurements at a later stage, even if they had disabled automatic upload or if the initial upload had failed.

On Android:

https://github.com/ooni/probe-android/pull/214 https://github.com/ooni/probe-android/pull/215 https://github.com/ooni/probe-android/pull/213

On iOS:

https://github.com/ooni/probe-ios/pull/258 https://github.com/ooni/probe-ios/pull/265 https://github.com/ooni/probe-ios/pull/266 https://github.com/ooni/probe-ios/pull/267 https://github.com/ooni/probe-ios/pull/268 https://github.com/ooni/probe-ios/pull/269

## OONI pipeline

We worked quite extensively on the OONI data processing pipeline to make the annotation of confirmed and anomalous measurements more accurate, and to extract metadata from new tests.

Our work on the pipeline can be viewed via the following pull requests:

https://github.com/ooni/pipeline/pull/177 https://github.com/ooni/pipeline/pull/151

We also worked on improving the documentation of the OONI pipeline and explained how to reprocess measurements: https://github.com/ooni/pipeline/pull/183

## System for sharing OONI metadb with third parties

We set up a system for sharing OONI's metadata database with third parties: https://github.com/ooni/sysadmin/issues/272

This new system allows external people to set up their own instance (and to have an always in sync version) of the OONI measurement database that powers the OONI API and OONI Explorer.

It includes all the features that are extracted as part of the OONI pipeline for all OONI measurements ever collected.

We also wrote documentation which explains how you can set up your own copy of the OONI metadb: https://github.com/ooni/sysadmin/blob/metadb-share/docs/metadb-sharing.md.

## ndt7

We aim to replace the NDT speed test (currently included in the OONI Probe mobile app) with ndt7: a next generation speed test that will run very short network performance tests and provide users with greater quality information.

To this end, we have been working on implementing the ndt7 server and ndt7 client for Measurement Kit: https://github.com/measurement-kit/engine/issues/4. We continued to make progress on this throughout April 2019.

## Updated test list

Leading up to India's 2019 general elections, we updated the Indian test list to include more political party sites and election sites: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/455

We also embedded several OONI Run buttons on our site (https://ooni.io/get-involved/run/) to enable the testing of Indian political and media websites, as well as the testing of the whole Indian test list.

## Community activities

### Internet Freedom Festival (IFF)

The OONI team attended the Internet Freedom Festival (IFF) in Valencia, Spain, between 1st to 5th April 2019.

As part of our participation at the IFF, we:

* Facilitated a session to collect OONI community feedback: https://platform.internetfreedomfestival.org/en/IFF2019/public/schedule/cust...

* Hosted the OONI Partners Meetup: https://platform.internetfreedomfestival.org/en/IFF2019/public/schedule/cust...

* Presented OONI at the IFF expo: https://platform.internetfreedomfestival.org/en/IFF2019/public/schedule/cust...

* Presented OONI at the Tool Showcase: https://platform.internetfreedomfestival.org/en/IFF2019/public/schedule/cust...

* Co-facilitated a session with our Venezuelan partners: https://platform.internetfreedomfestival.org/en/IFF2019/public/schedule/cust...

### Digital Rights & Inclusion Forum (DRIF)

OONI's Maria traveled to Lagos, Nigeria, to participate at the Digital Rights & Inclusion Forum (DRIF) between 23rd to 25th April 2019.

At DRIF, Maria facilitated the session "Uncovering censorship evidence", where she presented OONI and explained how digital rights communities in Africa can use OONI Probe and OONI data as part of their work.

Information about the event is available here: https://drif.paradigmhq.org/

### Community meeting

We held the monthly OONI community meeting on our Slack channel (https://slack.openobservatory.org/) on 30th April 2019.

As part of the meeting, we discussed:     1. Measuring HTTPS throttling in Iran

2. Starting to use a Go engine - would an OONI Probe app bigger than 50 MB be a big problem for users?

3. Sourcing more in-country collaborators for OONI Probe testing

## Userbase

In April 2019, OONI Probe was run 319,720 times from 4,805 different vantage points in 212 countries around the world.

This information can also be found through our stats: https://api.ooni.io/stats

~ The OONI team.