Hi everyone,

This is my status report for January 2022

Internet shutdown in Kazakhstan

During the Kazakh government shut down the Internet in the country[1], it was found that users from that country can still access the Internet using the Tor Browser and specific obfs4 bridges.

Taking part in the campaign against censorship and the internet shutdown in Kazakhstan, I translated all the necessary instructions on connecting to Tor into Russian. It's public available on the Forum[2].

After this information was spread among the people in Kazakhstan, there was a massive amount of bridge requests, which were fulfilled as soon as possible. I've answered 452 tickets only about KZ. At the moment, users in the country don't need to use a bridge anymore. See this ticket[3].

Censorship in Russia

In January, I continued to support Russian-speaking users via e-mail. In addition, I translated one more RT template - "Russian: Basic troubleshooting when users can't access any particular website".

Also I tested the new support platform[4], which allows user support via Telegram. At the end of the month, this channel went live. I looked into the software used to support, familiarized myself with it, translated some templates in Russian and started to use it to communicate with the Tor Browser users.

Overall, I closed around 1250 tickets from Russia and Kazakhstan this month on Telegram and RT (frontdesk). From January 24 - February 3, I've answered and closed around 280 support requests in Telegram.

Additionally, I translated one website page and advised Russian-speaking users on the IRC channel.

Notes [1] https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/99 [2] https://forum.torproject.net/t/internet-shutdown-in-kazakhstan-how-to-circum... [3] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40058 [4] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40059