On Wednesday, March 22, 2023, 1:25:26 PM MDT, gus <gus@torproject.org> wrote:
Dear Relay operators community,
The parliamentary elections in Turkmenistan are coming up very soon on
March 26th[1], and the Turkmen government has tightened internet censorship
and restrictions even more. In the last few months, the Anti-censorship
community has learned that different pluggable transports, like
Snowflake, and entire IP ranges, have been blocked in the country.
Therefore, running a bridge on popular hosting providers like Hetzner,
Digital Ocean, Linode, and AWS won't help as these providers' IP ranges
are completely blocked in Turkmenistan.
Recently, we learned from the Anti-censorship community[2] and via Tor user
support channels that Tor bridges running on residential connections
were working fine. Although they were blocked after some days or a week,
these bridges received a lot of users and were very important to keep
Turkmens connected.
How to help Turkmens to access the Internet
===========================================
You can help Turkmens to access the free and open internet by running an
obfs4 Tor bridge! But here's the trick: you need to run it on a
residential connection -- you won't need a static IPv4 --, and it would
ideally be run on more robust hardware than just a Raspberry Pi
(although that can help, we have found they can get overloaded).
You can set up an obfs4 bridge by following our official guide:
https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/bridge/After you setup a new bridge, you can share your bridge line with the
Tor support team at frontdesk@torproject.org, and we will share it with
users.
A complete bridge line is composed of:
IP:OBFS4_PORT FINGERPRINT cert=obfs4-certificate iat-mode=0
Check this documentation to learn how to share your bridge line:
https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/bridge/post-install/Just sharing your bridge fingerprint is not the best, but it's fine.
You can read more about censorship against Tor in Turkmenistan here:
-
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/issues/40029 - Snowflake blocked:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/issues/40024Thank you for your support in helping to keep the internet free and open
for everyone.
Gus
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Turkmen_parliamentary_election[2]
https://ntc.party/c/internet-censorship-all-around-the-world/turkmenistan/17https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/80--
The Tor Project
Community Team Lead
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