[tor-project] OONI Monthly Report: February 2018

Mon Mar 19 16:00:47 UTC 2018

Hello,

The OONI team had an exciting month! We expanded our Latin American
community by forming two new partnerships with Asociación por los
Derechos Civiles (Argentina) and Fundación Karisma (Colombia). Our
outreach efforts also focused on Africa, as we hosted OONI workshops in
Uganda and South Africa.

Following research, we updated the Egyptian and Mali test lists, and we
published a follow-up study on the censorship events that occurred
during Iran's anti-government protests. We also published a blog post
that explains how to mine OONI data.

We continued to make progress on the revamping of the OONI Probe mobile
apps, we experimented with writing the OONI Probe CLI for the OONI Probe
desktop apps, and we made a series of significant improvements to our
data processing pipeline to better serve measurements on OONI Explorer.

# Established new partnerships

We are excited to have formally established two new partnerships! We now
also have the opportunity to collaborate with:

1. Asociación por los Derechos Civiles (Argentina),
Announcement: https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/961617333113548800

2. Fundación Karisma (Colombia)

As part of our new partnerships, we aim to collaborate on the study of
internet censorship through the collection and analysis of OONI Probe
network measurements.

# Updated test lists

We carried out research
(https://ooni.torproject.org/get-involved/contribute-test-lists/#test-list-research)
<https://ooni.torproject.org/get-involved/contribute-test-lists/#test-list-research%29> to
identify more URLs to test for censorship in Egypt and Mali. Based on
this research, we updated the following test lists:

* Egypt: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/301

* Mali: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/304

We also updated the following test lists based on URLs provided by
community members:

* Zimbabwe: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/297

* Kenya: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/298

# Revamping of OONI Probe Mobile

We made a significant amount of progress on revamping the OONI Probe
mobile app. Based on mockups, we implemented a working proof of concept
iOS mobile app to showcase the new UI.

Based on this work we will be finalising the copy of the mobile app and
begin a first round of user testing.

# OONI Probe Desktop App

This month we experimented with writing the OONI Probe CLI that is going
to be driven by the desktop app in
golang: https://github.com/openobservatory/gooni.

The main things we were looking to compare and contract with the node.js
app were:

* How easy it is to link to the measurement-kit C++ library
* How easy it is to cross-build and ship the CLI tool as a standalone binary
* What tooling and libraries we would be needing to use to implement the
full CLI tool
* What the overall architecture of this software component should look like

We are quite pleased with the results and believe this is probably the
direction we are going to go for.

Other factors that we took into account when thinking about using golang
are:

* How familiar developers in our team and community are with golang vs
node.js
* The security of the libraries and development process

# OONI Pipeline & OONI Explorer

We made a series of significant improvements and optimisation to our
data processing pipeline to allow us to almost entirely move onto the
new pipeline for serving measurements from OONI Explorer.

In particular, we added better indexes to allow sorting by
test_start_time (and therefore not break pagination in edge cases), as
well as some fixes to prevent bad queries from making the database
irresponsive.

For more details, please refer to:

* https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-explorer/pull/122
* https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-measurements/pull/50
* https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-measurements/pull/51

# Blog posts

We published two blog posts in February:

1. I have hands, how can I mine OONI data?
(https://ooni.torproject.org/post/mining-ooni-data/)
<https://ooni.torproject.org/post/mining-ooni-data/%29>

2. Iran Protests: DPI blocking of Instagram
(https://ooni.torproject.org/post/2018-iran-protests-pt2/)
<https://ooni.torproject.org/post/2018-iran-protests-pt2/%29>

The first post explains how to mine OONI data, while the second includes
a follow-up study on the censorship events that occurred in Iran during
anti-government protests. 

# Community activities

Our outreach efforts focused on Africa during February. 

## South Africa

On 16th February 2018, we presented OONI (as part of a 1 hour talk) to
the students and faculty members of the Computer Science department of
the University of Cape Town.

Further information about this seminar is available
here: http://www.students.uct.ac.za/event/internet-censorship-measurements

## Uganda

We participated in the "Internet Policy in Africa: Research Methods for
Advocacy" workshop hosted in Kampala between 26th February 2018 to 3rd
March 2018 (http://globalnetpolicy.org/event/research-methods-africa/)
<http://globalnetpolicy.org/event/research-methods-africa/%29>. 

As part of this week-long event, we facilitated the following workshops:

1. "Network Measurement Research": A 1.5 hour workshop explaining OONI
methodologies & presenting OONI censorship findings from various African
countries.

2. "Deep Dive: Network measurement data analysis": A 2.5 hour workshop
teaching OONI data analysis and interpretation.

We also participated in a working group that designed a research project
examining the relationship of internet censorship with conflict
resolution in South Sudan.

# Userbase

In February 2018 OONI Probe was run 280k times from 4,924 different
vantage points across 210 countries around the world.

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

~ The OONI team.

-- 
Maria Xynou
Research and Partnerships Coordinator
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.torproject.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E

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