[tor-relays] Help Turkmens to bypass Internet censorship: run an obfs4 bridge!

[tor-operator at urdn.com.ua]

gus <gus at torproject.org> wrote:

> Second, in Turkmenistan case, it appears that one ISP (AGTS) had
> different censorship rules compared to their main ISP,
> Turkmentelecom.

That's not possible because AGTS is entirely hosted by TurkmenTelecom.
This is different from PRC China where they have 3 operators with
different networks thus having each their censorship.

It also cannot be compared with Russia, because until 10 years ago, the
Internet in Russia was totally free, this enabled decentralization and
rapid deployment. Thanks to this, the government still does not have a
single button to press to shut everything down, and censorship is
implemented differently by each operator. In Turkmenistan, such
development was never possible.

Sometimes, the filtering seems lighter in Turkmeninstan, and the
reason is that TurkmenTelecom sucks at censorship. Turkmenistan does
not even maintain a blacklist, they maintain a whitelist, that is,
everything is blocked but what's on the list.
The result is that people can't even update software, things start to
break and then they are forced to lift the filtering up a little bit
which sometimes result in making bootstrapping Tor possible.

Also, when there is an event such as an election, they simply disconnect
everything. Therefore, running bridges and relays won't help,
sadly.