[tor-reports] OONI July 2016 Status report

[Arturo Filastò]

Hello Tor people!

The OONI team made steady progress this July. We developed the alpha version of
the OONI Web User Interface, and officially established partnerships with
non-profit organizations for the study of internet censorship in 5 countries
around the world.

We also continued the development of OONI mobile applications based on
MeasurementKit and started an effort to ease the integration of MeasurementKit
itself with ooni-probe.

OONI Web User Interface
-----------------------

ooniprobe has largely been restructured to act as a background daemon,
controlled by a front-end web interface. This restructuring provides a natural
control interface for Lepidopter, makes the set-up and installation process
much easier, and positions OONI as a tool for collecting regular measurements
over time.

We have published an alpha release of the new OONI Web User interface and have
begun a public alpha testing for it.

The development of is can be viewed at the following links:

* https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe/pull/582

* https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-wui

Partnerships
------------

We are also moving quickly at growing the OONI network. OONI signed contracts
with non-profit organizations, officially establishing partnerships on the
study of internet censorship across 5 countries around the world. These
countries include:

1. Brazil

2. Kenya

3. Malaysia

4. Zambia

5. Zimbabwe

In an attempt to further support our partners, we improved our documentation
and guides. Specificially, we updated our guide on how to use Lepidopter
(https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-web/pull/65), and we created a new
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section
(https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-web/pull/66) which we will soon publish
on our website. We also started mapping out and preparing for the research that
we will be conducting with partners for the publication of country-specific
reports in the upcoming months. Furthermore, we updated the test list for
Pakistan (https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/blob/master/lists/pk.csv)
and created a new test list for Zimbabwe
(https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/blob/master/lists/zw.csv).

Citizen Lab Summer Institute
----------------------------

We attended the Citizen Lab Summer Institute
(https://citizenlab.org/summerinstitute/2016.html) at the beginning of this
month where we presented OONI on a panel, and facilitated a number of workshops
relevant to our work.

Such workshops include the following:

* Test lists: Creating criteria for risk assessment (in collaboration with Adam
  Senft of the Citizen Lab)

* OONI Partnership Program (This attracted many new potential partners.
  Discussions with such organizations are ongoing, and we have already started
  distributing Raspberry Pis for the stable collection of network
  measurements.)

* Lepidopter (Presentation of Lepidopter, and explanation of how users can run
  ooniprobe from a Raspberry Pi)

* Censorship Factbook (Discussion on how to merge various datasets which can
  help provide a more holistic view of censorship around the world, in
  collaboration with the FPU)

* Data formats for merging different network measurement projects (in
  collaboration with ICLab)

Hiring & Publications
---------------------

The OONI team is growing! In July we made an offer to Leonid, and are excited
to have him join as a core developer, starting mid-August.

We collaborated with Leonid and with RIPE Atlas on analyzing the censorship
events that occured around the attempted military coup in Turkey, which we were
able to publish on our blog in the immediate aftermath of the event:
https://ooni.torproject.org/post/turkey-internet-access-disruption/

MeasurementKit and NetProbe
---------------------------

MeasurementKit (https://github.com/measurement-kit/measurement-kit) v0.2.0 was
published at end of June and several point releases followed suit throughout
July. We added support for the NDT network performance test, refined
significantly the implementation of OONI tests, and improved the generic
support code for running OONI test in quality and features by including, for
example, a client for the OONI collector. In July we also started work to ease
the integration of MeasurementKit with Python code
(https://github.com/measurement-kit/measurement-kit-python) and, hence, with
ooni-probe.

All these enhancements have been integrated into the iOS and Android
applications (called NetProbe) that provide OONI for mobile. The iOS app
(https://github.com/measurement-kit/measurement-kit-app-ios), in particular,
now uses MeasurementKit v0.2.0, while for the Android app
(https://github.com/measurement-kit/measurement-kit-app-android) we are still
testing this integration.

~ The OONI Team

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