August 2016 archive

Ethiopia: Internet Shutdown Amidst Recent Protests?

Nearly 100 deaths and thousands of arrests have been reported in Ethiopia over the last days, as part of protests against the marginalization and persecution of the Oromos and Amharas, Ethiopia’s two largest ethnic groups. But the attacks and arrests may not have been the only forms of retribution carried out by the Ethiopian government …

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Internet Access Disruption in Turkey – July 2016

With the attempted coup in Turkey, reports went out about social media being throttled and/or blocked. We analysed data about this that we collected with RIPE Atlas and the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI).Read more here.Publisher: RIPE Atlas & Open Observatory of Network InterferencePublication date: 19th July 2016

OONI releases new Web Connectivity test for detecting online censorship

Today the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) is excited to be releasing a brand new test, called Web Connectivity, which is designed to detect three different types of censorship: DNS tampering, TCP/IP blocking and HTTP blocking.Read more here.Publisher: Open Observatory of Network InterferencePublication date: 3rd June 2016

How Uganda blocked social media, again

Today we are releasing data which indicates that two ISPs in Uganda – Smile Telecom (Uganda) and Orange – carried out IP blocking to censor access to major social media services. Interestingly, OONI’s findings illustrate that social media is not consistently blocked across networks, and that certain cases of censorship can be easily circumvented.Read more …

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Why we still recommend Signal over WhatsApp… even though they both use end-to-end encryption

WhatsApp’s collaboration with Open Whisper Systems recently brought end-to-end encryption to the lives of a billion people around the world. (Open Whisper Systems develops Signal, an open source mobile messaging and VoIP app.) When WhatsApp integrated the encryption protocol developed for Signal, many of us began using end-to-end encryption without even realizing it.Undoubtedly, this is …

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OONI Data Reveals How WhatsApp Was Blocked (Again) in Brazil

Following the latest reports of WhatsApp being blocked in Brazil, the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) ran tests locally in Brazil to detect the technical details of how censorship was implemented. This blog post includes a publication of our measurements, revealing that Brazilian ISPs blocked WhatsApp’s website through DNS hijacking.Read more here.Publisher: Open Observatory …

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OONI Explorer: Censorship and other Network Anomalies Around the World

Today the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) team is pleased to announce the public beta release of OONI Explorer: a global map of more than 8.5 million network measurements which have been collected across 91 countries around the world over the last 3 years.Read more here.Publisher: The Tor ProjectPublication date: 23rd March 2016