Last weekend, a number of social media sites and news outlets were blocked in Pakistan during Islamist protests. Protesters gathered in Islamabad alleged that Mr. Zahid Hamid, the Federal Law Minister, should be removed from his position because he omitted a reference to the Prophet Muhammad in a parliamentary bill. On Saturday, 25th November 2017, law enforcement agencies …

Continue reading

It’s easy to notice when popular platforms that we commonly use – like Google, WhatsApp, or Facebook – are blocked. The not-so-easy part is noticing the censorship of all those other, less popular platforms, such as the sites of minority groups. Due to their sensitive nature, minority group sites are probably more likely to be …

Continue reading

Right before the Tor meeting, the OONI team gathered in Montreal for a 4-day meeting to reflect, regroup, hack, and plan. This post shares information from our meeting and future plans with the broader community. All session notes are available on GitHub. Read this post here. Publication date: 20th October 2017 Publisher: Open Observatory of Network Interference …

Continue reading

We confirm detection of 210 blocked URLs in Pakistan. Explicit blockpages were observed for many of these URLs, while others were blocked by means of DNS tampering. Many of the blocked URLs are considered blasphemous under Pakistan’s Penal Code for hosting content related to the controversial “Draw Mohammed Day” campaign. Geopolitical power dynamics appear to be reinforced through the blocking of …

Continue reading

We confirm the blocking of at least 25 sites related to the Catalan referendum by means of DNS tampering and HTTP blocking, based on OONI Probe network measurements collected from three local networks. OONI data shows that these sites were blocked every day from (at least) 25th September 2017 (when the testing started) leading up to the referendum day, …

Continue reading

Thousands of ooniprobe network measurements collected from 60 local networks across Iran over the last three years have confirmed the blocking of 886 domains. Read the full research report here. Publication date: 28th September 2017 Publisher: Open Observatory of Network Interference, Article19, ASL19, Small Media

OONI released OONI Run, a website linked to an exciting new OONI Probe mobile app feature that enables you to: Engage your friends (and the world) to run censorship measurement tests Monitor the blocking of your website around the world OONI Run includes a variety of OONI Probe software testsdesigned to: Test the blocking of websites Find middleboxes Measure the speed and performance of …

Continue reading

Image by Arturo Filastò (CC-BY-SA-3.0) OONI network measurement data, collected from eight vantage points across three Cuban cities between 29th May 2017 to 10th June 2017, confirms the blocking of 41 websites. Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology, which we suspect to be located in Havana, was used to reset connections to those sites and serve (blank) block …

Continue reading

Last May, the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) team visited Cuba. We ran a variety of network measurement tests in Havana, Santa Clara, and Santiago de Cuba with the aim of measuring internet censorship. This post provides an overview of our study. Read the post here. Publisher: The Tor Project Publication date: 28th August 2017

Internet censorship enables governments to manipulate public discourse and erode citizens’ rights. But a five-year-old software program called ooniprobe allows users to fight back. Read this commentary here. Publication date: 22nd August 2017 Publisher: Project Syndicate