nutprobe

Client-side based URL availability testing tool. For a full description of the project, see Visualising the censorship blog post.

How to use it

Client-side probe

dist/assets/probe.statis.js - compiled probe file, to be injected into client pages

Include the file on your pages, and send out the reports using the following snippet:

<script type="text/javascript">
    try {
      var nutprobe = require('nutprobe/probe').default;
      var targets = [
        '//domain1.com/ping',
        '//domain2.com/ping',
        '//domain3.com/ping'
      ];
      var expected_answer = 'pong';
      var report_success = true;
      var cooldown_days = 1;
      nutprobe(targets, expected_answer,
               'https://yourname.firebaseio.com/reports',
               report_success, cooldown_days);
    } catch(e) {};
  </script>

where

• targets is the array of domain targets (URLs) to check,
• expected_answer is the correct answer that should be received when polling those URLs,
• cooldown_days is the number of days to wait until repeating the check for this client,
• report_success is whether to report successful checks, or failures only.

yourname.firebaseio.com should be changes to the name of your Firebase project that will host the report and processed data.

Processing reported data

bin/processor.js - summary statistics generator bin/export.js - export processed and summarised report data bin/locations.js - export location geo coordinates

Once some samples have been collected by the client-side probe, the standard workflow is:

1. Post-process collected data: ./bin/processor.js
2. Export a csv file with the summarised results: ./bin/export.js > domain-availability.csv
3. Export a csv file with the location geo coordinates: ./bin/locations.js > locations.csv
4. Reload data files in Tableau to rebuild the visualisation.