FreeBrowser in Turkmenistan

[wkrp]

GreatFire has a blog post saying that the largest share of their circumvention tool FreeBrowser now comes from Turkmenistan, where it is in the top 10 of all Android apps. The figures make them believe that a notable fraction of Internet users in Turkmenistan are using FreeBrowser. Can anyone corroborate from their own experience?

https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2023/aug/14-million-people-used-freebrowser-circumvent-great-firewall-turkmenistan

FreeBrowser’s popularity in Turkmenistan has been achieved with no promotional effort and largely by word of mouth. GreatFire focuses most of its efforts on China where the so-called great firewall is the most sophisticated censorship technology in the world. But our tools can also beat firewalls in other countries.

However, the rise of FreeBrowser in Turkmenistan came as a complete surprise. We believe that the growth of FreeBrowser is linked to efforts that the Turkmen authorities took in 2022 to limit the use of VPNs in the country. In the second half of 2022, civil rights organizations reported that “an increasing number of internet websites” were being blocked and that those using circumvention tools were being subjected to intimidation.

[atabally]

Surprisingly this tool has been working more than 5-6 months (maybe 1 year idk exactly) even though it is the most installed app in Play store and this is the only circumvention tool that people can use free. This tool managed to survive from 1-2 block waves and it still works. It doesn't work so fast (it is maybe because of our internet speed idk) but since it is the only thing that works currently people use it. Sometimes it take 3-5 minutes to connect when installed first time then connection is smooth. A lot of paid vpn providers popular to unpopular ones all quit from this business because they can't keep their tools unblocked but FreeBrowser still works and it is free.

Thank you greatfire for their tool and do not let them isolate us from the outside world

[jesowozapoc]

Does it work now? They put a link on the top most popular apps in Turkmenistan. When I checked for the first time it was on the 7'th place. Now it is on the 14'th

[Ali-Razmjoo]

Can anyone try this to check if this VPN from Ashgabat is still working?
no need to buy tho, just open this URL from there: https://latency.vs.secologist.com/

It seems like a big challenge to connect to VPN from there...

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Update: Cloudflare stopped working, Google CDN works.

[wkrp]

Hi @Voxicurse, another place you can look for information is the NTC forum, they have a subforum for Turkmenistan there, and also a large number of Russian speakers if you speak Russian.

https://ntc.party/c/internet-censorship-all-around-the-world/turkmenistan/17

All the TM posts on this forum are tagged with a label: Turkmenistan .

At https://bugs.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/40024#note_2929076 you can see some commands to run for testing different kinds of blocking.

[wkrp]

GreatFire has published FreeBrowser source code now.

• https://github.com/greatfire/freebrowser
• https://github.com/greatfire/freebrowser-backend

[jesowozapoc]

Great. Now it will be less spooky since when I tried to download free browser desktop firefox prevented the download saying that it's a virus