New issue
Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.
By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.
Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account
Belarus links #46
Comments
There was a decrease in Tor relay users and an increase in Tor bridge users, mainly obfs4. https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?start=2020-04-01&end=2020-08-15&country=by Psiphon shows an increase in daily connections from Belarus, from near zero on August 7 to over 15 million on August 11. https://psix.ca/d/nyi8gE6Zk/regional-overview?orgId=2&var-region=BY (archive) OONI has a decrease in "available" measurements and an increase in "blocked" measurements. |
@jakubd shares OONI measurements that show what overt blockpages look like. On the ISP A1 (formerly velcom):
On MTS:
On Beltelecom:
|
@fortuna analyzed Censored Planet data for Beltelecom on August 9–10, 2020, and made a sorted list of domains by interference rate. About 96% of tested domains experienced no interference, 3% were blocked in every measurement, and the remaining 1% were sometimes blocked and sometimes not. The blocked domains include a lot of Google domains, social networks, communication tools, and proxies. https://gist.github.com/fortuna/ae68a39de773251ef7c427c1eb25b75a |
FYI , I've updated the gist with another CSV with the actual errors that the Censored Planet probes see: Most of the errors are timeouts, but there are some EOFs, which I believe mean a premature TCP FINs. I see TCP resets for some domains. Presumably they were blocked previously by a different mechanism. For example:
|
You can see the shutdown clearly on Google's Transparency Report. The Censored Planet data does not show blocking of the |
In a series of articles, Ryan Gallagher reports that the block in Belarus was done, at least partially, using technology provided by Sandvine. After facing criticism, on 2020-09-15 Sandvine cancelled its deal with the government of Belarus. The first article is according to two unnamed sources, later backed up by internal Sandvine documents and a recording of a conference call with employees. Previous discussion of the use of Sandvine equipment for censorship in Pakistan. 2020-08-28 Belarusian Officials Shut Down Internet With Technology Made by U.S. Firm (archive)
2020-09-11 U.S. Company Faces Backlash After Belarus Uses Its Tech to Block Internet (archive)
2020-09-15 Francisco-Backed Sandvine Cancels Belarus Deal, Citing Abuses (archive)
|
Belarus protests: From internet outages to pervasive website censorship (archive) OONI, Human Constanta, and the Digital Observers Community Belarus have a report on web page blocking in Belarus between 2020-08-01 and 2020-09-03. Mass blocking of web sites is reported to have begun on 2020-08-22, which is later than the temporary shutdown which took place between 2020-08-09 and 2020-08-12. Blocking is done by block page for HTTP, TCP RST for HTTPS (possibly triggered by SNI), and in one case, DNS spoofing. Their source data is available in a spreadsheet (archive).
|
Internet blocking in Belarus (archive) Qurium and Human Constanta have published a report giving details of how blocking is done on four ISPs in Belarus.
Summary table of how each of 56 domains is blocked on the four ISPs:
|
Link to relay graph I posted the graph also to NTC, because there may be a greater number of experts on Belarus there. Psiphon Data Engine doesn't show a change in Psiphon users in Belarus at that time. (Screenshotted before the date falls off the recent history.) While looking at the graphs, I also noticed an apparent Tor relay block on 2020-10-13 that I don't think has been discussed before. |
A long thread at NTC (in Russian) where @ValdikSS has prepared a server container and client VM to maintain access in Belarus. If you make an account at NTC and log in, there is an🌐 automatic translation button beneath each post.
IODA dashboard for Belarus in the past 6 days. For help using the IODA dashboard, see the IMV talk by Ramakrishna Padmanabhan or the screencast by Philipp Winter.
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: