[ooni-talk] Report: Egypt blocks BBC and Alhurra

[Maria Xynou]

Hello,

In collaboration with community members in Egypt, OONI just published a
report on the blocking of BBC and Alhurra in Egypt:
https://ooni.org/post/2019-egypt-blocks-bbc-and-alhurra/

We share network measurement data on:

* Blocking of BBC:
https://explorer.ooni.org/search?until=2019-09-26&domain=www.bbc.com&probe_cc=EG

* Blocking of Alhurra:
https://explorer.ooni.org/search?until=2019-09-26&domain=www.alhurra.com&probe_cc=EG

We corroborated OONI measurements by performing manual curl tests with
the help of our local partners, the findings of which we share in the
report.

We found that Egyptian ISPs are using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)
technology that is aware of TLS and which is most likely fingerprinting
the SNI field of the TLS handshake.

Both bbc.com and alhurra.com could therefore benefit from supporting
Encrypted SNI on their backend servers to enable censorship
circumvention (at least for Firefox users).

As more protests are planned tomorrow, there is the risk that further
censorship events may be triggered in Egypt.

You can track any potential new censorship events by digging through
measurements contributed by OONI Probe users in Egypt:
https://explorer.ooni.org/search?until=2019-09-26&probe_cc=EG

To check for blocked sites in Egypt, here are all the ones that present
anomalies:
https://explorer.ooni.org/search?until=2019-09-26&probe_cc=EG&only=anomalies
=> this is automatically updated every day with new results (but there
may be some false positives)

Please share with your networks:
https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/1177294075948650499

Thanks,

~ OONI team.

-- 
Maria Xynou
Research & Partnerships Director
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.torproject.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E


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