[ooni-talk] Report on Russia blocking OONI Explorer

[Maria Xynou]

Hello,

Russia recently blocked access to one of our platforms, OONI Explorer: a
large open dataset on internet censorship worldwide (
https://explorer.ooni.org/).

Today we published a *report, documenting the blocking of OONI Explorer in
Russia* based on OONI data:
https://ooni.org/post/2024-russia-blocked-ooni-explorer/

On 11th September 2024, we received an email from Roskomnadzor, informing
us of their decision to block access to OONI Explorer. On the same day,
OONI data shows that ISPs in Russia started implementing the block.

While Roskomnadzor mentioned their intention to restrict access to the
Russian translation of our circumvention tool reachability measurements, in
practice, the restriction is far-reaching. The block restricts access to
all OONI data hosted on OONI Explorer.

On some networks in Russia, we are able to automatically confirm the
blocking of OONI Explorer based on fingerprints. For example, OONI data
shows that DNS resolution returns an IP that hosts a block page.

On most networks in Russia, access to OONI Explorer appears to be blocked
by means of TLS interference. Many measurements resulted in timeout errors
and connection reset errors right after the Client Hello message during the
TLS handshake.

While ISPs in Russia blocked access to OONI Explorer, they did not block
access to our main website (ooni.org), nor to our censorship measurement
app (OONI Probe) – as suggested by the fact that the overall OONI
measurement coverage from Russia seems quite stable.

It is still possible for people in Russia to download OONI data from the
OONI API (https://api.ooni.io/) or to fetch OONI data from our S3 bucket (
https://docs.ooni.org/data/).

We thank OONI Probe users in Russia for contributing measurements!

~ OONI team.
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