[tor-project] OONI status report - February 2017

[Arturo Filastò]

# OONI Monthly Report: February 2017

February was an important month for the OONI project, as the launch of
the ooniprobe mobile app for Android and iOS platforms significantly
increased OONI's userbase and global coverage of censorship events.
Below we provide some highlights from OONI's activities in February 2017.

## Launch of ooniprobe mobile app

On 9th February 2017 we launched our mobile app for Android and iOS
platforms. The development of the apps was carried out as part of
Lorenzo Primittera's OTF fellowship through support from the OONI team.

The new ooniprobe app includes network measurement tests that are
designed to examine:

* Blocking of websites ("Web Connectivity" test)

* Presence of middle boxes ("HTTP invalid request line" test)

* Speed and performance of networks ("NDT" test)

This app can be installed on Android and iOS platforms through the
following app stores:

* Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.openobservatory.ooniprobe

* Apple nes.apple.com/us/app/id1199566366

More information about ooniprobe's mobile apps can be found through the
post that we published on the launch date:
https://ooni.torproject.org/post/ooni-mobile-app/

The launch of ooniprobe's mobile app received widespread media coverage.
Some news outlets that wrote about ooniprobe's mobile apps include:

* CNN:
http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/08/technology/ooniprobe-censorship-mobile-app/

* Forbes:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2017/02/09/tor-projects-new-mobile-app-alerts-you-about-surveillance-and-censorship/#6ee0300d53e0

* The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/ooniprobe-censorship-mapping/516051/

* Cyberscoop:
https://www.cyberscoop.com/ooniprobe-tor-app-ios-android-censorship/

## ooniprobe mobile app: Translations and feature requests

Following the launch of ooniprobe's mobile apps, we started collecting
feedback from our users and implementing feature requests. These are
summarized through the following platform:
https://trello.com/b/RgwVg6i8/ooniprobe-mobile-feature-requests

More feature requests can be viewed through the tickets and pull
requests of the following GitHub repositories:

* https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooniprobe-ios

* https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooniprobe-android

* https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-wui

In response to community feedback, we started working on the f-droid
version of ooniprobe:
https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooniprobe-android/issues/54. We also
reviewed and edited the Citizen Lab's global test list (that is tested
by ooniprobe's mobile app) quite extensively:
https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/133.

We started coordinating the translation of ooniprobe's mobile apps
through support from the Localization Lab. In February, ooniprobe was
translated to the following languages:

* Spanish

* French

* Italian

Work is being done on adding translations for:

* Hindi

* Arabic

We added support for translating ooniprobe's mobile apps
(https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-wui/issues/31) and future
releases will include translations.

## New web UI

We made progress on implementing the new web UI following the UX review.
We tagged a release candidate for ooni-probe that features the new web
UI and made an open call for testing:
https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe/releases/tag/v2.2.0-rc.1.

## Community engagement

We have setup a slack to IRC bridge to encourage less technical users
and OONI enthusiasts to join in our public discussions:
https://slack.openobservatory.org/.

Starting in February we have also started to hold broader community
meetings on Slack and IRC with the goal of engaging more with the wider
OONI community. The logs for the last community meeting can be found
here: http://meetbot.debian.net/ooni/2017/ooni.2017-02-28-15.59.log.html.

## Updated documentation

Since May 2016 we have been receiving legal consultation for the
improvement of our documentation and practices pertaining to potential
risks associated to the use of ooniprobe. To this end, we updated the
following documentation:

* OONI Data Policy: https://ooni.torproject.org/about/data-policy/

* Risks: Things you should know before using ooniprobe:
https://ooni.torproject.org/about/risks/

The above documentation not only incorporates feedback that we received
through legal consultation, but also includes information pertaining to
ooniprobe's mobile apps.

In addition, we published a test description for OONI's new NDT test
(which is included in our mobile apps):
https://ooni.torproject.org/nettest/ndt/

## Research and data analysis

In collaboration with Sinar Project, we carried out research and data
analysis for our upcoming reports on Myanmar, Thailand, and Indonesia.
We expect to publish these research reports within the next month.

## Userbase

OONI's userbase expanded significantly in February thanks to the launch
of our mobile apps.

In February alone, ooniprobe was run 143,607 times from 2,765 different
vantage points across 181 countries around the world.

This information can also be found through our stats here:
https://measurements.ooni.torproject.org/stats

~ The OONI team.