[tor-project] OONI Monthly Report: August 2017

Wed Sep 13 16:33:26 UTC 2017

# OONI Monthly Report: August 2017

The OONI team made steady progress in August.

We published a new research report on our study of internet censorship in Cuba, and we created three new test lists. We carried out research on how best to secure probe orchestration, and we made progress on our data processing pipeline and on the custom URL scheme for the mobile clients. We also created a new OONI style guide for the design of our apps and the creation of data visualizations. Our commentary about OONI was published by Project Syndicate.

## Published research report on internet censorship in Cuba

We published a new research report, titled: "Measuring Internet Censorship in Cuba's ParkNets"

You can read the report here: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/cuba-internet-censorship-2017/

We also published a summary of the report on the Tor blog: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/measuring-internet-censorship-cubas-parknets

Our study was covered by the following:

1. Amnesty International: https://medium.com/@AmnistiaOnline/la-paradoja-de-internet-de-cuba-b3cd206a3f1d

2. Motherboard: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbbjxm/here-are-the-41-websites-you-cant-access-in-cuba

3. El Nuevo Herald: http://www.elnuevoherald.com/noticias/mundo/america-latina/cuba-es/article170768342.html

## Style guide for design of apps and data visualizations

We created a style guide for the design of our apps and for the creation of data visualizations based on OONI data.

Our master style guide can be found here: https://openobservatory.github.io/design/

Our style guide for the data visualizations that are to be included in our reports and blogs can be found here: https://github.com/OpenObservatory/design/issues/2 

It's worth noting that we created a graph based on this style guide for our Cuba report, which was re-used by Motherboard.

We also started working on a style guide for the design of our apps: https://github.com/OpenObservatory/design/issues/3

Based on these new style guides, we created some mock-ups for the new design of our website (https://github.com/OpenObservatory/design/issues/5) and mobile apps (https://github.com/OpenObservatory/design/issues/7).

## Created new test lists

In collaboration with community members, we created the following three new test lists:

1. Taiwan test list: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/205

2. Afghanistan test list: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/203

3. Angola test list: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/204

## Research on securing probe orchestration

We brainstormed and researched on how to best secure probe orchestration. Since this is a very critical components we believe it’s essential that it does not get compromise or if compromise happens it is mitigated.

The results of these discussions are documented here:
https://github.com/TheTorProject/proteus/issues/24
https://github.com/TheTorProject/proteus/issues/26
https://github.com/TheTorProject/proteus/issues/27

## Progress on custom URL scheme

A major feature request that we have received from our community members is to add support in our mobile clients for testing single URLs (independently from whether or not they are included in the Citizen Lab test lists).
This was implemented with a custom URI scheme (ex. ooni://nettest/web_connectivity?url=http://google.com) that allows people to put a badge on their website that, when clicked by a user with the ooniprobe app installed, will run an ooniprobe measurement to a site of their choosing or, if they don’t have the app installed, prompt them to install it.
This will allow people to encourage the usage of ooniprobe for testing the reachability of sites they care to monitor and/or run experiments that they believe are important.

During August, we made progress towards implementing the custom URL scheme in our mobile apps and a new version of the app supporting the URI scheme to run tests with or without custom parameter will be released soon.

More details abou this in the following tickets:
https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooniprobe-android/issues/66

## Progress on data processing pipeline

We continued to make progress on the engineering of our data processing pipeline. During August, we started the extraction of anomalies from the measurements and fixes a variety of different bugs we found in the processing of the data.

More information about this can be found here:
https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-pipeline/pull/62

## Project Syndicate commentary about OONI

We wrote a commentary explaining why running ooniprobe matters, which was published by Project Syndicate. 

The commentary can be found here: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ooniprobe-internet-censorship-by-maria-xynou-2017-08

Our commentary was subsequently cross-published by many other publishers as well.

## Userbase

In August 2017 ooniprobe was run 78,464 times from 1,728 different vantage points across 159 countries around the world.

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

~ The OONI team.

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