[tor-project] OONI Monthly Report: December 2018

Sun Jan 13 22:49:30 UTC 2019

Hello Tor world,

During December 2018, the OONI team wrapped up the year by preparing for
the upcoming OONI Probe mobile app launch, making a series of
improvements to Measurement Kit (our network measurement library) and by
implementing an orchestra endpoint for test lists.

## Prepared for OONI Probe mobile app launch

Following the public beta release of the revamped OONI Probe mobile apps
in November, we spent December preparing for the stable release in
January 2019. This involved:

* Fixing bugs reported as part of the beta testing.

* Improvements to how we managed translations in the mobile apps via:
https://github.com/ooni/translations

* Coordinating translations & joining the OONI Probe Office Hour on the
Localization Lab Mattermost channel to address translator questions
(https://www.localizationlab.org/blog/2018/12/11/ooni-probe-office-hour).
We're extremely grateful to the Localization Lab for their great support
in coordinating translations!

## Test list orchestra endpoint

We added a dedicated ooni/orchestra API endpoint for provisioning OONI
Probes with URLs to be tested: https://github.com/ooni/orchestra/pull/58
& https://github.com/ooni/orchestra/pull/57.

This allows for a more dynamic and quick update of test lists on mobile
devices and it's a first step towards rolling out OONI Probe Orchestration.

## Measurement Kit

### Released Measurement Kit v0.9.1

We released a new version of Measurement Kit:
https://github.com/measurement-kit/measurement-kit/projects/2. This new
version contains bug fixes and improvements over version 0.9.0 and will
be included in the upcoming release of the mobile apps.

### Improved DNS engine in Measurement Kit

We wrote the foundation for a new DNS engine in Measurement Kit. The
requirements for this new DNS engine have been documented in
https://github.com/measurement-kit/measurement-kit/issues/1689. We have
implemented these requirements in a separate repository
(https://github.com/measurement-kit/mkudns), which we plan on
integrating in Measurement Kit v0.10.0 or v0.11.0. This new engine will
allow us to save the content of sent and received UDP DNS packets, and
will also allow us to timestamp network events. We will use this code
when running some OONI tests to collect low level data useful to
understand censorship. We are specifically planning on submitting base64
encoded packets to the OONI pipeline for further analysis and for
historical records.

### Rewritten iOS integration layer

We have created a new repository
(https://github.com/measurement-kit/mkall-ios) for integrating
Measurement Kit with the iOS apps. This new repository has been designed
with OONI Probe for iOS in mind but could potentially be beneficial to
any other project using Measurement Kit. The gist of this rewrite is
that now the app can use Objective C code directly to interact with
Measurement Kit. The code in mkall-ios will take care of mapping the
Objective C requests to Measurement Kit's internal APIs. This change is
great for us because it allows us to decouple the implementation of the
OONI app from Measurement Kit internals. In turn, this improvement
allows us to increase our code velocity, i.e. the speed at which we can
change mutually independent parts of the code base by minimizing the
surface over which changes propagate.

The upcoming version of OONI for iOS will use this repository. We're
working to implement similar changes for Android too.

## Updated the test list of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

In preparation for the Democratic Republic of Congo's elections in late
December 2018, we carried out research and coordinated with locals to
update the country's test list. The updates can be viewed here:
https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/420

The CD test list was also updated earlier (November 2018) thanks to URLs
provided by community members:
https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/413

## IEEE publication

Earlier in 2018, we published a research report on internet censorship
in Nigeria, in collaboration with Paradigm Initiative:
https://ooni.torproject.org/post/nigeria-internet-censorship/

A version of our research report was published in the IEEE Internet
Policy Newsletter (December 2018 edition):
https://internetinitiative.ieee.org/newsletter/december-2018/measuring-internet-censorship-in-nigeria

## OONI blog post for Tor Strength in Numbers blog series

In support of the Tor Project's end-of-year fundraising campaign, we
published a blog post, "Strength in Numbers: Fighting Internet
Censorship", which is available here:
https://blog.torproject.org/strength-numbers-fighting-internet-censorship

Our blog post was translated to Russian and cross-posted by
Roskomsvoboda: https://roskomsvoboda.org/43616/

## Community activities

### MAMI Active Measurement Hackathon in Scotland

OONI's Simone traveled to Aberdeen, Scotland, to participate at the
Measurement and Architecture for a Middleboxed Internet (MAMI) Active
Measurement Hackathon on 5th & 6th December 2018. The goal of the 2-day
hackathon was to share knowledge and experience in internet measurement
between OONI and MAMI.

Information about the hackathon is available via MAMI's blog post:
https://mami-project.eu/index.php/2018/12/20/mami-active-measurement-hackathon-in-aberdeen-scotland/

### EngageMedia's OONI blog post

The Philippines' EngageMedia published a blog post about OONI,
explaining OONI Probe and encouraging local communities to participate
in censorship measurement research. Their blog post is available here:
https://www.engagemedia.org/blog/ooni-measure-censorship

## Userbase

In December 2018, OONI Probe was run 298,455 times from 4,527 different
vantage points in 209 countries around the world.

This information can also be found through our stats:
https://api.ooni.io/stats

~ The 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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