Access Now human rights activists from Access Now referring to activists inside the country
report that Venezuela’s state provider CANTV has begun blocking citizens ’access to the Tor network, and does so at a high technical level.
Bypassing state blocking is a necessary necessity for citizens, because the authorities are trying to obstruct access to many popular Internet resources. For example, the latest blockages have affected the sites of several popular publications, including El Nacional and La Patilla.
Previous attempts at online censorship could often be circumvented by changing the DNS settings from a local Venezuelan server to an international server like Google or 1.1.1.1 from Cloudflare, but this does not help now, activists say. Therefore, citizens have switched to the use of VPN-services and Tor. The graph above shows how the traffic to the Tor bridges has increased dramatically in recent months. With direct connections the same picture. Probably, this surge of popularity and the encouragement of state regulators to start blocking Tor.
“It seems that the Venezuelan government has found a way to implement a very complex Tor lock. It acts not only on the direct access channels, but also on the bridges Tor provides to bypass this blockage, ”said Venezuelan IT specialist and journalist, Melanio Escobar. “The government is moving in the direction of closure following the example of China or Iran.”
Experts are talking about block escalation, because this time it touched the largest opposition sites and the Tor network using more sophisticated methods. Thus, there is now one of the most powerful attempts at blocking by the government.
Anti-
blocking activists
VE sin Filtro write that CANTV with a high degree of success blocks not only clean direct connections, but also obfs3 and obfs4 bridges. Only the
meek plug-in transport works reliably .
Meek to work uses a technique called domain fronting, which allows you to mask the request to the Tor bridge so that it becomes indistinguishable from the usual request, for example, to the Google search engine (although Google recently banned domain fronting on its servers). In more detail the scheme of action meek is shown in the diagram.
In the near future, VE sin Filtro promises to publish a report with technical details on how the authorities manage to filter obfstsirovanny traffic obfs3 and obfs4.
Since 2016, Venezuela has experienced several waves of public protests due to the deteriorating social and economic situation. In this regard, the authorities declared a state of emergency in the country and detained a number of activists, including Internet activists, who expressed anti-government policies online. For example, Internet activist
James Criollo (Jaimes Criollo) was imprisoned for some time and tortured until he gave passwords from his social network accounts.
What is in Russia?
VPN services have recently become
more and more popular among Russians , despite their
formal ban at the legislative level .
On November 1, 2017, the law banning the use of VPN services and anonymizers for access to information prohibited in Russia came into force. Owners of such services and search engines are required by law to restrict access to such information. They are given three days to restrict access through the proposed technical means and programs to prohibited sites. The list of prohibited resources is kept by Roskomnadzor (by the way, an interesting
article was recently published by
one of the employees of Roskomnadzor , where he talks about everyday work).
Nevertheless, the largest VPN services continue to work quietly in Russia, not fulfilling the requirements of Roskomnadzor. Their popularity
has increased dramatically in anticipation of blocking Telegram.
Access to the Tor network in Russia is not yet blocked,
unlike in Belarus . In case the state tries to do this, the Tor network provides for work across bridges and connected transports. This opportunity is now used by residents of Venezuela and Belarus.
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