On Mon, 14 Sep 2015, Vladimir Teplouhov wrote: > Hello. > > У кого-нить уже есть информация по блокировкам интернета в Узбекистане(и > др.)? > Что там применяют или испытывают?
[translated from Russian, with apologies to both Russian speakers and English readers] Hello, Does anybody have any information about Internet blocking in Uzbekistan (and others)? Are they experimenting with something there? Skype and other voice services have ceased to work... http://uforum.uz/showthread.php?t=15221&page=205 what is known at the moment: * Gernally a high-speed transmission is experienced between Uzbekistan and Russia, one gets initially a working voice and video connection, but after few seconds the voice connectivity stops working. Chat continues to work... * VPNs used to relieve the situation, but later VPN networks ceased to work (according to rumors TOR is not working as well, but I haven't verified that yet). * One can observe that connections are filtered in transit between Russia and Uzebkistan, a purely domestic traffic seems to work properly (but I think they may expand the filtering activity also to cover internal connectivity as well). * The government and ISP officials pass the buck towards Russia - therefore one cannot rule out some recent work done in Russia and the use of Russian equipment. A financing for projects concerning for example TOR detection and blocking has been announced on the Russian government procurement portals. (A provider has a financial interest in blocking VoIP services of the competition, _as this brings a revenue increase for telephony_ - that's why providers do have a vested interest here; but nevertheless the use of Russian equipment cannot be excluded [even in this case]). Initially I thought they identify VoIP users by traffic volume, which is seems pretty easy, but _the connectivity is not blocked completely_ (as it would be in case an IP address is banned), and the chat is working... There are also issues popping out with adding new contacts on Skype! That's why I started to suspect, that a more advanced methods are used, possibly they analyze and crack network procotols, including p2p - which is unexpected and very dangerous. Vladimir PS according to some rumours the provider purchased some expensive equipment in China, but I think that development of the filters is most probably by somebody else (in .UZ there are simply no experts and no money, I don't think that they have more far-reaching goals than just blocking some anti-government sites, but the equipment being used apparently can do much than that!)... Apparently the peripheries of the Internet serve now as a testing ground for the new blocking technology, so we can expect that similar issues will pop up in Russia and other countries, as well as in the homeland of the NSA - USA... What do people think about this? PPS if the block size of the bitcoin protocol will be expanded it will become visible to a crude [volume-based] traffic analysis, even without analysis of the protocol itself... (in general I think we should start considering building of [new] *physical* connectivity channels independent of the government and consider construction of the new Internet, independent of the governments...) So right now there is a good possibility to work out and test countermeasures - but we should not wait any longer, as the experience shows "the problem is solved" by turning off the filters for certain periods of the day and re-applying them again in the most unexpected moment. PPPS please translate this into English - automated translations usually give not only a rough translation, but they also distort the intended meaning. -- tor-talk mailing list - [email protected] To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
