Blog posts on OONI: Open Observatory of Network Interference

From Heuristics to Anonymous Credentials: Assessing OONI's Approach to Bad Measurements

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Image: Evaluating OONI’s Anonymous Credential System.

Ensuring the integrity of OONI’s measurement dataset is critical for maintaining its credibility and usefulness, particularly for human rights defenders and researchers who rely on it.

As the OONI Probe network expands, so does the risk of faulty or misleading measurements, whether caused by misconfigurations or deliberate attacks.

In this blog post, we discuss our existing and upcoming new methods for detecting and mitigating faulty measurements in conjunction with our new anonymous credentials system for use in OONI Probe. As part of it we assess the effectiveness of the anonymous credentials system which is being rolled out into production.

Launch: New OONI Probe Desktop App for Windows and macOS

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re a user of the OONI Probe desktop application, you might have felt it was lacking a bit of love. It works fine, but it was lacking some features and UI improvements already available on its mobile counterpart. Well we’ve got good news, a new version of the OONI Probe desktop app is now available for Windows and macOS. And you can expect more frequent updates going forward.

Get the new OONI Probe Desktop App.

Support OONI and Your Favourite Internet Freedom Tools in the New Quadratic Funding Campaign

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Image: Crypto crowdfunding campaign for internet freedom.

This week, we joined a group of 10 like-minded projects with the launch of a new quadratic funding campaign for internet freedom.

DONATE TO OONI

Our ability to continue our work is at risk, but with your help, there is a new way to fund internet freedom.

Join the quadratic funding campaign to support OONI and your favourite internet freedom tools.

Every contribution helps. Small donations can have an outsized impact.

Measuring Internet Censorship: Challenges, Trends, and Impact

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Internet Society Pulse blog.

In short:

Internet censorship is becoming more sophisticated, targeted, and harder to detect.
OONI crowdsourced network measurement data enables research and supports advocacy and rapid response to Internet censorship events.
OONI’s longitudinal data reveals several key trends in how Internet censorship is evolving globally, including targeted, intermittent blocks for short-term control, and long-term blocks for systemic suppression.

Internet censorship is becoming more sophisticated and harder to detect, making transparency more urgent than ever.

Year in Review: OONI in 2025

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Image: Year in Review: OONI in 2025.

In this report, we share OONI highlights from 2025, as well as some of the great ways through which the internet freedom community made use of OONI tools and data.

Launched OONI Probe Multiplatform App for Android and iOS

In March 2025, we launched an OONI Probe multiplatform app for Android and iOS! This is an important milestone for the long-term sustainability of the OONI Probe apps, as it will enable us to ensure feature parity and to ship new features faster and more effectively across platforms.

Announcing OONI's New Anonymous Credential System

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In our previous posts, we outlined why OONI requires an anonymous credential system and detailed the security and privacy requirements such a system must satisfy. We highlighted the core challenge: OONI needs to establish trust in submitted measurements without creating identifiers that could reveal user identity or allow cross-network tracking.

Anonymous credentials offer a cryptographic mechanism to authenticate certain properties of a probe — such as long-term participation or measurement volume — without exposing who the user is, where they are, or linking their activity across networks.

Protect Our Internet. Document Censorship – Support OONI Today.

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Image designed by Robotina.

Today, we are launching OONI’s end-of-year fundraising campaign. This year, the need to document internet censorship is more important than ever.

Around the world, access to online information is increasingly blocked – often during events such as protests and elections – limiting people’s ability to communicate and access independent reporting during critical moments.

Throughout the year, we observed many cases of online restrictions. Major social media platforms were blocked in countries such as Togo, Cameroon, and Tanzania. Messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp faced blocks in Kenya, Vietnam, Nepal, and Iran. And more independent news media websites were recently blocked in India, Egypt, and Jordan.

Survey: How useful are the new OONI resources to you?

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

To better support the internet freedom community in monitoring and responding to censorship events, we’ve introduced several major enhancements over the past few years, including:

New OONI Explorer Censorship Findings platform
New OONI Explorer thematic censorship pages
New research reports based on OONI data
Methodological improvements (e.g., new throttling methodology)
Data analysis improvements through OONI Pipeline v5

We’re now seeking community feedback on these resources and methodological updates so we can evaluate their impact and continue improving them.

Join us at the OMG Village at the Global Gathering 2025!

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Are you attending the upcoming Global Gathering event in Estoril, Portugal? Are you interested in investigating internet shutdowns and censorship, and curious to learn more about the tools and open datasets that support this work?

Join us at the Global Gathering Open Measurement Gathering (OMG) Village: a community space organized and hosted by 4 internet measurement projects: Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), Measurement Lab (M-Lab), Internet Outage Detection & Analysis (IODA), and Censored Planet. We also have the pleasure of being joined by our friends Netalitica and Project Ainita, who will each host a booth on Day 3.

OONI Security Audit: Penetration Test Report

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As part of our free software ethos and community commitment to deliver secure and high quality code, we are publishing the detailed penetration test report conducted by Radically Open Security with support from the Open Technology Fund (OTF).

Download Security Report

This report contains the results of a crystal box penetration test — a core part of our broader security audit process – carried out between August 5, 2024 and October 18, 2024. The security audit focused on evaluating the core components of OONI’s software to ensure they meet high standards of security and quality.

[Event Report] India, Let's build the list 2025

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a guest post by The Bachchao Project, originally published here.

In June 2025, The Bachchao Project and OONI reviewed the list of websites used for monitoring website censorship in India. This is part of our efforts as a collective to build robust civil society engagement in monitoring internet access in India. As part of this event, we invited a small group of experts and practitioners to join us for a series of workshops focused on updating specific categories of websites tested for censorship in India.

OMG! Summary of the 3rd Open Measurement Gathering (OMG) Ask Me Anything (AMA) event

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

On June 25, 2025, the Open Measurement Gathering (OMG) held a public event, “Open Measurement Gathering AMA”, featuring Censored Planet, IODA, OONI, and Measurement Lab. This was a chance for the OMG group to share project updates, future plans, and gather questions and feedback from the Internet freedom community. Each measurement group presented for 30 minutes followed by Q&A.

This public virtual event was inspired by the past two OMG convenings (public reports 1 and 2) at which OMG groups have shared exciting updates to their platforms, tools, and/or datasets before sharing with the broader Internet freedom community. For the third OMG convening, the groups decided to share previewing updates publicly to encourage community feedback.

Launch: New OONI Explorer thematic censorship pages

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Image: OONI Explorer thematic censorship pages.

Today we are excited to announce the publication of new OONI Explorer thematic censorship pages! These new pages include charts and reports documenting the blocking of social media, news media, and circumvention tools around the world based on OONI data.

In this blog post, we share information about the new OONI Explorer thematic censorship pages.

About OONI Explorer

OONI Explorer is the world’s largest open dataset on internet censorship.

Requirements for OONI’s anonymous credentials system

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The goal of integrating an anonymous credential system in OONI Probe is to increase trust in OONI measurements by enriching the data with properties about the probes that collected them, while preserving the privacy of our users.

In our first blog post on the topic, we explain at a high level what this system is meant to achieve and provide a comprehensive academic literature review of the current state of the art in cryptographic anonymous credential systems.

Launch: New OONI Probe multiplatform app

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are excited to share that we have launched an OONI Probe multiplatform app for Android and iOS! This is an important milestone for the long-term sustainability of the OONI Probe apps, as it will enable us to ensure feature parity and to ship new features faster and more effectively across platforms.

Update now to the latest version (5.0.3) to start using the new OONI Probe app on Android or iOS.

OONI Probe is a free and open source tool that we have built since 2012, designed to measure various forms of internet censorship. To enable communities worldwide to run OONI Probe and contribute measurements (which are published as open data in real-time), we have made OONI Probe available for both mobile and desktop platforms. Specifically, OONI Probe is available for Android, F-Droid, iOS, Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Probe Security Without Identification

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks to Toomore Chiang and OCF community, this post is available in Mandarin (zh-tw).

Image: In his seminal paper Security without identification: transaction systems to make big brother obsolete, Chaum envisioned users interacting anonymously with various organizations using a single digital wallet, even if those organizations colluded.

Year in Review: OONI in 2024

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As the new year begins, we publish this post to share some OONI highlights from 2024. We also share some of the things we’ll be working on in 2025!

New OONI Foundation

Image: Notary appointment in Rome, Italy, to establish the Open Observatory of Network Interference Foundation (OONI) ETS in February 2024.

Survey: Share your feedback on OONI tools, resources and documentation

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

OONI’s community now includes over 50 organisations and hundreds of thousands of OONI Probe users all over the world.

We are very thankful for your trust in our tools, your support over the years and your contributions to different parts of OONI-verse through collected measurements, localisation projects, and research projects.

With this survey, we want to reflect on our community activities and learn how we can improve upon our outreach, tools and documentation.

Launch: Next generation OONI Run for community-driven censorship testing

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Image: OONI Run.

Today we are thrilled to announce the launch of OONI Run v2: the next generation version of OONI Run for community-driven censorship testing.

Originally launched in September 2017, OONI Run is a platform for creating mobile deep links that you can share with OONI Probe users to coordinate the testing of websites for censorship. Over the past 7 years, OONI Run has been used extensively by community members in Venezuela, Malaysia, India, and around the world as part of their censorship measurement campaigns aimed at monitoring and rapidly responding to emergent censorship events. To improve the OONI Run platform and better meet community needs, we previously conducted an OONI Run usability study, through which we documented extensive community feedback.

Animation: OONI Partner Gathering 2024

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year, we had the opportunity to host the OONI Partner Gathering 2024: a two-day event in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where we brought our partners from Asia and the Middle East together to exchange skills and knowledge on internet censorship research. Our goal was to strengthen global and regional collaborations on censorship measurement research and advocacy. We previously published a report which shares details about the event and its outcomes.

Today, we are excited to share a new animation about the OONI Partner Gathering 2024. This animation provides a glimpse into the event, highlighting the importance of community participation in censorship measurement research. Watch the animation below!

Job Opening: OONI Backend Developer

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Are you a backend developer interested in defending human rights on the internet? We have a job opening for you!

The OONI team (a non-profit measuring internet censorship globally) is looking for a dedicated Backend Developer to work on our backend components and infrastructure, and to provide OONI data analysis support for our research efforts.

Job description

By joining our team, you will work on OONI’s backend components, ensuring the stable and reliable performance of our infrastructure in response to the growing global coverage of measurements. You will also provide OONI data analysis support for OONI research reports and in support of the research of our partners.

OONI Community Interviews: Chido Musodza

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today we are excited to publish an interview with Chido Musodza, Program Associate, Community Engagement at Localization Lab. Chido is passionate about supporting minority language communities through the localization of open-source technology. Localization, on the one hand, makes tech products more inclusive and on the other hand, empowers the development of minority languages and their presence in digital space.

Watch Chido’s interview to learn more about the need for localization and community engagement!

OONI Partner Gathering 2024 in Malaysia

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We are excited to share that on 8th and 9th May 2024, we hosted an in-person OONI Partner Gathering in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. As part of this 2-day event, we brought our partners (primarily from Asia and the Middle East) together to exchange skills and knowledge and strengthen our collaborations on internet censorship research and advocacy. In this report, we share details about the event and its outcomes.

OONI Community Interviews: Tawanda Mugari

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today we are excited to publish an interview with Tawanda Mugari, Co-Founder & Geek in Chief of Digital Society of Africa (DSA). Through our partnership with DSA, we have had the opportunity to collaborate on research and training activities across southern Africa. Tawanda is a digital security expert, community leader and trainer who has been part of the OONI community for years. Watch Tawanda’s interview to learn more about his important work!

Internet sanctions on Russian media: diverging actions and mixed effects

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The original post appeared on the blog of SIDN Labs.

As a response to the Russian aggression against Ukraine, the European Union (EU) imposed sanctions on organisations affiliated with the Russian Federation prohibiting them from broadcasting content in the EU, including online distribution. In a collaborative effort with researchers from the University of Illinois Chicago, Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), the University of Twente and the University of Amsterdam, we carried out a longitudinal traffic analysis to understand how internet service providers (ISPs) in different EU member states implement these sanctions. We found that the degree of blocking varies widely, both between and within individual EU member states. This raises questions about the effectiveness of the EU sanctions. This blog is a summary of the paper we published last month.

Year in Review: OONI in 2023

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As the end of 2023 approaches, we publish this post to share some OONI highlights from the last year. We also share some of the things we’ll be working on in 2024!

New OONI non-profit legal entity

OONI is now a registered NGO in Italy!

OONI Community Interviews: Ihueze Nwobilor

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Today we are thrilled to publish an interview with Ihueze Nwobilor: Senior Programs Officer with Paradigm Initiative. Through our partnership with Paradigm Initiative, we have had the opportunity to collaborate on several research reports examining internet censorship in Nigeria. Ihueze’s work is focused on digital inclusion and on making digital technologies accessible to the under-served communities in numerous African countries, including Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Sudan, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Since the blocking of Twitter in Nigeria in 2021, Ihueze has become an active OONI Probe user and gained a unique experience of using OONI data in his advocacy and government engagement work. Through his advocacy and litigation efforts with Paradigm Initiative, the Twitter ban in Nigeria was declared unlawful and access to the platform was restored.

Launch: New OONI Censorship Findings platform

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Image: OONI Censorship Findings platform.

Today we are thrilled to announce the launch of the OONI Censorship Findings platform!

Internet censorship is frequently being reported around the world, but how can we verify such events with empirical evidence?

Our new platform provides short reports on internet censorship around the world based on OONI’s open data. With the launch of the platform, we are publishing 20 reports on internet censorship that emerged in 2023. In response to emergent censorship events, this platform will be updated with new reports on an ongoing basis.

Measure all the Things! IMC Hackathon 2023

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

On 23rd October 2023, right before the Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2023, we co-hosted an internet measurement hackathon in collaboration with the Internet Society (ISOC), M-Lab, Censored Planet and IODA.

In this post we would like to share some of the projects that were developed as part of the hackathon. It was great to see how much was accomplished in such a short period of time!

The day started with an introduction to the various datasets from OONI’s Arturo, Censored Planet’s Armin, IODA’s Zach, ISOC’s Amreesh and M-Lab’s Lai Yi. Following the brief presentations, the participants formed teams to work on some of the specific challenges that we had proposed or came up with new ones.

OONI Community Interviews: Siti Nurliza

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Today we are thrilled to publish an interview with Siti Nurliza: a talented data analyst and technologist with Sinar Project, one of our most dedicated and long-term partners who have led OONI censorship measurement efforts in Southeast Asia for more than 6 years!

Sinar Project is a civic tech initiative using open technology, open data and policy analysis to systematically make important information public and more accessible to the Malaysian people. Over the years, we collaborated with Sinar Project on measuring and reporting on internet censorship in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar through the use of OONI tools and data.

Join us at the IMC 2023 Hackathon on Network Interference using Open Data

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Are you attending the Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2023?

Join us at the IMC Hackathon on Network Interference using Open Data on Monday, 23rd October 2023, in Montreal, Canada. The hackathon is organized by the Internet Society (ISOC), the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), M-Lab and Censored Planet.

IMC is a yearly academic conference focusing on Internet measurement and analysis. The conference is sponsored by ACM SIGCOMM.

This IMC Hackathon will be about exploring, analyzing, and visualizing open network measurement data with a focus on identifying Internet censorship and Internet shutdown events.

New OONI Explorer features for investigating internet censorship through open data

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We’re excited to share that OONI Explorer includes new features for investigating internet censorship worldwide based on open data.

Specifically, these features include:

New domain-centric pages;
New network-centric pages;
New “internet outage” charts (integrating IODA, Google traffic, and Cloudflare Radar data), available in each country-specific and network-specific page;
New user feedback reporting mechanism, available through the “Verify” button in the banner of each OONI measurement page.

In this blog post, we share information about these new features.

Job Opening: OONI Project Manager

Tue, 02 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This job posting is now closed. Any applications received after 2023-06-28 will not be considered

Are you a project manager interested in defending human rights on the internet? We have a job opening for you!

The OONI team (a non-profit measuring internet censorship globally) is looking for a dedicated project manager to help us manage our software development work.

We will be reviewing applications on a rolling basis.

Job description

By joining our team, you will help ensure that our software projects are on track, supporting a global community that relies on our tools for measuring and fighting internet censorship.

Introducing OONI Probe Web

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of OONI Probe Web: a new browser-based tool for measuring the blocking of websites.

We built OONI Probe Web in response to long-term community feedback, requesting a censorship measurement tool that can be run from a browser, without requiring the installation of any software. Our goal is to support rapid response efforts to emergent censorship events.

However, please note that OONI Probe Web is experimental, and what can be measured from a browser is very limited in comparison to what can be measured from an app. We therefore hope that the use of OONI Probe Web encourages further use of the OONI Probe app for more extensive and accurate testing.

How we're improving OONI data quality: An analysis of failed measurements

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog post, we manually analyse failed OONI measurements to assess why they were classified as such, whether they are symptomatic of censorship, and whether they still carry helpful information for researchers. We focus on measurements from three countries (India, Pakistan, and Indonesia) and outline steps on how we will improve overall data quality.

Background

Web Connectivity is a network test that determines whether a web resource is accessible from the network where the user runs OONI Probe. To this end, Web Connectivity measures accessing the resource and compares the measurement results with another measurement performed by a control vantage point. After the measurement, OONI Probe submits a JSON document summarising its findings and the control vantage point findings to the OONI backend. In turn, the OONI data processing pipeline classifies all Web Connectivity measurements into four categories:

Year in Review: OONI in 2022

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As the end of 2022 approaches, we publish this post to share some OONI highlights from the last year. We also share some of the things we’ll be working on in 2023!

OONI Community Video

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We are happy to celebrate OONI’s 10th anniversary together with our amazing community, who have been at the heart of our work over the past decade.

Today, we are excited to share a new video with OONI community members, where they discuss how OONI has been useful to their work, while sharing what they would like to see OONI do in the future.

Featured community members and partners

Andrés Azpúrua, Venezuela Inteligente

Andrés is the co-founder and Director of Venezuela Inteligente, a non-profit organization that aims to facilitate information, communication and collaboration between citizens and civil society organizations to create impact from a non-partisan perspective. They promote, facilitate and develop digital tools, improving access to information, collaboration and responsiveness, empowering organizations, activists and citizens. They fight for the rights of Venezuelans online and offline.

Highlights: 10 Years of OONI

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today is OONI’s 10th anniversary!

As of today, 10 years ago, the first OONI measurement was published. Today, 10 years later, more than a billion OONI measurements have been published, shedding light on internet censorship worldwide.

In this post, we share some OONI highlights from the past 10 years, as well as some of our future plans.

You can start off by getting a glimpse of “OONI in 10 years” through the following animation, which shares some highlights from the past decade.

Join the 10th Ooniversary Events!

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

You’re invited to join us for the celebration of OONI’s 10th anniversary!

To share OONI highlights from the last 10 years, as well as how community members have used OONI tools and data as part of their work, we’ll be hosting 2 live-streamed events:

OONI Highlights:
- Date and time: 5th December 2022 at 14:00 UTC (1 hour event)
- Location: Live-streamed on OONI YouTube channel

Survey: Help shape OONI’s strategic priorities

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

OONI will celebrate its 10th anniversary on 5th December 2022!

This is a time for celebration, but also a time for reflection: What worked well? What should we improve? What should we do differently going forward?

The OONI community has been at the heart of our work over the past decade, and so we invite our community to help shape OONI’s strategic priorities for the future.

Please take a few minutes to complete our survey: https://ooni.typeform.com/2022-survey

New online OONI training course launched by Advocacy Assembly

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We are excited to share that a free, online OONI training course (“Measuring Internet Censorship with OONI tools”) has been launched today on Small Media’s Advocacy Assembly platform!

Through this course, you will learn how to measure internet censorship through the use of OONI tools. You will also learn how to access and interpret real-time OONI data on internet censorship around the world.

Today, the course is available in English, Arabic, Spanish, and Farsi. Over the next months, the course will also be available in French, Swahili, Portuguese and Russian.

New Test Lists Editor: Contribute websites for censorship testing

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) team is excited to announce the public launch of our new Test Lists Editor!

This platform enables the public to review and contribute to the lists of websites (“test lists”) that are tested for censorship by OONI Probe users around the world.

Help the internet freedom community discover website blocks around the world by contributing through the new Test Lists Editor!

OONI’s submission for the OHCHR report on internet shutdowns and human rights

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Currently, the 50th session of the UN Human Rights Council is taking place.

In response to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’s call for submissions in support of the OHCHR report on internet shutdowns and human rights to the 50th session of the Human Rights Council in June 2022, the OONI team provided a submission with relevant information on the occurrence of mandated disruptions of access to social media and messaging platforms over the past 5 years based on empirical OONI network measurement data.

Job Opening: OONI Community Coordinator

Fri, 13 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Are you passionate about defending human rights on the internet? Are you extremely organized and enjoy supporting communities around the world? We have a job opening for you!

The OONI team (a non-profit fighting internet censorship) is looking for a dedicated community coordinator to help grow and support the OONI community around the world.

The application deadline is Sunday, 12th June 2022.

Job description

By joining our team, you will support our partners and global community of human rights defenders to measure and fight internet censorship. Our community is at the heart of our work, and you will play an important role in helping to ensure that our tools meet the needs of our community.

New Launch: OONI Measurement Aggregation Toolkit (MAT)

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) team is thrilled to announce the public launch of the OONI Measurement Aggregation Toolkit (MAT)!

The MAT is a tool that enables you to create your own custom charts based on aggregate views of real-time OONI data collected from around the world.

Use the MAT to track internet censorship worldwide based on real-time OONI data!

About the MAT
- What is OONI data?

Year in Review: OONI in 2021

Mon, 27 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In light of the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, 2021 continued to be a challenging year for everyone.

Yet, several exciting things happened in the censorship measurement world. In this post, we share some OONI highlights from 2021, as well as some upcoming OONI projects for 2022!

OONI Probe

iThena integration of OONI Probe boosts censorship measurement coverage worldwide

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last months, the iThena project integrated OONI Probe into their platform, resulting in a major spike in OONI censorship measurement coverage around the world.

In this blog post, we’re excited to introduce you to iThena and discuss how they helped support censorship measurement worldwide.

About iThena

iThena, developed by the Cyber-Complex Foundation, is a distributed computation and measurement project based on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform. iThena aims to generate a dynamic topological model of the Internet, based on measurements from distributed devices.

[Event Report] India, Let's Build the List

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a guest post by The Bachchao Project, originally published here.

The Bachchao Project in partnership with OONI hosted an online event on 9th and 10th October 2021 to update the Citizen Lab test list for India. The event, which was called “India, Lets build the list”, was organised to help strengthen community based monitoring of internet censorship in India. The event allowed experts from different fields to contribute to a curated list of websites that are relevant to India and which are regularly tested for censorship by volunteers in India.

Why Collaboration and Transparency is Key to Internet Measurement

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the Internet Society Pulse blog.

With Internet shutdowns, disruptions and censorship events on the increase around the world, tracking where such events are happening and gathering evidence to help in the fight against them is becoming more and more important.

Tracking these events is crucial because of the impact they have on society and the economy. When social media apps are blocked, for example, freedom of speech, access to information, and movement-building is hampered. When access to the Internet is shut down completely, people may not have access to vital services or be able to work and study.

Job Opening: Mobile Developer for OONI Probe

Fri, 17 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Are you a mobile developer interested in defending human rights on the internet? We have a job opening for you!

The OONI team (a non-profit fighting internet censorship, originally born out of the Tor Project) is looking for a dedicated mobile developer to work on OONI Probe: a free software app designed to measure internet censorship and network performance.

The application deadline is Sunday, 31st October 2021.

Job description

If you join our team, you will lead the development of the OONI Probe mobile app, supporting human rights defenders worldwide to investigate and fight internet censorship.

A brief introduction to OONI

Tue, 24 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is gentle introduction to OONI that does not require readers to have a technical background.

If you are familiar with how the Internet works and how it can be censored you can skip The basics.

For frequently asked questions and answers, please refer to the OONI FAQ.

The basics

You might be connecting to the Internet from a local network or using an Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Accessing OONI data

Tue, 24 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This page has moved to: https://docs.ooni.org/data/

OONI Partner Training 2021

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last week, we had the pleasure to host two 3-day OONI Partner Training events for our partners in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. As part of these events, our goal was to share OONI-specific knowledge and skills, and to collect feedback to better serve community needs.

In this post, we share information about the training events.

Making the OONI Probe Android app more resilient

Thu, 27 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We recently made OONI Probe Android more robust against accidental or deliberate blocking of our backend services. Specifically, we implemented support for specifying a proxy that speaks with OONI’s backend services. We also improved the build process to influence the TLS Client Hello fingerprint, which helps with avoiding accidental blocking.

Adding support for a proxy

Since late 2020, community members have been reporting specific OONI Probe Android failures. The symptom is that all tests fail with the “all available probe services failed” error. This issue has been publicly documented, for example, in ooni/probe#1324. The following screenshot shows what a user would see under this specific error condition.

Year in Review: OONI in 2020

Mon, 21 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In light of the global COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 has been a challenging year for everyone.

Yet, several exciting things happened in the censorship measurement world. In this post, we share some OONI highlights from 2020, as well as some upcoming OONI projects for 2021!

Investigating Encrypted DNS Blocking in India

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In October 2020, we collaborated with Divyank Katira and Gurshabad Grover, researchers at the Centre for Internet & Society, India, to implement and evaluate a new OONI experiment focused on detecting DNS censorship.

This new OONI experiment, called dnscheck, focuses on detecting the blocking of encrypted DNS transports such as DNS over TLS and DNS over HTTPS. Its methodology improves upon the measurement methodology OONI previously used to measure DoT blocking in Iran.

The implementation, written by Divyank Katira, is currently only available to users of the miniooni research client. We are however planning on promoting the dsncheck experiment as a first class experiment that will run by default as part of the “websites” experiments group.

OONI Probe ASN Incident Report

Fri, 09 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Last week we noticed that some OONI measurements were available on OONI Explorer under a report ID containing a valid Autonomous System Number (ASN), even though the raw JSON data contained zero as the ASN (i.e. encoded as AS0). We initially thought that this was caused by a bug in our API code, but it actually turned out to be an OONI Probe bug in our probe engine (which powers the OONI Probe apps).

Please update your OONI Probe mobile app to the latest version (2.7.0), which fixes this bug. If you are an OONI Probe desktop app user and prefer not to share your network ASN, please refrain from running tests until we have released a fix for OONI Probe desktop (hopefully this will be possible next week).

Internet Measurement Village 2020: Slides & Video Recordings

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last month, between 10th June 2020 to 3rd July 2020, we organized and hosted the Internet Measurement Village (IMV) 2020, an online community event aimed at sharing skills, knowledge, and resources on internet measurement, in defense of a free and open internet.

As all the IMV sessions were live-streamed and will continue to live on the OONI YouTube channel, we hope that these recordings will serve as a valuable resource on internet measurement for the internet freedom community.

Support the OTF: Support a Free and Open Internet

Wed, 22 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last month, the Open Technology Fund (OTF) – one of the main funders of free censorship circumvention and privacy-enhancing technologies that human rights defenders worldwide rely on – has been under threat, following the ousting of its leadership.

We previously published a statement in support of the OTF, explaining why we think the OTF is essential for internet freedom and encouraging the public to sign the letter to congress.

In this post, we share our experience working with the OTF, and discuss how they have played a crucial role in supporting the fight against internet censorship worldwide.

Azərbaycan: OONI Probe Test üçün çağırış

Thu, 25 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is a guest post by Arzu Geybullayeva (Azerbaijan Internet Watch), originally published here.

Azerbaijan Internet Watch Azərbaycanda internet senzurasını izləyir və bu çərçəvədə aşkar etdiyi pozuntuları öz səhifəsində sənədləşdirir. Bu barədə daha ətraflı məlumatı buradan əldə edə bilərsiniz.

Layihənin bir vacib cəhətlərindən biri də ölkədə bloklanan veb səhifələri izləmək ve bu bloklamaların necə baş verdiyini araşdırmaqdır. Bu barədə isə daha ətraflı buradan və buradan məlumat əldə edə bilərsiniz.

Gördüyünüz kimi, bu testleri aparmaq üçün Azerbaijan Internet Watch OONI ilə əməkdaşlıq edir. OONI dünyada internet senzurasının şəffaflığını artırmağı hədəfləyən layihədir.

Save Internet Freedom: Support the Open Technology Fund

Fri, 19 Jun 2020 16:48:11 +0000

Last Wednesday was dubbed as a “Wednesday night massacre”, following the firing of the directors of four organizations overseen by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM): Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Middle East Broadcasting, and the Open Technology Fund (OTF).

Out of these four organizations, we would like to draw your attention to the OTF, not only because they have been a long-term funder of our project but, more importantly, because they have been essential in creating the internet freedom community as we know it.

OONI Run Usability Study: Findings

Tue, 09 Jun 2020 09:38:02 +0000

OONI Run is a platform (launched in September 2017) that you can use to generate mobile deep links and widget code to coordinate OONI Probe testing. To enable community members to more effectively use OONI Run, we researched its limitations and collected structured community feedback through an OONI Run usability study.

This report outlines the objectives, personas, assumptions, and methods of this study.

We also share the outcomes based on the analysis of information collected through our survey and interviews with community members, as well as some of the next steps towards improving OONI Run.

Join the online Internet Measurement Village 2020

Fri, 05 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We are excited to bring the first online Internet Measurement Village to you this month.

Interested in learning all about Internet measurement and how to detect Internet censorship? Curious to explore open datasets on Internet censorship and Internet outages? Eager to learn how advocates are pushing back against Internet shutdowns and defending a free and open Internet?

Join us for the online Internet Measurement Village, starting on Wednesday, 10th June 2020 and ending on Friday, 3rd July 2020.

OONI Run Survey & Interviews: Share your feedback

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

OONI Run is a platform that you can use to generate mobile deep links and widget code to coordinate OONI Probe testing.

Researchers and human rights defenders around the world have used OONI Run to coordinate OONI Probe censorship measurement campaigns, particularly leading up to and during political events (such as elections and protests).

We’re excited to hear more about your experience with OONI Run so that we can improve it.

Launched: New OONI Probe Desktop App for Windows and macOS

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Today, OONI is thrilled to announce the public launch of the new OONI Probe desktop app that you can download and install on Windows and macOS to measure internet censorship and network performance.

Install OONI Probe Desktop app

By running the tests in the new OONI Probe desktop app, you can measure:

Blocking of websites;
Blocking of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram;
Blocking of Tor and Psiphon;
Presence of systems (“middleboxes”) that could potentially be responsible for censorship and/or surveillance;

Building a smart URL list system: Policy for URL prioritization

Wed, 15 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

To improve the monitoring of website censorship around the world, OONI aims to create a smart URL list system, while ensuring, to the extent possible, the safety of the URL lists themselves by running them through the usual Citizen Lab URL review process. This will help ensure smarter test target selection and by extension, it will enable us – and the broader internet freedom community – to more effectively monitor, analyze, and respond to cases of website censorship around the world.

Let's measure the accessibility of COVID-19 websites around the world

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Ensuring a free and open internet during an emergency, like the current COVID-19 pandemic, is more important than ever. However, access to information related to the coronavirus pandemic has already been censored by certain governments. China censored information on the coronavirus on Chinese social media platforms, while Venezuela’s state-owned CANTV blocked access to a coronavirus information portal last week.

We therefore invite you to participate in a measurement campaign to check if COVID-19 sites are accessible in your country (and on the network you’re using) and to share relevant measurement data with the world.

Year in Review: OONI in 2019

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As the new decade begins, we publish this post to share some OONI highlights from 2019. We also share some thoughts for 2020.

OONI Highlights: 2017-2019

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on the OTF website.

Back in 2012, the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) was born with OTF support to create the first open methodologies that would enable anyone around the world to measure internet censorship and other forms of network interference.

Today, OONI comprises a global community that runs its censorship measurement software (OONI Probe) in more than 200 countries every month. Millions of measurements have been collected from tens of thousands of networks in 236 countries since 2012, all of which are openly published on OONI Explorer – arguably the largest publicly available resource on internet censorship to date.

Call to Action: Let’s measure the blocking of LGBTQI websites around the world!

Wed, 04 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

LGBTQI websites are blocked in several countries around the world, such as Malaysia and Indonesia. This includes popular dating apps and sites, like grindr, which is blocked in Lebanon and Iran.

How can we track the blocking of LGBTQI sites around the world?

We have teamed up with OutRight Action International – a leading international LGBTQI human rights organization – to investigate the blocking of LGBTQI sites worldwide.

We invite you to contribute to this research!

Next Generation OONI Explorer Launched!

Thu, 12 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Today the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) team is thrilled to announce the public launch of the revamped, next generation OONI Explorer!

OONI Explorer is an open data resource on internet censorship around the world. This new platform offers access to millions of censorship measurements collected from 233 countries since 2012.

OONI Software Development Guidelines

Sat, 23 Feb 2019 01:00:00 +0000

The goal of this document is to explain and explicit some of the best practices relevant to software development that we follow at the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI).

By following these development guidelines we aim to produce higher quality code, which contains less defects and allows us to iterate more quickly delivering greater value to our end users is a shorter amount of time!

Version control

Also known as: “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Git!”

OONI Probe Android 2.0.0 Incident Report

Fri, 22 Feb 2019 23:00:00 +0000

The first public release of OONI Probe Android 2.0.0 (since 2.0.0-alpha.7) included a very serious bug: we lost measurements and collected measurements that we shouldn’t have. As soon as the problem was identified, we quickly released a fix (OONI Probe Android 2.0.1). All measurements that should not have been uploaded have been deleted and we are working on a new OONI Probe release (OONI Probe Mobile 2.1.0) that will allow you to manually re-upload measurements. No other OONI Probe platforms (iOS, [macOS](https://ooni.io/install/OONI Probe), [Linux](https://ooni.io/install/OONI Probe), Lepidopter) were affected.

Year in Review: OONI in 2018

Fri, 18 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As the new year begins, we publish this post to share some OONI highlights from 2018. We also share some of the exciting new projects we’ll be launching in 2019!

New partnerships

Our network of partners grew significantly in 2018!

Major Revamp: OONI Probe Mobile App 2.0 Launched!

Mon, 14 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Today the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) project is thrilled to announce the release of a major, new OONI Probe mobile app version!

Are websites and social media apps blocked? Is your network unusually slow?

Install OONI Probe now on Android or iOS to find out!

Do you use OONI Probe? We want your feedback!

Thu, 19 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Survey (self-hosted mirror)

Since last year’s launch of the OONI Probe mobile apps, tens of thousands of people have been measuring internet censorship in around 200 countries every month. But OONI Probe is far from perfect.

We’re excited to hear more about your experience with the apps so that we can improve them.

We invite you to complete our survey and/or participate in an interview to provide feedback.

Survey

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the current OONI Probe mobile apps.

OONI Community Interviews: Julie Owono

Wed, 23 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve met Julie Owono, you’ll probably agree that her passion and determination for defending digital rights is one of the things that stands out about her.

In her capacity as the Executive Director of Internet Sans Frontières (Internet Without Borders), Julie has spearheaded advocacy efforts in defense of online freedoms in many West African countries. Notably, Julie led campaigns against internet shutdowns in Cameroon, as well as in Togo and Chad. Over the last two years, Julie has championed OONI community engagement in West Africa and used OONI data as part of campaigns.

OONI at RightsCon 2018

Fri, 11 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We are excited to participate at RightsCon next week: the world’s leading event on human rights in the digital age. Annually hosted by Access Now, this three-day conference will take place in Toronto between 16th-18th May 2018.

Over the last years, RightsCon has provided us the opportunity to participate in critical discussions in the digital rights field, meet many fascinating people and organizations, and to form new coalitions. We therefore look forward to participating at RightsCon and are eager to meet many new faces!

OONI Community Interviews: Moses Karanja

Wed, 09 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We first met Moses Karanja several years ago at the Citizen Lab Summer Institute. He’s a Kenyan information controls researcher, having previously worked with Strathmore University Law School research centre, CIPIT. Currently, he’s a PhD student at the University of Toronto.

Over the last years, Moses has championed OONI community engagement across Africa. Thanks to his tireless efforts, communities in many African countries are now running OONI Probe and using OONI data to examine internet censorship and other forms of network interference. We have worked with Moses on a number of research reports and are grateful for his commitment to defending a free and open internet.

ParkNet: Short Documentary on Internet Censorship in Cuba

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Last year we had the opportunity to travel to Cuba to explore its internet landscape. We spent most of our time hopping from one public WiFi hotspot to another, measuring networks in Havana, Santa Clara, and Santiago de Cuba. You might remember that we published a research report on our findings.

Today we publish a short documentary (“ParkNet”) on our study of internet censorship in Cuba.

“ParkNet” is a term that we coined to refer to parks that serve as public WiFi hotspots in Cuba. You can also access the internet from many other public spaces, but we found parks to be particularly interesting due to the sort of collective experience that they offer when “visiting” the internet.

OONI's recent participation at events in Africa, India, and Europe

Wed, 11 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last months, the OONI team had the opportunity to host workshops, give presentations, and participate in discussions at the following conferences and events:

Seminar at the University of Cape Town (South Africa)
Internet Policy in Africa: Research Methods for Advocacy workshop (Uganda)
Nullcon 2018 (India)
Internet Freedom Festival (IFF) 2018 (Spain)
Tor Meeting (Italy)

These events provided us a great opportunity to meet many fascinating people from various communities, learn about their work, form new collaborations, and collect feedback for the improvement of our tools and methodologies.

Investigating Internet Blackouts from the Edge of the network: OONI's new upcoming methodology

Wed, 04 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The OONI team is creating a new methodology aimed at automatically detecting and examining internet blackouts. Learn all about our methodology here.

Imagine a day where the internet is shut down completely. You have to work, check the news, and communicate with your friends and family. All of a sudden, you can’t do any of that, because there simply is no internet. It feels like a strange form of time travel has taken place: you’re thrown several decades into the past, into a world without internet, but in one which has learned to heavily rely on it. And sometimes, you remain in that world for several days (or months, in the case of the anglophone region of Cameroon). None of this makes sense, and there’s no clear justification for it either.

Year in Review: OONI in 2017

Sat, 30 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

As the end of 2017 approaches, we publish this blog to share some OONI highlights from the last year. We also share some of the things we’ll be working on in 2018!

OONI Probe mobile apps

OONI at the 34th Chaos Communication Congress (34C3)

Sat, 23 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Next week the OONI team will be attending the 34th Chaos Communication Congress (34C3): Europe’s largest hacker conference on technology, society, and utopia. Are you going? We hope to see you there!

OONI lecture

OONI’s founder and project lead, Arturo Filastò, will be presenting OONI at 34C3.

OONI at LAVITS and Primavera Hacker 2017

Tue, 12 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this month we had the opportunity to present OONI at two conferences in Chile: LAVITS and Primavera Hacker.

LAVITS

LAVITS is a Latin American network of surveillance technology and society studies that organizes international symposiums since 2009. It features publications, talks and workshops related to surveillance and technology, internet censorship, resistance and counter surveillance, identification, biometrics, protection of personal data and privacy. The fifth series of the LAVITS symposium took place in Santiago, Chile from 29th November to 1st December 2017.

Identifying cases of DNS misconfiguration: Not quite censorship

Fri, 24 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Country: Brazil, worldwide

OONI tests: Web Connectivity, HTTP requests

Probed ISPs: AS1916 (Associação Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa), AS262650 (Kyatera Informatica Ltda), AS2715 (Fundacao de Amparo a Pesquisa/RJ), AS27699 (TELEFÔNICA BRASIL S.A), AS28573 (CLARO S.A.), AS52873 (SOFTDADOS CONECTIVIDADE), AS7738 (Telemar Norte Leste S.A.), AS8167 (Brasil Telecom S/A - Filial Distrito Federal)

Measurement period: July 2016 — November 2017

Website inaccessibility reasons: IPv6 or DNS misconfiguration

We recently noticed that pernambuco.com, a regional news portal, has not been reachable from several networks in Brazil for quite some time. By looking at OONI data, we found that the site was not reachable and that it presented signs of DNS-based blocking due to empty DNS responses that is usually a symptom of potential internet censorship. But upon further analysis, we found a number of DNS misconfigurations of the nameservers hosting the domain in question. A nameserver is a function of a DNS server that implements a network service for providing responses to queries against a directory service. In this article we present an analysis of possible DNS misconfigurations that may have caused pernambuco.com to be inaccessible. We also provide some solutions to resolve DNS misconfiguration for pernambuco.com and other sites potentially affected in Brazil and worldwide.

Writing a modern cross-platform desktop app

Mon, 30 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The goal of this article is to outline some of the architecture & design considerations made while thinking about how we would implement the OONI Probe desktop apps. This is the result of research and experimentation with a variety of different libraries and approaches. For each part of the technical stack we will outline the rationale leading to our choices.

Requirements & design goals

Our primary goal with the OONI Probe desktop apps is to enable Windows and macOS desktop users to run OONI Probe network measurement tests without knowledge of the command line. These tests will use the Measurement Kit implementation of OONI tests.

OONI Team Meeting: Montreal 2017

Fri, 20 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, right before the Tor meeting, the OONI team gathered in Montreal for a 4-day meeting to reflect, regroup, hack, and plan.

This post shares information from our meeting and future plans with the broader community. All session notes are available on GitHub.

OONI Run: Let's fight internet censorship together!

Wed, 27 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Today we released OONI Run, a website linked to an exciting new OONI Probe mobile app feature that enables you to:

Engage your friends (and the world) to run censorship measurement tests
Monitor the blocking of your website around the world

OONI Run includes a variety of OONI Probe software testsdesigned to:

Test the blocking of websites
Find middleboxes
Measure the speed and performance of networks
Measure video streaming performance

By choosing the tests that interest you and the sites you want to test, generate a link via OONI Run and share it. Alternatively, embed the widget code to monitor the accessibility of your site. The global OONI Probe community can then respond!

OONI Partner Gathering 2017

Mon, 24 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Two weeks ago we hosted the first OONI Partner Gathering in Toronto, Canada. This report provides an overview of the event, partner needs and challenges, and future goals to address them.

View the pdf version of the report here.

About

Over the last year, the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) project has had the opportunity to collaborate with various digital rights organizations in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. We joined forces to collaborate on the study of internet censorship by collecting network measurements from local vantage points, reviewing and creating censorship measurement resources, and by publishing findings through research reports.

OONI at the CryptoRave 2017

Fri, 12 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

CryptoRave is a free, non-commercial and collectively funded 48 hour event featuring talks, workshops and activities related to security, privacy, anonymity, hacking and freedom of expression that attracts more that 2,500 people mainly from South America. The event took place in São Paulo, Brazil on 5th and 6th May 2017.

A number of people attended the OONI presentation and workshop (“Listatona”) that was co-organized with Coding Rights. During the workshop participants were able to better understand OONI’s testing methodology, and how OONI Probe performs network measurements. Participants provided useful feedback regarding test-lists and URLs from diverse sources from South America.

OONI at the Internet Freedom Festival & RightsCon 2017

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last month the OONI team joined the internet freedom community at the following events:

These events provided us with the opportunity to engage with community members, create new friendships, learn about new projects, and to share skills and knowledge. We also had the opportunity to facilitate sessions that allowed us to collect feedback for the improvement of our software and research methodologies.

Examining internet blackouts through public data sources

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 16:39:00 +0000

Pulling the plug on the internet is one of the ways that governments around the world attempt to exert control over the flow of information.

While the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) project has developed numerous software tests for examining different forms of internet censorship (such as the blocking of websites, instant messaging apps, and censorship circumvention tools), we currently do not have tests that are designed to examine internet blackouts, when the internet as a whole is rendered inaccessible within a location.

New OONI Probe Mobile App: Measure Internet Censorship & Performance

Thu, 09 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Today the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) project is thrilled to announce the release of a new mobile app (“OONI Probe - Measure Internet Censorship & Performance”) that can now be installed on Android and iOS for testing Internet censorship and network performance.

By running the tests included in OONI’s mobile app, you can monitor:

New OONI tests examine the blocking of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Today the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) project is excited to announce the release of two new software tests which are designed to examine the blocking of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. You can now run these tests to monitor the accessibility of these apps across time, and to collect data that can serve as evidence when/if they are blocked.

WhatsApp test

Many of our users have asked us to develop a test to examine the accessibility of WhatsApp, especially in light of it being blocked by various governments around the world during elections, protests, and other political events.

OONI releases new Web UI: Run censorship tests from your web browser!

Tue, 13 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Today we are excited to announce the beta release of our new web-based user interface (WUI) that enables OONI Probe users to run censorship tests from a web browser!

Whether you’re running OONI Probe from your desktop or a Raspberry Pi, you can now easily choose which tests you want to run through OONI’s web UI and run them with the click of a button. These tests are designed to examine the following:

OONI releases Lepidopter Raspberry Pi distribution

Wed, 07 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) team is happy to announce the beta release of OONI Probe’s distribution for Raspberry Pis, caĺled Lepidopter.

What is Lepidopter

Lepidopter is a Raspberry Pi distribution image with all the required dependencies and software packages in place, configured to run network measurement tests via the OONI Probe software. It is developed and designed to require no physical attendance upon first bootstrap but also allows experienced users to further configure it as they wish. The source code and the building scripts of the Lepidopter image are free and open source software.

OONI-dev meeting and hackathon 2016

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Oonitarians are spread out across the globe, and OONI’s core team is no exception. We recently met in Berlin to hack on OONI’s software, work on our roadmap, and to have all those discussions that are more fruitful to have in person than on IRC. We also held a hackathon to engage new individuals with our project!

Below we document some of the things that we worked on as part of our OONI-dev meeting and hackathon.

OONI Hackathon: Join us to explore internet censorship!

Tue, 25 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Interested in exploring (and exposing) internet censorship? Join the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) hackathon in Berlin!

When? Friday, 11th November & Saturday, 12th November 2016
Where? The OnionSpace (Gottschedstraße 4, 13357 Berlin, Germany)
What time? 10am onwards
Who? Software developers, data analysts, academics, journalists, bloggers, lawyers, activists, and all those who don’t go by any particular label, but are curious enough to join! We only have one rule: Be excellent to each other.

OONI releases new Web Connectivity test for detecting online censorship

Fri, 03 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Today the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) is excited to be releasing a brand new test, called Web Connectivity, which is designed to detect three different types of censorship: DNS tampering, TCP/IP blocking and HTTP blocking.

Advantages of running Web Connectivity

This test allows us to see which websites are blocked and how, more accurately than ever before!