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Welcome, everybody, to our next talk
only, let's fight Internet censorship
together.
When you think about Internet censorship,
I guess that a lot of people would just
have an association with countries like
China or Iran or Saudi
Arabia.
But not a lot of people are aware that
filtering and blocking of websites
and Internet censorship also takes place
and almost all the other countries around
the world.
And this talk will educate you about
this. Our speaker is
to feel as though he is the
founder and developer of UNY,
and he will tell you more about this
super interesting project of his in this
talk. Please give him a warm round of
applause.
Thank you, Miriam.
Hi, erm,
I guess I would like to start with
thanking you and sort of
expressing how much this is an honor
for me to present this project
in front of an audience like C.C.C..
I've been coming to to these events
since I was just just
over 18 years of age.
And so I think this project
and also the
a large part of my adult life
is also due to the encounters and
the things I have learned at events like
this.
And so
to get right into it,
I think the first thing that
we should start with when talking about
a project like Erni is.
Understand what we are talking about, so
to frame what what we mean when we
say Internet censorship,
because these
are these.
There is some video
connection.
OK, yeah, so what
is Internet censorship
within the context of Sony?
When we talk about Internet censorship,
what we mean is some form
of network interference
that comes with intent
to disrupt or distort
the reality of
of the Internet from the perspective
of a country or a network.
So it means that it requires
intent from the censor to
create this altered
view of what is
the Internet.
Another term that we use to define
Internet censorship is is a filter net.
And what we will see in during the course
of this presentation is that there are,
in fact, many filter nets around the
world and that depending on
which country you are in and depending
on the on the regime
or the ideology
of those in power,
different views of
of what is acceptable and not acceptable
to be done on the Internet
are enforced
and so on.
Or the open observatory of network
interference is this
network measurement project that was
started back in 2012.
And it's a community
led project
that's composed of a network of
volunteers that install
the software and collect
evidence of Internet censorship around
the world since
until today we have gathered
measurements from over 200 countries
and we have measurements
coming in from tens of thousands
of different networks every month.
But
the sort of founding principles
around uni and the reason why we
decided to work on this
project is that we
we want to sort of bring to
the field of network measurement and in
particular the field of network
measurement applied to detecting
network interference and
or Internet censorship, the principles
of openness and transparency.
So only as open methodologies,
which means that all of the tools
and techniques that we use in order to
examine Internet censorship are
openly documented and specified,
sort of like in RACC format.
And and these allow
people to validate
that. What we are claiming to do is
actually reasonable and
and fair.
The methodologies that
that we that we specify
are then implemented using open
source software.
So you can verify that what we define
in the specification is in fact
consistent with what is implemented.
And all the data that is collected
by the thousands and
tens of thousands and hundreds of
thousands of volunteers around the world
are made available openly as open data.
So anybody can use this data
for their own purpose and sort
of from from the beginning to the end
of the chain, validate that
what we are doing is, in fact
correct and and reasonable.
And hopefully by
doing all of this, we will reach at
some point a state,
a stage in which we can
we can say that what we are doing is, in
fact, reproducible research
so that every step
from the definition of what you do to
the implementation, to the publication of
the data is entirely reproducible.
All of our tooling, like all
of our back in infrastructure, even our
sysadmin scripts, are made available
openly so anybody can set up
their own money if
they wish.
But before going more into what UNE
is, I would like to to
give you a taste
of what what is possible
with this sort of research, as in what
are the sorts of things that can be
discovered by collecting
network measurements around
the world.
And these are obviously
just some small samples.
You can learn more about each of these
case by reaching our full length reports.
But this is sort of more to show
you. What is the kind of impact
that a tool like
Huni probe can have in
in the world?
So the first case I would like to talk to
you about is one that
maybe you have heard in the news, or
maybe not, because it was not covered as
well. And it's.
Round the the protests in Ethiopia
in December of last
year, 2016,
these protests sparked in a
particular region region of the GOP
called the Oromo region, and they
were around some conflict related
to the expansion of
a certain city of
the borders of the city, Addis Ababa.
That would, in a way,
sort of basically kick people
out of their homes because they would
suddenly have a big house
like a big city in where they live.
And so this this led to some very
serious protests that
were very violent.
And the police was also very
brutal to the to the protesters.
And it led to many deaths.
And and as a result of these
protests, also some
network interference was done.
So in order to stop
the protesters from communicating and
organizing, WhatsApp was blocked
so the protesters could no longer
coordinate or organize
themselves.
And with unity, we gathered evidence of
this so we could prove in an undeniable
way that WhatsApp was blocked,
that deep packet inspection technology
was being used.
And we were also able to understand
precisely how it was working.
That allowed us even to give some
advice of what some site operators
could do to even circumvented
in some way.
And many websites from
media outlets, human rights
websites and obviously political
opposition websites were found
to be blocked during this period
following this.
In Ethiopia, the state
of a state of emergency was declared
starting from October 8th,
2016, just until
a couple of some months ago,
August 20, 17.
So lasting 10 months.
But what's interesting from this
sort of case is that what we found
evidence of is actually blocking
and censorship being implemented before
the state of emergency,
which in theory was something that was
not supposed to be allowed.
And together with Amnesty International,
we published a research report
outlining our findings and
sort of providing evidence
that this was
something that that was, in fact,
happening and and was clearly
not something that
a clear human rights violation.
Um.
Another interesting case
that we worked on together with our
our partner, our Malaysian partner
senior project was
published in May 2017, and it was
a sort of a study of Internet
censorship in in Indonesia.
We found
that many,
many sites of various categories
were blocked.
But I think one of the most interesting
things from from this particular
report was the fact that
we collected measurements from
around 60 different networks.
And based on these, we were able to see
that there was actually very much some
difference between the different
operators in terms of what was being
blocked and what was not being blocked.
So as an example, Vimeo and Reddit
were found to be blocked on certain
Internet service providers in Indonesia,
although the ban for blocking such
websites was supposedly lifted two years
ago.
And this stems, I guess, from
the fact that the Indonesian
legislation states
that Internet service providers
are are granted the authority
to inhibit or block content
that is considered negative content
and they are left
on their own to make this judgment
call of what constitutes negative
content.
And as a result, you see
quite some variation in terms of
which sites are blocked and which are not
blocked.
And this is why it's important even
in places where you may say, you
know, that censorship is happening.
Yes, you may know that censorship is
happening, but you don't necessarily know
what the censorship of your neighbor
looks like, even if they live in
the same country.
Another
very interesting report that
I think we could spend an entire
one hour talk just
discussing about this
particular country
was published in September 2017
and it was on the country
of Iran.
And there we found an astounding
number of of websites
to be to be blocked.
I think in in total, we
counted one thousand
and 20 year olds
blocked, ranging from
all sorts of various different
categories.
And without going too much in depth into
this, what I
should say on Iran is that it's
definitely one of the countries that has
the most state of the art Internet
censorship apparatuses, and
they implement the most
sort of advanced forms of Internet
censorship.
And two interesting aspects that
are unique to this country, I think
are, one, that the censorship
that they implement is done
in, let's say, nondeterministic
fashion.
What this means is that you will visit a
website, and it's not that every
connection to that website will be
terminated immediately
or every time you visit it.
They will just selectively drop
some packets, every certain
number of requests leading
the user to think in some cases that
the website is not, in fact blocked, but
is just unreliable or not
not functioning properly.
The other aspect that we found
that was quite interesting is
given the fact that we analyzed the
corpus of data dating back to 2014,
we were also able to track the evolution
of censorship over the course of these
years.
And one of the things that we found
was that certain websites
such as Instagram, Instagram,
that previously they were blocking only
specific posts.
So specific images or specific
pages on the site that were deemed
sort of unacceptable or
against the,
you know, the the morale of
the majority.
But as Instagram rolled
out HTP on all of their websites,
the Iranian government was put in a
situation where they either blocked
all the website or
they could not block the specific pages.
And so, I mean, I guess this is more
something to reflect upon of how
sometimes something that you take as just
a positive thing. And it clearly is a
positive thing to have websites
implement and have
secure connections to them.
But it does also lead sometimes to some
some effects that are not
not expected maybe.
And this is an example of it.
So now Instagram is entirely blocked
in in certain networks in Iran.
Another case that probably
you have heard about
happened in in Spain
just a couple of months ago,
and that was around the
Catalonia independence referendum.
And there
was some movement
to do a referendum
to claim independence from Spain
for the Spanish region, Catalonia,
and as a result of this,
the Spanish government decided
that one one way to
sort of create an obstacle
for the success of this,
this movement was that of
of implementing censorship and blocking
websites.
I think the reason why this is
something important to talk about
here in Europe is that we should not
forget that these things also
happen in our home and that oftentimes
when we talk or think about Internet
censorship, we think as
it's something that happens only
over there.
But in fact, many countries in Europe
implement censorship for for gambling
or other reasons.
And it's kind of a slippery slope,
because once you have the infrastructure
in place that can be used
to implement Internet censorship,
those in power
can possibly abuse it to,
you know, do things that
are clearly not acceptable.
And so during the Catalan referendum,
twenty five websites were blocked.
The DOT cat registry
was raided by the police
and they forced them to
take down or block a
series of dot cat domains
that were hosting just information
about the Catalonia independence
referendum.
So I hope this has given
you an idea of what are the
sort of things that can come out of
running a software like probe and
collecting this sort of evidence.
So not what I would like to talk to
you a bit about is the sort
of ecosystem of
Yuni software. So the various software
components that make up Huni
probe and all of the things that you
see here are open source.
You can like, you
know.
Git clone them and hack on
them to
to your pleasing
end, and
the first thing that I'll
tell you a bit about is, is the sort of
engine that uni probe,
the client that we use to run the network
experiments is is
based on and it's called measurement kit.
And this is a C++ library
that we use to implement
all of our network measurement
experiments.
And it's currently supports
Android iOS as our two primary targets.
But it also works on any Unix system
and we are
in the process of
ensuring that it works properly on
Windows as well.
We have JNI and no gigas bindings,
so you can include this library
inside of a project of yours
where you need to do some particular
experiments that involve
measuring networks.
As I said, the tool that we use
to collect network measurement
data is goony probe.
We have an Android and iOS app
that you can download on your on your
phone.
It's also available on Android.
We have Mac OS
and Linux as well
in the form of Web UI.
So but
we are also working on a
more fully feature, the proper desktop
client that will support
also also Windows as well as Mac
and Linux.
And the sort of tests that we do,
as I guess you
somewhat understood from from the
the the case studies
are mainly around these sorts
of categories.
So we have tests that examine
Web censorship.
So whether or not a particular website is
blocked or is not blocked,
we check to see if instant messaging apps
like Facebook, Messenger,
Telegram, WhatsApp, etc.,
work or do not work.
We have a series of tests for censorship,
circumvention tools like Tor,
VPN, Lantern's
iPhone, etc.
Then we have some tests that sort
of are more trying to understand
certain characteristics about your
network. So whether or not a middle box,
so something like a transparent HGV proxy
or something that is intercepting
your connections and forwarding
on them for you is present
on your network.
And more recently, we've started to have
also tests for examining speed and
performance.
This is how our our mobile app
looks like you can run it on
your on your phone and and check
to see what is blocked or not
blocked on your network.
And by doing so, you're contributing
to our global understanding
of Internet censorship around the world.
This is our desktop clients that, as I
was saying, is a Web user interface.
And this is another interesting
thing that we have recently launched,
which is sort of a way for
you to also engage other people
to.
Monitor or stand
up for against Internet censorship,
for the things that you care about.
So with Iran, what you can do is you can
add a list of your URLs that you want
to monitor.
So, for example, let's
say animal
rights activist
group in Germany wants to monitor some
German websites.
They will create an yuni run
link.
And when people click on this, if they
have the app installed, the app will open
and will offer to test the sites
that they want to test.
So we obviously
also accept contributions for
or suggestions on what we we
should be testing.
But
you can also do this on your own within
Iran.
And as I was saying, all the data is
available as open data
so you can
access the API, visit the only
explorer and
and and use the data in your own
studies to
to uncover evidence of
of Internet censorship.
Sure. Why that is.
So this is only Explorer.
This is a global data map and it shows
all the measurements that we have.
You can browse through it to understand
what is blocked and what measurements
and what data is available
in the various countries around the
world.
As I said, we also have an API
that's more oriented towards, let's say,
developers or data scientists.
So you can query this API and
obtain the raw data.
And all the research reports that we
write are actually all based on
on the same data.
So you can write your own research report
on a country that you care about just by
accessing our data, which is all,
all, all as
open as it can be.
So get out there and
use any data to understand
better what is happening
in the countries that you care about.
And to close what I
would like to leave you with is
sort of another story, I guess,
about a trip that
some of the uni team did to Cuba.
And I have a video here that
I'll I'll use to support
the narration of the story
in a way.
Um, and, um.
And yeah. So this was in
spring 2017
and, um.
Let's look and let's see if
we can get this to start from the
beginning. OK.
OK, the audio is not playing.
Yeah, so.
Without further ado, I will tell you
the story of our of our trip to Cuba
and the data that you see here is
and the facts here are obviously
during the trip, some things have changed
since we went there.
But
you can find more information
inside of our of our research report.
Many of us take the Internet for granted,
many of the things here at C.C.C.
would not be possible without it.
But imagine living in a world
where access to the Internet is not
a big Quetta's.
That's the type of world most Cubans live
in.
This is a story of our spring
2017 trip to Cuba.
Exploring its Internet landscape.
Simona, Maria,
Leonida, Joe and
all of the other humanitarians that are
here have
this would not be possible without them.
So this is also for for all of
them.
Most Cubans cannot access the Internet
from the comfort of their homes.
Rather, they need to visit designated
public spaces that offer Internet access.
Welcome to Park Net.
This park, along with many others across
the country, serves as a public Wi-Fi
hotspot. Such hotspots were set up
two years ago in 2015 when the Cuban
government provided public access to the
Internet for the first time.
Most hotspots are located in parks,
while others are located in other public
spaces, like post offices and airports.
In a way, Cubans don't access
the Internet, they visit it.
And so it becomes a sort of collective
experience, especially
at night when the heat is more tolerable.
Dozens of Cubans gather in these hot
spots to use the Internet and to
chat online with their friends and
family.
To start browsing the net, you need to
have an account issued by a taxi,
Cuba's only telecommunications company.
It Texas holds these cards at one point
five dollars for one hour of Internet
access. You can also purchase these
accounts from resellers who
lurk around in darkness, but they will
mark up the price to even three or four
dollars for only one hour of Internet
access.
We were curious to explore whether and
to what extent Internet censorship was
implemented in Cuba, and so
we run our network measurement software
called Zooni Probe, as well as a variety
of other network tests.
Based on our measurements, we found 41
websites to be blocked.
More might be blocked as we limit their
testing to a list of sites created by
country experts.
Most of the sites that we found to be
blocked include news
outlets and blogs, as well
as pro-democracy and human rights sites,
many of them seem to have one main thing
in common.
Directly or indirectly,
they express criticism towards the Cuban
government.
Other circumvention tools, like the Tor
anonymity network were found to be
accessible across Cuba.
Our software not only allowed us to
confirm whether sites were blocked,
but it also allowed us to collect network
measurement data that clearly shows how
censorship is implemented.
ETECSA appears to be blocking sites
through the use of technologies that
resets connections or service block pages
instead of the intended Web page.
In many countries around the world, when
a website is blocked, you know it
because it often looks something like.
This or this,
black pages usually include some
information not notifying you what,
that the site is blocked and sometimes
even include a reference to the legal
justification, which means that
it may not always be clear that the site
is intentionally being blocked.
Users might assume that
it's a connectivity issue rather than
government commission censorship.
But it isn't the only ISP in the world to
serve Black Bloc pages.
You see this in many countries as well.
Interestingly enough, we only found the
HTP version of the sites to be blocked.
And the GPS is unblocked, meaning
that people could circumvented
using a GPS, however, many sites
that we found to be blocked do not
support a
Chinese vendor. Huawei appears to be
supporting Cuba's Internet
infrastructure, and you don't even need
to run any tests to find this out.
The server header of the Black Pages, for
example, points to Huawei equipment.
Even a Texas captive portal itself
seems to be written by Chinese developers
since they left over some comments in the
source code of the captive portal page.
Overall, Internet censorship in Cuba does
not appear to be particularly
sophisticated given the high costs
of the Internet, rendering it
inaccessible to most Cubans.
Perhaps the government doesn't even need
to invest in sophisticated Internet
censorship.
But Cuba's Internet landscape is
changing, and so might Internet
censorship.
That's why we think it's important to
monitor networks continuously, users
in Cuba and around the world can
run any probe to shed light
on information controls.
Thank you.
A, I think I finished right
on the dot, so I suspect
that thank
you very much. So everybody in the
audience who now got curious about
money, maybe you want to consider if you
want to contribute by running an uni
probe in your own country or when you're
on holidays and some interesting places,
just think about whether you would like
to contribute and help out.
And we have an assembly on in
the CCL and the second floor, that
universe. If you have more questions
about money, you should come and join us
upstairs and we will be
happy to answer any questions you may
have. Exactly.
Perfect. Check them out and their only
assembly, please give another big round
of applause to approval.
Thank you very much.