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The ooni.org homepage and all cross organisational issues
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Create a new methodology for measuring throttling #1298

Closed agrabeli closed 1 year ago

agrabeli commented 1 year ago

Bandwidth throttling is commonly being reported around the world (particularly during elections and large-scale protests), but an open methodology for measuring it in an automated way from local vantage points does not exist yet. Last year, we collaborated with Censored Planet on measuring the throttling of Twitter in Russia, but this was the result of manual tests run by in-country volunteer technologists and included the analysis of packet captures.

As part of this activity, we will implement a new open methodology for measuring throttling that will be shipped as part of the OONI Probe apps and run automatically from local network vantage points (without requiring any technical expertise from the user, nor the collection of packet captures). This will enable our global community to automatically measure throttling every day and contribute measurements as open data in real-time, supporting the efforts of advocacy groups worldwide (such as the global #KeepItOn campaign).

We have already started experimenting with some possible approaches for measuring the presence of bandwidth throttling. We recently, for example, investigated the throttling of Twitter in Russia amid the war in Ukraine through the analysis of data already present in OONI measurements. Through our analysis, we were able to infer that Russia’s throttling infrastructure appears to be centrally managed.

We plan to further systematize the collection and analysis of throttling-related information to detect this form of censorship at scale. In developing our methodology, we plan to collaborate with our partner, the Internet Outage Detection and Analysis (IODA) project of Georgia Tech, who are also planning on extending their platform to measure the presence of bandwidth throttling. OONI and IODA datasets and measurement approaches are different, and will therefore be complementary, offering richer insight into bandwidth throttling.

agrabeli commented 1 year ago

I have set a tentative timeline on zenhub which probably needs to be adjusted.

agrabeli commented 1 year ago

Closing this ticket because it's a duplicate: https://github.com/ooni/ooni.org/issues/1296