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posted by janrinok on Tuesday January 25 2022, @02:52AM   Printer-friendly

Tor Project battles Russian censorship through the courts:

The Tor Project has filed an appeal against a Russian court's decision to block the Tor website in the country.

The Tor network is an open source system for anonymizing online communication. Also known as the onion router, the network is used to circumvent censorship and is widely accessed by civil rights activists, whistleblowers, lawyers, human rights defenders, and those under oppressive regimes.

On Monday, the developers of the network said an appeal has been filed regarding a decision by the Saratov District Court to impose a block on the torproject.org website in Russia.

The appeal has been filed between the Tor Project and RosKomSvoboda, a Russian digital rights protection outfit.

On December 6, 2021, the Tor Project was told that its website would be blocked in accordance with Article 15.1 of the Law on Information. Public proxy servers and some bridges were also blocked in the country and Tor developers have noticed blocks across Russia in the past month.

[...] Tor says that Russian users account for the second-largest user base by country with over 300,000 daily users.

A mirror version of the Tor website has been launched by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).


Original Submission

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Tor University Challenge: First Semester Report Card 4 comments

Back in August the Tor Project and the EFF launched an advocacy campaign for getting more Tor relays running at universities. Now it is December and they have published an update on how the Tor University Challenge has gone so far.

In August of 2023 EFF announced the Tor University Challenge, a campaign to get more universities around the world to operate Tor relays. The primary goal of this campaign is to strengthen the Tor network by creating more high bandwidth and reliable Tor nodes. We hope this will also make the Tor network more resilient to censorship since any country or smaller network cutting off access to Tor means it would be also cutting itself off from a large swath of universities, academic knowledge, and collaborations.

So far they have established contact with more pre-existing relays at universities, increased the number of relays in general running at universities, and cultivated better contact with the national-level university Internet connectivity organizations (NRENs). Some of the institutions have established public relays, and others even added new exit relays.

Previously:
(2023) The Internet Enabled Mass Surveillance. A.I. Will Enable Mass Spying
(2023) Mullvad VPN And The Tor Project Collaborate On A Web Browser
(2022) Tor Project Releases Latest Version of its Eponymous Browser
(2022) Tor Project Upgrades Network Speed Performance with New System
(2022) Tor Project Battles Russian Censorship Through the Courts
... and more.


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday January 25 2022, @03:04AM (5 children)

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Tuesday January 25 2022, @03:04AM (#1215439) Journal

    Maybe they need to change the protocols to blend in better with all the noise

    --
    La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday January 25 2022, @03:36AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 25 2022, @03:36AM (#1215452) Journal
      Or rather add to the protocols. Plus the site has to be blocked in order for the censorship to work. They still can mirror, proxy, and a variety of other things that would keep censors guessing.
    • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25 2022, @03:40AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25 2022, @03:40AM (#1215455)

      The only things blocked are the public (non onion) website and known entry nodes. TOR is still usable despite that. They aren't blocking the TOR browser package of my Linux distribution, for example.

      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 25 2022, @03:49AM (1 child)

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 25 2022, @03:49AM (#1215458) Journal

        +1 informative, thank you.

        My first question was, "Have they actually shut down TOR? If it's that easy, then what good was TOR to start with?" Good to know that they have only succeeded in blocking access to a known WWW site.

        • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25 2022, @07:06AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25 2022, @07:06AM (#1215516)

          They could follow the "SoylentNews" protocol of banning all IPs that come from other than Facebook/Amazon/Apple cellphone-creditcard linked portals. Works for SN! Good enough for Ruskies.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25 2022, @09:08PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25 2022, @09:08PM (#1215677)

      A larger and more trustworthy pool of guard and exit nodes. I've been seeing a lot more connection reset and exit MITM attacks recently. It's not just one exit or one guard either. It's dozens to hundreds of them, including bridge nodes requested off torproject.org iitself. Tor as a platform is heavily compromised.

      I am not sure how I2P compares at this time.It sucks for tor-style clearnet browsing due to the lack of dynamically selected exit nodes, but it is far more decentralized and flexible regard banning misbehaving nodes.

      I2P is the bazaar, Tor is the Cathedral.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Tuesday January 25 2022, @04:44AM (6 children)

    by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday January 25 2022, @04:44AM (#1215476)

    On December 6, 2021, the Tor Project was told that its website would be blocked in accordance with Article 15.1 of the Law on Information.

    Heh. "Information wants to be free!" "We are outlawing this in accordance with the Free Information Act."

    Another reminder that Russia as a general rule tends to not give a fuck about what we think out here further west.

    Tor says that Russian users account for the second-largest user base by country with over 300,000 daily users.

    But I'm sure that's just a coincidence; can't possibly be that their people don't exactly agree with what their government wants them to believe!

    On the other hand, is Putin still supposedly wildly popular over there? Standing up to Those Damn Commies^W^W^WThose Imperialist Swine Americans is good press; who could guess? Those Americans are invading innocent countries; *we're* just retaking land that is rightfully ours! Not like we made an agreement explicitly stating we wouldn't invade somebody [wikipedia.org] then did anyway. Revanchism? What's that? It's their own fault those Ukrainians were dumb enough to trust us and give up their nukes!

    On 4 March 2014, the Russian president Vladimir Putin replied to a question on the violation of the Budapest Memorandum, describing the current Ukrainian situation as a revolution: "a new state arises, but with this state and in respect to this state, we have not signed any obligatory documents."

    Funny, I don't remember the U.S. doing the same thing when the Soviet Union fell...

    Always an excuse to justify it

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
    • (Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 25 2022, @06:02AM (4 children)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 25 2022, @06:02AM (#1215488) Journal

      Funny, I don't remember the U.S. doing the same thing when the Soviet Union fell...

      How many treaties has the US honored? Far fewer than we have honored.

      https://www.history.com/news/native-american-broken-treaties [history.com]

      Need I find a summary of the various banana republics we have betrayed and abandoned? Other treaties around the world are only observed so long as we see them as advantageous, forgotten on any pretext.

      You don't remember the US doing the same when the Soviet fell, because the US couldn't see any clear profit in doing so, at that point in time.

      • (Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25 2022, @06:41AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25 2022, @06:41AM (#1215511)

        Preach, comrade! Preach!

        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25 2022, @01:16PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25 2022, @01:16PM (#1215561)

          preaching truth, does not make it a lie, whatever the source.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25 2022, @02:55PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25 2022, @02:55PM (#1215579)

        How many treaties has the US honored? Far fewer than we have honored.

        I'd like to know why you typed this. I find unlikely I'll get an answer I can trust, but I would like to know.
        below this sentence you seem to revert to the previous "runaway is a US citizen" frame.

        I really wish trolls would stop polluting the internet, whether russian or american or whatever...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25 2022, @01:25PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25 2022, @01:25PM (#1215563)

      careful what you wish for, free info includes your private details..

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday January 25 2022, @08:21AM (1 child)

    by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Tuesday January 25 2022, @08:21AM (#1215530) Journal

    Tor says that Russian users account for the second-largest user base by country with over 300,000 daily users.

    By Worldometer, Russia has 146 032 289 population today. That makes rough estimate about 0.2% of people in Russia using Tor daily. So, impact on population is negligible. If such network metric was a commercial project by some large corporation, it would be already discarded, like Google::G+ was.

    Anyway, Tor itself is near to useless. It only facilitates cheap crime, espionage and diversion, none of it is hardly tolerable under any regime. But it does not actually hide anything from determined state adversary. List of people who actually got caught by law enforcers in Europe is growing. In countries where user base is actually small, agencies easily get upper hand by just donating some large infrastructure to Tor network and watch endpoints. Statistics is good enough to build up a suspicion to investigate by other means. Honest people do not want to run exit nodes anywhere in the world because the law is often indiscriminate with complicity.
    For ages, Tor support of IPv6 spans from experimental to none, rendering it unusable on ipv6-only networks.
    Did I forget something?

    We need something new.

    --
    Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Wednesday January 26 2022, @06:25AM

      by legont (4179) on Wednesday January 26 2022, @06:25AM (#1215772)

      We need something new.

      Funny enough, it's mostly Russians who are building it https://ton.org/ [ton.org]
      after the US tried to kill it.

      --
      "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
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