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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Access Now's partners have confirmed that the Tor network — a widely used tool allowing users to browse the internet anonymously — was blocked in Venezuela last week over the government-owned internet service provider CANTV, by far the largest ISP in the country.

Direct access traffic on the Tor network steadily increased in Venezuela over the past two months, and even more sharply this month via Tor bridges — alongside a new wave of online censorship from the Maduro government. These most recent blocks have affected several major Venezuelan news outlets, including El Nacional and La Patilla, among others.

While previous online censorship in Venezuela could often be avoided by switching DNS settings from a local Venezuelan server to an international service (like Google's public DNS), this has not been possible for the most recent blocks. Instead, people have needed to rely on using virtual private networks (VPNs) and Tor to circumvent government censorship. This increased use of Tor to access blocked content is likely what triggered these new restrictions to the tool.

"It seems that the government of Venezuela has found out how to do a very sophisticated block for the Tor network. It's not only on the direct access channels, but also the bridges Tor provides to bypass that blocking," said Melanio Escobar, Venezuelan technologist and journalist, and founder of Redes Ayuda. "The government is moving forward to be as closed as China or Iran."

"This is the latest escalation in Venezuela's internet censorship efforts, as it blocks higher-profile sites with more sophisticated methods. This is one of their boldest internet censorship actions yet," said Andrés Azpúrua, Director of Venezuela Inteligente, an organization documenting technical evidence of the Tor block and other censorship events in Venezuela through its project VE sin Filtro. Reports further analyzing the technical details of the Tor network block are forthcoming.

Source: https://www.accessnow.org/venezuela-blocks-tor/

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