OONI Run: Let's fight internet censorship together!

by agrabeli | September 27, 2017

Today, the Tor Project’s Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) team 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 tests designed to:

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!

Engage your friends

With OONI Run, you can choose which websites you want to test for censorship. Simply select “Web Connectivity” and add as many URLs as you like. 

OONI Run: Web Connectivity

Then click “Generate” to generate a link that you can share with your friends. 

OONI Run: Links and code

If they already have OONI Probe installed, the link will open their mobile app and automatically start testing the sites of your choice! Otherwise, it will encourage them to install OONI Probe first.

Engage the world

OONI Run can help build a global network for rapid response to emergent censorship events. By tweeting a generated link, you can encourage the world to run the tests (and to test the sites) you’ve chosen.

If you suspect that a site might be censored during political events, add that site to OONI Run, generate a link, and share it with people in that country. If you heard rumors of censorship, engage people in that country to collect data that can serve as evidence.  

Monitor your site

Perhaps your site has been blocked by some governments and you're unsure how the censorship is implemented or whether it’s blocked across all networks. Or perhaps you’re just interested in having data that can serve as evidence that your site was intentionally censored.

You can monitor the accessibility of your site through the following simple steps:

  • Select “Web Connectivity” on OONI Run
  • Add your site
  • Click “Generate”
  • Embed the provided widget code and encourage the global OONI Probe community to test your site!

You can embed a nice widget on your website by including the widget source like this:

<script src=' https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/ooni-run/dist/widgets.js'></script>

You can then add buttons to your website by adding this element:

 <a href='https://run.ooni.io/nettest?tn=web_connectivity&ta=%7B%22urls%22%3A%5B%22https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wikipedia.org%22%5D%7D&mv=1.2.0' class='ooni-run-button'>Run OONI!</a>

This is how the button will look like on your website:

OONI button

Otherwise, if you would like a bigger widget, you can add (and tailor) the following element to your website:

      <div data-link='https://run.ooni.io/nettest?tn=web_connectivity&ta=%7B%22urls%22%3A%5B%22https%3A%2F%2Fwikipedia.org%22%5D%7D&mv=1.2.0' class='ooni-run-banner'>
      Test Wikipedia
    </div>

It can look like this:

Wikipedia widget

Going forward, more OONI Probe tests will be added to OONI Run. Together, we can coordinate on fighting internet censorship around the world.

 

Note: OONI Run is now available on Android and within 24-48 hours (depending on Apple) it will be available on iOS too.

Comments

Please note that the comment area below has been archived.

September 27, 2017

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I've been curious about why censors haven't treated OONI tests differently from other network traffic (either completely blocking all traffic from OONI nodes, completely unblocking all traffic from OONI nodes, returning random blocks rather from the normal ones, or trying to physically locate them and shut them down). It seems like this tool will make it much easier to reliably locate OONI nodes without doing much effort—a censor can create a site called this-is-an-ooni-node.censor.gov.tk or whatever, submit it to OONI Run, and then see who connects to that site. Is there little or no adversarial response against the OONI project itself so far?

Hi Seth,

I'm pasting Arturo's response to your questions (posted on the tor-talk mailing list) here:

"When you click on a link with OONI Run the user is presented with a page that shows them the list of URLs (if the test is web_connectivity) that they are about to test.

If a malicious URL is included in such list, the user will be able to avoid running it by simply clicking the X button.

The run.ooni.io links are also defined as a custom URI inside of both apps, so if the app is installed, the user will actually never be connecting to ooni.io servers.

That said, something to keep in mind, is that OONI Probe is not a privacy tool, but rather a tool for investigations and as such poses some risks (as we explain inside of our informed consent procedure).

We are not aware of any OONI Probe users having gotten into trouble for using our tool, but we prefer to air always on the safe side be sure that they understand very well the speculative risks that they could run into."

September 28, 2017

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And offcourse

Fight censorship by using the new Torbrowser 7.0.6 and Tails 3.2 that can be downloaded since september 25th but are not mentioned anywhere on (blog.)torproject.org nor tails.boum.org.
Why is that? What is going on? Are there 7.0.7 and 3.2.1 versions upcoming??

September 28, 2017

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i had trouble with hkps but i do not know if it is considered as a censorship or a survey / blocked / down site /maintenance : hkps is used for uploading:downloading gnupg keys.

i disagree about the usage (not the goal) of your tool ooni.

- i do not care that is censored ; i take care about the authenticity_integrity of the sites i visit,
- i do not care of wikipedia {wiki(s) are obsoletes and give a false value of a definition, explanations.} ; i surf on the sites which i need for setting , configuring , communicating.
- does ooni work for onion sites ?
- during politic events TorBlog was censored and sometimes bad behavior occurred :
a) different tab had the same relays,
b) https broken, noscrips broken,
c) vpn shut down before or after the tor check,
d) going to a site then going back (pushing the arrow on the bar) showed the alert 'you are not connected at the tor network' (checked before).
e) is a site hacked has the same sens that a site censored or with an unstable/slow connection ?
f) bridge did not work,
g) dns did not respond,

i think that these attacks do not depend on politic event but are planned like a test or an update of a secret agreement.
i suppose it was a state sponsored attack with the help of famous enterprises/firms (and their clients) which the work is to struggle against the censorship/d.o.s.

i noticed that the doc on the web are outdated and there are a lot of fake sites so google (startpage & duckduckgo run it) is a partner of the censorship.

OONI is more for admins of website and for cellphone, tablet than desktop users.

OONI should have some default sites like hkp/hkps e.g.

i should not use it because it is not an anonymous tool.

September 30, 2017

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Related resource:

To check the authenticity of a secure web connection your device is making (any starting with httpS://) use this page by tech guru Steve Gibson:

https://www.grc.com/fingerprints.htm

His server will go out and grab the unique identity (SHA1 hash) of the security certificate of the web site you want to check. If the number Gibson's site shows is the same as the number your browser shows then you are connected to the genuine website, not a fake one.

October 06, 2017

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Tell me whether I can use Parrot O.S. for anonymous surfing on the network when it's properly configured ?

January 16, 2018

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hi
please create OONI for windows
thanks