The state of Internet Censorship

Will Scott / Vasilis Ververis

Freedom House, 2015

Asia

China

Great Cannon

Bangladesh

India

Pakistan

Korea

Europe

Gambling censorship

New censorship "trend"
Govs blocking gambling/betting resources
Overblocking / "mistaken" blocking
Collateral damage

Inconsistent MX records
TLS timeout sites on same IP

Greece

Per ISP Blocking


HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2015 01:51:15 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: https://www.gamingcommission.gov.gr/index.php/forbidden-access-black-list/
Content-Length: 258
Connection: close


input: http://xn--mxaaaaded0cl8bwg.com
response:
body: ''
code: 403
headers:
- - Date
- ['Sun, 21 Jun 2015 22:47:44 GMT']
- - Content-Length
- ['0']
- - Connection
- [close]
- - Server
- [WebProxy/6.0]

UK

Goverment pressured ISPs promoting filters
Each ISP decide on what is right/how to be blocked

21013 sites blocked by strict filters
11395 sites blocked by default filters

Middle East

Saudi Arabia


A HTTP requests test ran on 8/2/15
url: "http://www.arabtimes.com"
method: "GET"
body: "<title>Blocked URL</title><iframe frameborder='0'
    width='100%' height='100%'
    src='http://87.101.181.13'>This page is blocked</iframe>   "
code: 403
Date: "Thu, 10 Dec 2007 08:40:25 GMT"
Server: "Protected by WireFilter"
Connection: "close"
Content-Type: "text/html"
Accept-Ranges: "bytes"
Content-Length: "134"
response_length: "134"

Iraq


HTTP invalid request line test ran on 3/22/15
HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request
Server: squid/2.7.STABLE9
Date: Sun, 22 Mar 2015 22:02:48 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 1234
X-Squid-Error: ERR_INVALID_REQ 0
X-Cache: MISS from firewall.wahjalayn.com
X-Cache-Lookup: NONE from firewall.wahjalayn.com:3128
Via: 1.0 firewall.wahjalayn.com:3128 (squid/2.7.STABLE9)
Connection: close