There's a pretty bad bias problem here because the probe app scans domains that are frequently blocked in dictatorships, but doesn't scan domains that are frequently blocked in "democracies", like Anna's Archive. Then it ends up looking like the dictatorship countries have all the censorship.

Hmm.

I'd wager the vast majority of internet censorship is within platform, like that done by Reddit mods.

The most egregious example I've seen in my lifetime was when old Twitter decided to censor a NYPost article, down to blocking sharing in DMs.

It seems that type of example is entirely missed here. Is there any attempt to capture that signal?

For everyone in this thread saying "but the platforms!", I don't disagree with you. Extensive censorship exists. But I don't believe that's the intended purpose of this tool and the metrics it collects. It doesn't measure censorship at what we would call layers 4-7 in the OSI model. It's concerned with IP reachability and layer 3. It collects valid data for that purpose.

I really wonder if anyone installs it on their machine. May be I am one off but I am Hearing about this for first time, don't recognize any of their partners.

Is this an “instantly be arrested by the secret police” app for those where such things are censored?

The glowing reviews would reflect quite the survivor bias.

Would be cool if it also measured the latency and throughput across many different protocols to detect deviations from net neutrality.

I’d be careful to use a tool like this because it will look like you are going to these sites in question.

How is this not marketing for large websites?

Facebook doesn’t give a shit about censorship, beyond it means a limited audience.

Pretty strong censorship. That's why I can't even open this link in my country.

Ripe atlas have thousand of endpoint that can ping/fetch.

Thank you for having circumcision.org on the list of websites.

Related:

Quack: Scalable Remote Measurement of Application-Layer Censorship:

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...

Global Measurement of DNS Manipulation:

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...

Reachability index of Internet blockade circumvention tools:

https://explorer.ooni.org/circumvention

Psiphon:

https://forge.psiphon.ca/en/what-is-psiphon

"Dictatorship" is the standard forum design. Reddit, HN, X, Lemmy... All of them. And censorship is common. We literally prefer it that way. I think it's to create a solid blame trail. I think that's a necessary thing.

The most pervasive censorship is who and what social media companies decide to block or suppress. Even in places like China. It's deliberately harder to measure, but any censorship measurement that omits it is like measuring war casualties, but ignoring those on the front lines.

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> Measure the speed and performance of your network with the NDT test

This is very much in line with the likes of pokemon go, wiki landmark projects and what have you (those are nice things to have for autonomous drones/missiles to navigate only with vision when gps/cellular/starlink is actively blocked).

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Russia banned stuff like speedtest because things like that may help “map” the network, aid NSA to model malware propagation, etc.

Not that this should matter when you have cisco, dell, nokia hardware, but it won’t hurt either.

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I mean come on, some nuts even willingly install stuff like this: https://atlas.ripe.net/