Internet blocking in Myanmar – secret block list and no means to appeal
In March 2020, The Ministry of Telecommunications (MoTC) issued a directive to all operators in Myanmar with a secret list of 230 sites to be blocked due to the nature of the content; adult content and fake news. The order was based on article 77 of the Telecommunications Law and the MoTC directive stipulated that […]
Internet blocking in Cuba – “Silencing dissidents in the name of moral and good manners”
Cuba has become infamous for blocking regime-critical content, and seldom provides any explanation other than the content failed to comply with the governments definition of “moral and good manners”. CubaNet and Tremenda Nota are two news sites that are blocked in Cuba. CubaNet has traditionally being blocked in Cuba since its launch in 1994. However, […]
Togolese investigative media “The Confidential Report” blocked by authorities
On March 25th, Qurium was informed by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) that the website The Confidential Report was not reachable inside Togo since Sunday 22nd. During two days, Qurium conducted in-country tests as well as tests outside of Togo to determined the cause of blocking. The first finding of the tests was that […]
Procera-Sandvine blocks eltuz.com in Uzbekistan
Eltuz is a satirical web-magazine in Uzbekistan, featuring articles, cartoons, polemics and jokes. According to the website, it serves as platform for liberal democratic values and freedom of speech and expression. Eltuz is blocked inside Uzbekistan, and we have therefore analyzed how the blocking is taking place. When placing connections to eltuz.com to both ports […]
Find Face and Internet blocking in Azerbaijan
This is how we found the presence of a server of Find Face, the Russian face recognition software, in Azerbaijan while troubleshooting the Internet blocking of a website in the country. During the 8th of November 2019, we noticed that traffic coming from mobile operator Bakcell in Azerbaijan was no longer arriving to the website […]
Turkmenistan blocks Google’s Cloud Storage
Only days after its launch on March 4th 2019, the independent and regime critical news site Turkmen.News was blocked by the Turkmen authorities by means of DPI. In July 2019, the news site was migrated to Google Cloud Storage to circumvent the blocking. Shortly thereafter, the popular storage service became inaccessible in Turkmenistan due to […]
Collateral blocking in Kazakhstan traced back to illegal prostitution ring
The 31st of July 2019, hundreds of websites became unreachable from inside Kazakhstan and during several days no one knew why. This article investigates the real target of the blocking, “Rainbow Spa” and its connection to an illegal prostitution ring. The first reports of the massive blocking were published in social media, and pointed to […]
Turkmenistan and their “Golden DPI”
Free press does not exist in Turkmenistan, where the government, headed by president Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov controls all media. A small part of the population has access to a highly-censored version of the internet, where all regime critical websites are blocked, as well as all social media platforms. Qurium has been investigating how Turkmenistan has implemented […]
SUS-759: Sandvine and Internet blocking in Azerbaijan
Background During the first week of April 2018, we started to monitor connections performing daily tests to check the site azadliq.info. The tests included performing crafted requests to the website to learn more about the techniques we used to unblock the sites in the country. Testing blocking from Canada and Azerbaijan These connections were very […]
Democratic Republic of Congo shutdowns the Internet after Elections
Update 1st January 2018 22:00 PM UTC. Still no Internet traffic from RDC. Update 2nd January 2018 8:00 AM UTC Still no Internet traffic from RDC. Radio France International (RFI) working in 105 Mhz is down. Jamming or power cut? Update 3rd January 2018 8:00 AM UTC Still no Internet traffic from RDC. Oracle Internet […]
