CENSORS
ae United Arab Emirates
Synonyms: UAE, AE
9 findings tagged here
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FilterMap identified 90 blockpage clusters from 90 vendors and actors across 103 countries using 374 million measurements from ~45,000 vantage points against 18,736 sensitive domains; 87 of these signatures were previously unknown. Commercial filters were detected in 36 out of 48 countries rated 'Not Free' or 'Partly Free' by Freedom House, with Fortinet alone present in at least 60 countries.
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Monitoring ESNI-related censorship across 14 geographic regions — including Mainland China, Iran, UAE, South Korea, and 10 others — found no blocking of ESNI traffic or interference with ESNIKey retrieval via DNS TXT records as of mid-2019, contradicting a widely circulated report claiming South Korea had already blocked ESNI. Additionally, the GFW's residual censorship window after a triggered RST was measured at 60 seconds (down from the previously reported 90 seconds).
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Across all tested countries, circumvention and anonymization tools are the most consistently blocked category: www.hotspotshield.com is blocked in 5 of 13 detected censoring countries, and three Tor Project properties (bridges.torproject.org, www.torproject.org, ooni.torproject.org) each appear in the top-10 most broadly blocked domains. Collateral damage is also documented — Iran blocks psiphonhealthyliving.com as a substring match for the psiphon.ca circumvention domain.
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Across MENA countries (UAE, Tunisia, Oman, Iran, Qatar, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Burma), over 80% of blockpage-delivering tests delivered the blockpage without DNS redirection, indicating transparent web proxies performing deep HTTP inspection rather than the cheaper DNS-intercept approach dominant in China. McAfee SmartFilter was identified in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and UAE; Netsweepr in Qatar, UAE, and Yemen.
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Five commercial filtering products (FortiGuard, Squid, Netsweeper, Websense, WireFilter) were identified in 7 of 36 block-page clusters via copyright notices in HTML comments, HTTP header strings, or URL path patterns; the remaining 29 clusters contained no identifying markup. WireFilter was first detected in the wild in Saudi Arabia (AS 25019) in 2011, representing a newly deployed filtering product not previously observed in measurements.
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All confirmed URL filtering deployments—McAfee SmartFilter in UAE and Netsweeper in Yemen, UAE, and Qatar—block content across at minimum six of seven tested human-rights-sensitive categories: media freedom, human rights, political reform, LGBT, religious criticism, and minority groups/religions. Netsweeper in both Qatar (Ooredoo) and UAE (Du) blocks all seven categories. This content is protected under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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In every ISP where URL filtering was empirically confirmed, the 'proxy anonymizer' category was actively blocked. Netsweeper blocked 6/6 submitted proxy domains in YemenNet (AS 12486), 5/6 in Du UAE (AS 15802), and 6/6 in Ooredoo Qatar (AS 42298); McAfee SmartFilter blocked 5/5 anonymizer-category submissions in Etisalat UAE (AS 5384). Blue Coat in UAE and Qatar did not confirm—Etisalat appears to use SmartFilter for URL filtering atop a Blue Coat proxy appliance for traffic management.
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The paper presents a repeatable method for confirming which specific URL filtering product is used for censorship: create test domains under researcher control, submit a subset to the vendor's public URL categorization interface, then retest within 3–5 days to observe whether submitted domains become blocked. This technique confirmed McAfee SmartFilter in UAE (Etisalat, AS 5384) and Saudi Arabia (Bayanat Al-Oula AS 48237, Nournet AS 29684), and Netsweeper in Qatar (Ooredoo AS 42298), UAE (Du AS 15802), and Yemen (YemenNet AS 12486).
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As of March 2013, Tor is documented as blocked in China, Iran, Syria, Ethiopia, the UAE, and Kazakhstan. Blocking techniques range from simple IP address blacklisting to a sophisticated hybrid consisting of deep packet inspection (DPI) and active probing.