CENSORS
ve Venezuela
Synonyms: VE
4 findings tagged here
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Venezuela and Cuba exhibit average unblocked rates of 68.83% and 69.70% respectively across 461,114 and 5,501 OONI tests, placing roughly 31% and 30% of probes as blocked — censorship rates comparable to documented heavy-censor states — despite being routinely excluded from standard censoring-country lists.
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The 30 key ASes computed from globally popular sites also intercept over 90% of paths to country-specific popular sites in nine censorious nations (China, Venezuela, Russia, Syria, Bahrain, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran), covering 93.3% of paths to the top-50 country-specific sites. The same key AS set remained stable across repeated experiments conducted four months apart, suggesting durability over time.
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Internet connectivity is the primary determinant of RAD attack strength across nation-state censors: China (573 ASes, 858 ring ASes) achieves a censorship metric of 0.277 under profile T1, while Syria (4 ASes, 5 ring ASes) achieves only 0.101 with the same decoy budget. Venezuela, despite fewer total ASes than Saudi Arabia (44 vs. 107), achieves a higher censorship metric (0.210 vs. 0.197) owing to its disproportionately large ring AS count (835 vs. 176), confirming that ring AS count predicts RAD capability better than raw AS count.
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The feasibility of the RAD attack scales sharply with the censor's network connectivity. Strategic placement of decoys in just 1% of ASes disconnects China from 18% of Internet destinations, Venezuela from 54%, and Syria from 87%. Countries with fewer controlled ASes and ring ASes have dramatically less routing flexibility and are far more vulnerable to even small decoy deployments.