2014-anderson-global
findings extracted from this paper
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Monitoring Twitter, YouTube, Tor, and Google Public DNS across 10 Atlas probes spanning 9 ASNs cost 19,200 credits per day (under 1 probe-day equivalent), and Atlas's external queuing allowed measurement scheduling to begin within hours of reported blocks. The platform documented 6 distinct shifts in Turkey's filtering strategy and identified private-sector cooperation in Russia that would have been missed by platforms limited to DNS and HTTP measurements.
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Rostelecom (AS12389) performed network-layer redirection of blacklisted traffic rather than DPI-based filtering: 40 of 343 Russian probes returned SSL certificates attributed to Russian ISPs (State Institute of Information Technologies, Rostelecom, Electron Telecom Network). The interference affected all protocols and ports holistically across Rostelecom's downstream peers, consistent with BGP-level false advertisements or forwarding rules rather than application-layer classification.
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LiveJournal cooperated with Russian authorities (Roskomnadzor) to segregate censored content by altering DNS A records for blacklisted blogs to a special host (208.93.0.190) that came online between February 10–17, 2014. Only 5 of 1,462 LiveJournal subdomains in Alexa's Top 1 million resolved to this address, all of which had been publicly declared in violation of Russian media law.
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Turkey's filtering of Twitter relied overwhelmingly on DNS manipulation over IP blocking: as of April 24, 2014, only 167 IP addresses were blocked versus 40,566 domain names. Users who received valid DNS answers could browse Twitter without further interference, making foreign DNS servers (Google 8.8.8.8, OpenDNS) an effective circumvention mechanism — reportedly graffitied across Turkey in protest of the ban.
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When Turkish users shifted to foreign DNS providers as a circumvention mechanism, Türk Telekom escalated by rerouting traffic destined for Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) to a local DNS server serving false answers (Event E, March 28), causing a rapid drop in Tor and YouTube availability across all Atlas probes regardless of DNS configuration. At least 6 distinct shifts in filtering strategy were documented within a two-week period.