2025-lipphardt-1-800-censorship
findings extracted from this paper
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In China, multiple URLs show 100% failure rates across 3–7 ASNs with near-zero confirmed blockpage rates (e.g., hkleaks.ru, blockdx.co, libgen.space each at 100% failure, avg_confirmed ≈ 0), indicating that China increasingly uses non-blockpage mechanisms — connection drops, TCP anomalies — that evade blockpage-based detection while achieving complete access denial.
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DNS censorship leaks geographically: Russia's neighbors show materially elevated censorship rates despite low independent censorship of their own — Lithuania 21.73%, Norway 12.04%, Finland 12.03% — compared to Russia itself at 43.59%, consistent with DNS queries from those countries transiting Russian infrastructure and being hit by Russian DNS injection.
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Russian transit censorship propagates to ASNs outside Russia: ASN 216071 (Netherlands) shows 38 top-10k URLs with 59% confirmed blockpage rate, ASN 6939 (Sweden) shows 4 URLs at 75%, and ASN 3214 (Germany) shows 4 URLs at 75%, all attributable to peering with Russian ASNs known to employ transit censorship.
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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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Among the most commonly transit-censored popular URLs (top-10k rank, ≥90% confirmed blockpage rate from Russian transit ASNs, not blocked elsewhere in those countries), turbovpn.com appears alongside Russian opposition news and social-media pages, demonstrating that Russia's VPN-blocking lists propagate into foreign transit ASNs.