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Venezuela Is Blocking Access To the Tor Network (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the not-on-my-watch dept.

An Access Now report finds that Venezuela has blocked all access to the Tor network. "The latest block includes both direct connections to the network and connections over bridge relays, which had escaped many previous Tor blocks," reports The Verge. From the report: According to network metrics, Tor access in Venezuela had recently spiked in response to recent web blocks placed on local news outlets. Unlike previous blocks, the latest restrictions could not be circumvented by using a censorship-resistant DNS server like those provided by Google and CloudFlare. For many Venezuelans, Tor seems to have been the only way left to access the restricted content. "This is the latest escalation in Venezuela's internet censorship efforts, as it blocks higher-profile sites with more sophisticated methods," said Andres Azpurua of Venezuela Inteligente, in a statement provided through Access. "This is one of their boldest internet censorship actions yet."

3 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Hey all, Venezuelan here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    China is providing all the network hardware to Venezuela for deep packet inspection (among other things) in exchange for no-bid infrastructure projects. That's how they're getting this done.
    These "projects" are just the government handing them money for work that never gets done. It's an escape path for the elite once the shit really hits the fan but until then their primary focus is exfiltrating enough resources from Venezuela to maintain their lifestyle.
    They shipped these devices to Venezuela about 10 years ago and it's taken the inept government this long to put them in.
    It's rumored that they "funded" these infrastructure projects to the tune of $100m but exact numbers are impossible to get as the constituent assembly has ruled that all government contracts are state secrets.

  2. Re:I thought they couldn't do that? by loonycyborg · · Score: 4, Interesting

    TFA is light on technical detail. Even Chinese firewall is ineffective against tor's latest steganographic transports. But even basic tor is hard to block, at least outgoing traffic.

  3. Run a Tor Node by crow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is why I run a tor relay node. Everytime I hear about something like this, it reminds me that tor is used by people in countries like this to bypass censorship.

    OK, I really run it because of the EFF's tor challenge where I got a free T-shirt, but that's the reason I've kept it running after the challenge was over.