Staying ahead of censors in 2025

https://forum.torproject.org/t/staying-ahead-of-censors-in-2025-what-weve-learned-from-fighting-censorship-in-iran-and-russia/20898

by ggeorgovassilis • 7 months ago

249 316 7 months ago

forum.torproject.org

mmsc• 7 months ago

Does anybody know what the situation is like in China these days? What's the most commonly used tool for proxying now?

Does basically all network leaving China still get ratelimited at a few megabytes per second?

vgk_sys2• 7 months ago

Easy the bypass; v2ray vless vmess trojan.

No as long as you pay CN2 GIA rate. Not ratelimited just oversubscribed and bad peering. Purchase the hundred dollar per mbps CN2 GIA dedicated bandwidth its no problem.

pigggg• 7 months ago

Folks using nyanpass setup for first hop into a near China hosting provider, then it's usually two additional hops within Asia and then the internet. There's a whole industry / ecosystem of folks who sell this - and set rate limit controls based upon how much you pay etc.

wartywhoa236• 7 months ago

What's the most commonly used tool for proxying now?

https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core

mlrtime2• 7 months ago

Nothing to add other than I have no idea what the list of tech in the replies are here, and I consider myself somewhat up to date on most tech... strange world.

vgk_sys2• 7 months ago

when wireguard work at line rate speed why bother with so much custom obfuscation it half the speed ?

vbezhenar2• 7 months ago

I visited China last year. I had a lot of issues accessing some known VPN services. My main tool to avoid censorship was using my foreign roaming and then I used VLESS on my VPS. Both approaches worked for me.

I'm not sure about rate limited by few megabytes per second, as I had rate limits like few bytes per second, when I tried to use ssh as a proxy. Few megabytes per seconds sounds like a perfect connectivity to me.

_k2vp• 7 months ago

Currently in China (as a visitor). Wireguard literally just works (to a VPS). Mullvad works as a commercial provider, just slower. Xray-core (vless, Trojan) if you're paranoid. I have my own proxy over syncthing relays https://github.com/acheong08/syndicate which I use to proxy to my home in the UK (residential IP) without exposing any ports.

I get rate limited to around 10mbps in Chongqing. Was slightly higher in Beijing.

bwv848• 7 months ago

Wireguard literally just works

https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/558

theasisa• 7 months ago

Does this offer any benefits over Tailscale and having an exit node at home?

keepamovin2• 7 months ago

Legal question for the Tor team (disclaimer, I love Tor and use it in BrowserBox):

- Does Tor need an OFAC license to supply to Russian and Iranian (and other sanctioned entities)? What's your approach to stay compliant and globally helpful? I know 50% of your funding comes from US government (or did a few years back, still?), does this give you extra pathways to engage those regions?

I'm wondering because the system would seem to fall under ITAR due to its encryption, and even if non-ITAR is still a cyber product and these countries are heavily OFAC listed rn.

This is relevant for me right now as I was recetnyl contact by a significant entity in a sanctioned region with a massive deal for BrowserBox. Applying for an OFAC license to see if it's possible to serve them (but we have to make final determination on ethics/legal even if license is approved, I guess). My feeling is that broad sanctions don't hurt the things they are meant to but punish people in all countries from forming transnational links that might actually help to prevent conflicts and build relations however small. Idk, just my reflections after encountring this situation.

greyface-• 7 months ago

supply
product

OFAC regulates international trade. Isn't Tor's publication an act of pure speech, rather than commerce? They're not charging for it, and they aren't physically moving any goods across borders. How could Tor be subject to any restrictions here?

(not a lawyer, just someone who naively thought the Crypto Wars ended in the 90s)

vscode-rest4• 7 months ago

Encryption isn’t ITAR.

keepamovin2• 7 months ago

I'm not sure that's why I'm asking.

octoberfranklin• 7 months ago

massive deal

OFAC applies to trade, like your "massive deal". OFAC's original authority comes from a law titled, literally "The Trading With the Enemy Act".

Tor publishes free software, asking nothing in return. That isn't trade. Neither are those evangelists who broadcast sermons on shortwave radio -- they certainly "serve" Iran in the sense that people in that country can hear their broadcasts.

"Cyber product" lolwut? I think you have been breathing too many beltway fumes.

tuetuopay• 7 months ago

This sounds a bit like the GrapheneOS shenanigans in France recently: it's an opensource project with no product per-se. There's no supplying to anyone; rather people help themselves to grab it. The debate would be should opensource projects like Tor or GrapheneOS prevent sanctioned people from grabbing the freely (as in both beer and speech) available project from the shelf.

(writing this message, I realized how hard it is not to write "product" for the thing graphene and tor make)

basedrum• 7 months ago

Check out their blog for their financial report, 50% is way too much

Fiveplus• 7 months ago

The section on conjure is fascinating. For those who haven't followed the refraction networking space, the idea of leveraging unused address space at the ISP level is something academic papers have proposed for years [1]. Seeing it deployed in the wild is huge. The hardest part of this has always been non-technical by the way. Convincing ISPs to cooperate. If the Tor project has managed to get ISPs to route traffic destined for unallocated IPs to a station that handles the handshake, it completely breaks the censor's standard playbook of IP enumeration. You can't just block a specific subnet without risking blocking future legitimate allocations.

I'd be curious to know if these are smaller, sympathetic ISPs or if they managed to partner with larger backbone providers. I'm interested to hear more about this.

[1] look up tapdance

piekvorst• 7 months ago

I doubt that Russian ISP would cooperate.

kgeist• 7 months ago

It completely breaks the censor's standard playbook of IP enumeration. You can't just block a specific subnet without risking blocking future legitimate allocations

At least in Russia, they don't really care about collateral damage. Currently, without a VPN, I can't open like 30-50% links on Hacker News (mostly collateral damage after they banned large portions of IPs)

mos872• 7 months ago

It's just half the Internet now after the late October blockage

photios• 7 months ago

No mention of EU chat control
No mention of "age verification"
No mention of people arrested for Twitter posts in the UK and the EU

What did they mean by this?

vscode-rest4• 7 months ago

Follow the money. Five eyes pay for TOR to exist.

commandersaki• 7 months ago

Similar to how CIA has a technology fund that gave money to Signal; because they use it?

dmantis• 7 months ago

Probably because the post is not about the good or bad, but about fighting with censorship technically. Usual tor connections have been blocked for a long time in Russia and Iran. They explain the way they bypass these blocks and advancing the TOR.

Nobody blocks them in the UK and the EU so there is nothing to fight in technical terms for TOR Project.

They are not EU/UK political representative to fight legally or politically.

throwfaraway1353• 7 months ago

Considering the staggering number of arrest for online/offensive communications in England & Wales, we should add Britain to the list of Russia and Iran

2017: ~5,500 arrests

2019: ~7,734 arrests

2023: ~12,183 arrests

nomilk• 7 months ago

I was also surprised the post focusses on Rus/Iran when Australia, UK, and many more countries (Malaysia, Thailand) have/are introducing laws to prevent large swaths of free speech (banning mediums by age, banning conversation by topic, or by making speaking one's mind online too risky, as almost anything now can be interpreted as 'offensive' or 'hate speech').

aprilthird2021• 7 months ago

Yes. I think social media or app bans should count as well, as well as consequences for things posted on social media which are simply opinions. I think killing of journalists should count as well (so probably India, Israel, etc.)

And I think also frivolous suits lodged by the govt at people for their speech. So that would include suing Twitter users for making jokes about the FBI director girlfriend, etc. One of the biggest things to censor speech the US is doing is forcing the sale of TikTok to government friendly group. There are many ways governments censor our speech, and they seem, sadly, to be increasing worldwide

otabdeveloper4• 7 months ago

Iran is le bad. Oceania has always been at war with ~Venezuela~ Iran, citizen.

wartywhoa236• 7 months ago

The neighbouring pot must always seem hotter to the frogs that are being boiled in their own one, that's a rule of the kitchen.

RobotToaster3• 7 months ago

Tor is primarily funded by the US State department, that's why.

widdershins• 7 months ago

almost anything now can be interpreted as 'offensive' or 'hate speech'

I only know about the UK, but this is not really true there.

Your speech has to be obviously threatening or abusive, and obviously motivated by prejudice towards one of a few categories (disability, race, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation are the main ones).

If you don't make threatening or abusive remarks towards these groups, you aren't breaking the law.

lukan7• 7 months ago

"as almost anything now can be interpreted as 'offensive' or 'hate speech'"

Are you serious here?

In russia you get problems for calling a war a war and worse problems if you say it is a bad war.

In UK you certainly can call a war a war and you can critize the government or other people all day long. What you cannot do is calling for violence against them. Or do you have counterexamples?

blell2• 7 months ago

It’s much simpler. The Tor project is politically biased in a way that they think the things the UK arrest people for should get people arrested.

berkes4• 7 months ago

swaths of free speech

Which is very cultural dependent as well. "Not being able to log in on TikTok if you are under 16" is not "preventing free speech". And "having no access to pornhub" is not preventing free speech either. Edit: TBC: this is not me defending these laws or rules.

E.g. Freedom of speech in the US, is rather narrow. It merely states you may "speak, write, and print with freedom" but not that you may do so anywhere, on any platform, on private property. It doesn't state that such speech, writings or printings must reach everyone.

The UNHCR article 19 goes further, though. But it doesn't automatically apply to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human... It includes `... and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers`.

And all these only apply to governments. Many of the examples you mention, aren't government-imposed but imposed by private entities (who, granted, often pre-emptively self-censor). E.g. certain words used on Instagram or in Yourube videos will hurt monetization, or will cause it's discovery or promotion to severely degrade; which is why people use phrases like "unalived". So let's not pretend the US is any good in this.

Dutch culture used to be rather free with nudity in movies and on TV. Every Dutch movie from before the era of US streaming services had at least a pair of naked boobies bouncing around. But this, and in it's wake the entire culture has become more prude-ish. A form of cultural colonialism by the US. Not terrible, but a good example of private companies imposing self-censorship even in places where it really is not needed. IANAL, but I'm quite certain youtube would be allowed to run videos with nudity just fine in most of (nothern?) Europe. But they don't.

Guestmodinfo• 7 months ago

India why forget us. Only thing is you may not find exact data.

vscode-rest4• 7 months ago

You must keep in mind TOR is funded in large part by the US government. It’s a bad look for them to put their allies in the same list as their enemies.

danielbln• 7 months ago

Bad looks haven't really been a deterrent to much of anything in US politics for a while.

earthnail3• 7 months ago

I’d much rather get arrested in Britain than Russia or Iran. And I certainly wouldn’t put the UK in the same bucket as Russia and Iran. Not even close.

Hate speech is a problem. If it wasn’t, why are Russia and China spending so much on troll farms? It’s a direct attack on a democracy’s ability to form consensus. I don’t think we’ve found the right, effective way to deal with this problem yet, but I applaud any democratic country that tries sth in that area.

I also think Tor is great, just for the record.

throwfaraway1353• 7 months ago

The problem is that it is really difficult to define what hate speech is, and more often than not it's used as a cudgel to silence the opposition.

For Iran and Russia, it is what Khamenei and Putin don't want to hear,

in the UK it's what Starmer doesn't want to hear.

tarkin2• 7 months ago

"[A] direct attack on a democracy’s ability to form consensus" is a wonderfully precise term.

Splitting democratic nations through fearmongering targeted at everyone's online profile is an incredible weapon.

kortilla• 7 months ago

No, external influence is an attack on democracy’s ability to form consensus. No hate speech required to drive a wedge between constituents and make people focus on the wrong things.

fasbiner• 7 months ago

So to be clear, your sole expectation of a liberal democracy is that it have a better judicial system than Russia or Iran.

And beyond that, you applaud any democratic country's efforts to reign in speech by arresting their own citizens in order to combat foreign influence operations?

And the fulcrum of this argument is that we believe that Russia and China have uniquely pernicious influence operations and there are no other state-level actors domestically or semi-domestically whose intelligence services also exert influence through the passage of laws restricting speech?

Having seen the last two years of politics in the UK and the US, your impression is that there is an overwhelming Chinese-Russian troll farm operation which self-evidently justifies rolling back the last two centuries worth of hard-fought and incremental precedents won for free speech and free press.

And again, the water-line we need to stay above is merely "this is still better than being arrested in Russia or Iran", keeping in mind that many countries we would not consider to be democracies at all also meet this bar.

miroljub• 7 months ago

If you live anywhere in the west, you should be more concerned by being arrested by your own government then by some government in the other part of the world.

llmslave26• 7 months ago

I'd rather get arrested in the UK too, but that's completely irrelevant.

Hate speech is a problem. If it wasn’t, why are Russia and China spending so much on troll farms?

Non-sequitur. The existence of troll farms doesn’t mean it's such a big problem that we should give up our rights surrounding speech and communication that we fought hard for.

dmm2• 7 months ago

Hate speech is a problem.

I agree, 100%. Donald Trump should have the power to jail people for things they say online.

RobotToaster3• 7 months ago

To put that into perspective, the number arrested in Russia was 3,253 in 2023.

mrtksn• 7 months ago

Sounds like Russians learned their lesson.

There's similar phenomenon in safety stats. In the stats Istanbul appears to be vastly safer than London but having lived in both, I can tell you why Istanbul is safer: Because public spaces don't exist and private spaces are guarded with bars and steel doors.

In London, there's pubs etc. everywhere, in Istanbul you are limited to few centers to be outside after 10. The places where people go are bustling because they serve a city of 16 million, so they are well lit and guarded.

In London, there are parks and guard free public spaces everywhere. In istanbul there are very few such places.

In London people mostly live in homes that don't have bars on the windows but in Istanbul there's bars on the first floor on every window on any building that's not a gated community. People with money live in gated communities or one of the very few upscale district.

In London you can walk ro everywhere, it has wide sidewalks and not many hills. In Istanbul sidewalks are tiny and often interrupted and the city has hills, as a result very few people walk more than a few hundred meters and people with bicycles are rounding error level non existent.

In Istanbul there's simply not many opportunities for crime, so when it happens it happens differently that the way it happens in London. No one ill grab your phone and run but if you wander in a non-commercial location or location that is not well lit after dark, you can be raped or stabbed just like that.

You can't really compare the realities of these cities by simply looking at some numbers without proper context.

chimprich• 7 months ago

That's a stupid perspective. That's presumably Russia's self-reported numbers, not the actual numbers of people who were detained for speech Putin's regime didn't like. For example, in 2023, Alexei Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in a special regime colony, his lawyers were arrested, and then Navalny was murdered in prison.

phkx4• 7 months ago

Maybe [the UK is not on the list] because this article focuses on technical aspects of overcoming blocking of the global internet in those countries that benefit from improvements to the TOR infrastructure. Maybe there are no problems circumventing DNS-level blocking with TOR in the countries which you mentioned. Maybe those people arrested (source?) were actually able to technically access the platforms on which they raised whatever they had to say. So maybe, the post is simply about a completely different topic.

phkx4• 7 months ago

Looking into the situation in the UK specifically, I found a description of the potentially underlying issues [1] and those are indeed worrisome. I still fail to see why one would raise it in the way GP did to comment on the TOR post.

Others have pointed at the funding of TOR through the US. If there is actual evidence that this impacts the stated purpose of TOR (non-discriminating access to the internet, I‘d say), please share. Otherwise, my impression is still that TOR works as advertised and is working on solutions where it is not.

[1] https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police...

thelamest• 7 months ago

Florida, 2020: 63,217 domestic violence arrests

The British arrest stats subsume DV harassment cases, and the original Times reporting quoted a police officer stating that they are the bulk of these numbers. I haven’t found an apples-to-apples comparison in the US, but the FL number gives a point of reference.

ben_w8• 7 months ago

Much as I take a dim view of the laws and politics of England & Wales*, those numbers include "indecent" and "obscene" messages, i.e. dick picks could be mixed up in these totals.

I suspect the actual number of un-asked-for dick picks sent each year is significantly (multiple orders of magnitude) higher than that, while also suspecting that most of those pics don't lead to arrests and what people are arrested for is in fact hate speech or threats that at first glance seem like they might be terrorist in nature, but so far as I can tell this distinction is not actually recorded in any official statistics so we just don't know.

* I left the UK in 2018 due to the overreach and incompetence shown in the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, plus the people in charge during Brexit all hating on international human rights obligations; I would've left a year sooner but for family stuff.

n4r96• 7 months ago

I'm getting fed up of people posting these figures. Especially with a misleading description like "arrests for comments on social media". They cover a very broad range of offences, many of which the public would want to keep as an offence. It includes cases like pedophiles grooming and blackmailing children, stalking, harrassment, even people emailing photos of aborted foetuses to pharmacies.

like_any_other2• 7 months ago

those numbers include "indecent" and "obscene" messages

Should we be worried that the government doesn't even bother to track how many people are arrested/jailed/convicted of non-true-threat/sexual harassment speech?

Well surely then one of the many NGOs fighting tyranny is trying to keep track of the numbers, right?

onion2k• 7 months ago

There is no central aggregated place for data about US citizens arrested for the sort of things the UK's Malicious Communications Act covers. There is no reason to assume that the US is more free. It could be much worse.

hdgvhicv4• 7 months ago

American views on “free speech” are not global, both in terms of what’s banned and in terms of what’s not banned.

asacrowflies2• 7 months ago

This has been a long held "western" value. Especially in the context of West vs Russia Iran North Korea etc. this rapid increase over the past few years in draconian enforcement of absurd thought control can not be explained away by such a shallow statement. ESPECIALLY the uk. Most of the American bill of rights and early constitutional amendment where based on centurys old English common law values just as much as they took inspiration from the Roman republics.

darubedarob4• 7 months ago

The narrowing of free speech and the declaration as hate speech, insanity or "backwardness" was a routine process in the USSR. You have private NGOs tracking and harassing speech that is still within the law in europe, while state actors support hate speech pushed by foreign actors. Its bad.

Take the use of taxes in fraud to buy votes en mass in michigan by the almost vice president. Or keir starmer just ignoring crimes comitted by his voting clientele. Its soviet block level bad out there.

lugu• 7 months ago

Am I living in a parallel universe or are you just a troll. In Iran you criticize the government on social media and you get arrested. In the UK you promote Nazi ideology and you get arrested. Is that really the same thing for you? Are you not seeing it?

XorNot• 7 months ago

He's a troll because those also aren't the real numbers. The UK law categorizes arrests under this category in the same bucket as domestic violence arrests.

The people talking about this never make the distinction.

kubb• 7 months ago

He has a throwaway account just for this occasion.

Probably not acting in good faith.

OtherShrezzing2• 7 months ago

2023: ~12,183 arrests

These numbers are for _all_ arrests under the Malicious Communications Act in that year. So while that category includes arrests for tweets, it also includes all arrests for any offensive communications via an internet-enabled device. So it'd include arrests for domestic abuse where at least one component of the abuse was through WhatsApp. Similarly, it can include just about any arrest where the crime was planned on an internet enabled device.

simonjgreen• 7 months ago

I’m not sure why you are being downvoted, this is a critically important point. Context is king, numbers alone are unhelpful

Havoc• 7 months ago

We’re the rules changed are this between those years though?

Cause if not a more than doubling is alarming regardless of how exactly the composition is sliced by online vs WhatsApp or whatever.

drnick12• 7 months ago

The point is, communications should not be surveilled at all by the state. It shouldn't matter that the Internet is sometimes used to commit crimes, the bigger issue is that the vast majority of non-criminal traffic is subject to snooping.

fn-mote2• 7 months ago

Sure, but it’s pretty hard to believe that the domestic violence arrests are increasing exponentially, isn’t it?

ETA:

So it'd include arrests for domestic abuse where at least one component of the abuse was through WhatsApp.

Are you absolutely sure of this? It sounded good on the first read, but I’m very skeptical now. It seems to me that the arrest is going to be for battery, even if the charges filed later include the WhatsApp messages.

vbezhenar2• 7 months ago

What are numbers for Russia and Iran?

immibis19• 7 months ago

What are people saying that gets them arrested? This important question, whose answer is for some reason never specified in complaints about UK censorship, is crucial to evaluating the severity of the UK's censorship regime.

ajuc• 7 months ago

When a dictatorship uses police to imprison innocent people the correct response isn't to say "but in Sweden there is police as well, see how many people they imprison a year".

Details matter.

Media laws already penalize traditional media for lying about various subjects in most democracies (see libel laws, etc.). And it's good that they do. The alternative of unchecked lies spreading everywhere is worse.

Why should the internet be exempt from media laws?

The problem with dictatorships isn't that fake news is prohibited. It's that the people who decide what is fake news and what isn't have bad intentions and can't be challenged.

systemtest3• 7 months ago

The Netherlands in the recent past has detained journalists on multiple occasions but you never read about that. Absolute horrible for a “free” country.

vaylian• 7 months ago

Is there no online source at all?

jimnotgym3• 7 months ago

Yet I have only ever personally been prevented from speaking in the UK by Xitter, with that great champion of Free Speech at the helm. I was given a the spurious reason of 'impersonation' for my ban.

squidbeak2• 7 months ago

Are you proposing we ignore communications threatening violence or inciting harm? For instance Lucy Connolly's tweet urging people to set fire to mosques?

lenkite• 7 months ago

Why has Europe gone nutso ? They were the ones who kept lecturing us (Global South) about "freedom of speech and media is critical to democracy", yadda-yadda at every global conference. Now many of their laws are even worse than much of the third world and people are getting arrested for saying banal stuff online.

Why did this happen ? What changed ?

logicchains• 7 months ago

Economies failing due to bad economic management but the people in charge don't want to lose power so they're resorting to silencing criticism to stay in office.

zingababba• 7 months ago

In the absence of god suicide is the highest form of self-expression.

graemep8• 7 months ago

Because they only suppress "bad" speech, where as we (identifying with one of my two nationalities, for those looking at my other comments which may seem contradictory) are suppressing "good" speech. Nothing subjective of culturally specific about any of that!

immibis19• 7 months ago

What were people arrested for saying?

darubedarob4• 7 months ago

And the partialness of arrests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaa_Abd_El-Fattah comes to mind whose tweets..

observationist• 7 months ago

Imagine being at the legal mercy of terminally online reddit mods who can deploy police to arrest you, and the police strategy is to roll up on you between 1 and 5 AM at night, to catch you vulnerable and off-guard.

If they don't like a comment you make, or if your face isn't sufficiently supportive in a picture taken of you, or if you downvote the wrong post, all someone has to do is claim they are offended, and you can get taken to jail.

Oi! You gotta loicense for that smirk?

They're still in the civilized phase of this, with people being politely disturbed but still playing along with authority. I can't imagine this ends well, however - I think they're gonna get riots in Guy Fawkes masks, widespread mayhem, and murder before it's over.

DANmode3• 7 months ago

Why would they start fighting now?

This is the place where they force themselves into your home to check if you have a television, in some cases, right?

entropyneur• 7 months ago

Honest question: why no mention of China? I assume they've given up earlier due to lack of resources?

mos872• 7 months ago

Do they have official instructions on how to setup (which URLs for STUN, etc - there are a couple required) TOR via Snowflake on desktop (bc on Android it all seems to be bundled inside Orbot)?

grumbel• 7 months ago

Why is Tor making it so difficult to change the region/ExitNode then? Geo-Blocking is by far the most prevalent form of online censorship and while Tor can work around it, it requires fiddling with config files and restarting the service instead of clicking a button.

immibis19• 7 months ago

Patches welcome, but try to design it in a way that spreads load proportionally to the bandwidth available in each country.

NoiseBert69• 7 months ago

I'd really love to see native DNS Tunneling in Tor.

iTCart• 7 months ago

The "Mimicry" Angle (Best for technical discussion) The shift from "obfuscation" to "mimicry" is the real story here. In 2025, "random-looking" traffic is itself a signature for DPI. Tools like WebTunnel that mimic standard HTTPS/SNI and Conjure that hides in unused ISP space force censors into a "collateral damage" dilemma: they can't block Tor without breaking their own web.

fguerraz• 7 months ago

You can’t fix censorship with tech. The only solution is booting the facists out.

jmnicolas3• 7 months ago

You won't find many historical examples of fascists being booted out by the people.

The only successful revolutions are piloted by a small elite with further interests that may not coincide with the people.

lurk23• 7 months ago

You won't find many historical examples of fascists being booted out by the people.

Every fascist regime that has ever existed has been ousted by war, revolution, or the vote. There are no fascist regimes left, unless you expand the definition of the term to mean “any authoritarian regime,” in which case there are plenty of historical examples of popular revolt.

The only successful revolutions are piloted by a small elite with further interests that may not coincide with the people.

This isn’t true.

jimnotgym3• 7 months ago

I think we could have a more thoughtful discussion if people didn't start off with an assumption that the way the US manages free speech is unquestionably better than the rest of the world. Take a breath and think before you write.

It seems to me that what you are allowed to say in the US is very dependent on how much the person you are saying it about is able to spend on lawyers, for instance.

llmslave26• 7 months ago

You're absolutely right, in that the US's libel laws are too strong and benefit the rich.

orloffm• 7 months ago

Russia was already complicated two years ago, most of-the-shelf VPNs blocked, and with Intel/Microsoft websites blocking themselves due to sanctions it was rather difficult to set up a fresh laptop - it couldn't download drivers, and obvious channels were all blocked.

This year they've blocked almost all of the VPNs and additionally calls in all messenger apps and FaceTime. The only thing that works is Outline - but one has to set up the server somehow, and if you're in Russia without a western credit card it might be difficult to do. For some reason the iOS app for Outline is still in the Russian App Store.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 7 months ago

"As the severity of censorship in Russia has increased, WebTunnel has also received several fixes, such as SNI imitation and safe non-WebPKI certificate support with certificate-chain pinning to ensure it can withstand more kinds of censorship, including SNI allowlisting and the rapid blocking of distributed bridges."

"SNI imitation" and "non-WebPKI certificate support" sounds like it could be useful for purposes other than evading censorship in any particular country

Discerning web users around the globe might also be interesting evading data collection, surveillance and ads by so-called "tech" companies, for example

https://blog.torproject.org/introducing-webtunnel-evading-ce...

nephihaha2• 7 months ago

I love how this goes on about Iran and Russia but not the obvious issues elsewhere.

yanoleaf• 7 months ago

Oh now you care, while conservatives were censored since 2020...

Staying ahead of censors in 2025

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