Staying ahead of censors in 2025

[throwfaraway135]

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]

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').

[OtherShrezzing]

>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.

[earthnail]

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.

[phkx]

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.

[ben_w]

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.

[thelamest]

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.

[systemtest]

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

[vscode-rest]

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.

[onion2k]

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.

[hdgvhicv]

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

[squidbeak]

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

[RobotToaster]

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

[lenkite]

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 ?

[immibis]

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.

[jimnotgym]

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.

[observationist]

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.

[ajuc]

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.

[vbezhenar]

What are numbers for Russia and Iran?

[lugu]

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?

[darubedarob]

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

[photios]

> 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?

[dmantis]

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.

[vscode-rest]

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

[iTCart]

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.

[grumbel]

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.

[immibis]

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

[mmsc]

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?

[acheong08]

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.

[vgk_sys]

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]

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.

[wartywhoa23]

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

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

[vbezhenar]

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.

[mlrtime]

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.

[jimnotgym]

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.

[llmslave2]

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

[Fiveplus]

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

[kgeist]

>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)

[kalterdev]

I doubt that Russian ISP would cooperate.

[orloffm]

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.

[fguerraz]

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

[jmnicolas]

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.

[entropyneur]

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

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"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...

[mos87]

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)?

[keepamovin]

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-]

> 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)

[octoberfranklin]

> 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]

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]

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

[nephihaha]

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

[NoiseBert69]

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

[yanoleaf]

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