Dear Relay operators community,
The parliamentary elections in Turkmenistan are coming up very soon on March 26th[1], and the Turkmen government has tightened internet censorship and restrictions even more. In the last few months, the Anti-censorship community has learned that different pluggable transports, like Snowflake, and entire IP ranges, have been blocked in the country. Therefore, running a bridge on popular hosting providers like Hetzner, Digital Ocean, Linode, and AWS won't help as these providers' IP ranges are completely blocked in Turkmenistan.
Recently, we learned from the Anti-censorship community[2] and via Tor user support channels that Tor bridges running on residential connections were working fine. Although they were blocked after some days or a week, these bridges received a lot of users and were very important to keep Turkmens connected.
How to help Turkmens to access the Internet ===========================================
You can help Turkmens to access the free and open internet by running an obfs4 Tor bridge! But here's the trick: you need to run it on a residential connection -- you won't need a static IPv4 --, and it would ideally be run on more robust hardware than just a Raspberry Pi (although that can help, we have found they can get overloaded).
You can set up an obfs4 bridge by following our official guide: https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/bridge/
After you setup a new bridge, you can share your bridge line with the Tor support team at frontdesk@torproject.org, and we will share it with users.
A complete bridge line is composed of:
IP:OBFS4_PORT FINGERPRINT cert=obfs4-certificate iat-mode=0
Check this documentation to learn how to share your bridge line: https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/bridge/post-install/
Just sharing your bridge fingerprint is not the best, but it's fine.
You can read more about censorship against Tor in Turkmenistan here: - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/issu... - Snowflake blocked: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/issu...
Thank you for your support in helping to keep the internet free and open for everyone.
Gus
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Turkmen_parliamentary_election [2] https://ntc.party/c/internet-censorship-all-around-the-world/turkmenistan/17 https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/80