Hi tor-relays@,
While I don't live in Russia, nor are my parents from Russia (they're from India), today, I noticed these articles that some people noticed Tor is blocked in Russia (sorry for being late):
https://ntc.party/t/ooni-reports-of-tor-blocking-in-certain-isps-since-2021-... https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-blocked-in-russia-how-to-circumvent-censo...
Yet, when I look at Tor Relay Status, I noticed many relays hosted on Russian residential ISPs are still online, and only a few aren't:
Moscow City Telephone: *https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/as:AS25513
Rostelecom: * https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/as:AS12389 * https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/as:AS42610 * https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/as:AS34168
Vimpelcom: * https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/as:AS8371 * https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/as:AS8402
MTS: * https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/as:AS60496
I didn't notice a big reduction in "relay" users on Metrics: https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?start=2021-09-06...
But did see an increase in "bridge" users: https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-country.html?start=2021-09-0...
And most Ooni results still show Tor can connect fine: https://explorer.ooni.org/search?until=2021-12-06&since=2021-11-29&p...
I feel it could be possible it's one of the two:
* Most likely, the censorship rollout is in stages. Some users are blocked but other's aren't, where it wasn't rolled out is still unblocked.
* Less likely, but Russia found people could use pluggable transports, like HTTPS obfs4 bridges and maybe they found blocking Tor itself is ineffective, or trying to block "meek" users ended up blocking Microsoft and ASP.NET/Azure-based webapps.
Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not on Azure as of now. I did however interview for a position in the Azure umbrella (not on the CDN however).
-Neel Chauhan