gus gus@torproject.org wrote:
Second, in Turkmenistan case, it appears that one ISP (AGTS) had different censorship rules compared to their main ISP, Turkmentelecom.
That's not possible because AGTS is entirely hosted by TurkmenTelecom. This is different from PRC China where they have 3 operators with different networks thus having each their censorship.
It also cannot be compared with Russia, because until 10 years ago, the Internet in Russia was totally free, this enabled decentralization and rapid deployment. Thanks to this, the government still does not have a single button to press to shut everything down, and censorship is implemented differently by each operator. In Turkmenistan, such development was never possible.
Sometimes, the filtering seems lighter in Turkmeninstan, and the reason is that TurkmenTelecom sucks at censorship. Turkmenistan does not even maintain a blacklist, they maintain a whitelist, that is, everything is blocked but what's on the list. The result is that people can't even update software, things start to break and then they are forced to lift the filtering up a little bit which sometimes result in making bootstrapping Tor possible.
Also, when there is an event such as an election, they simply disconnect everything. Therefore, running bridges and relays won't help, sadly.