How Tor Is Fighting—and Beating—Russian Censorship

For a long time, the best way to stay private on the internet has been to use the anonymity service, called "tor". It's very hard for people to track you online because of the fact that your web traffic is sent through a chain of computers, which makes it very difficult for them to find you. In recent months, Russia has stepped up its long-term ambition to block the internet, despite not having a fight.

In December of 2021, a 4-year-old court order was enacted by Russia's media regulators, allowing them to order internet service providers to block the Tor Project website. Since then, censors have been locked in a battle with the technical team and users in Russia, who are pushing to keep the Tor network online and allow people to access the uncensored web.

The technical and political aspects of Russia's attempts to block Tor are present. There have been some successes on both fronts. After a legal challenge, it was removed from Russia's list of blocked websites. This doesn't mean blocking efforts will stop immediately.

The leader of the community team says that they are being attacked by the Russians. The past few months have seen Russian officials adapt their tactics while the anti-censorship engineers of the Tor Project were able to launch updates to stop its services from being blocked. The fight is still going on. There are people who can connect to the internet. People can easily get away with some things.

In Russia, internet service providers can get blocking orders from the state, but it is up to individual companies to implement them. Due to more centralized internet control, China is the only country that has effectively blocked the web browser. Russian authorities have been installing new equipment that uses deep packet inspection to monitor and block online services, but the results are mixed.

The censors in Russia are not uniform. Because of different internet service providers, some people may not be able to access the internet. The effectiveness of Russian censorship appears to be waning.

There has been a decrease in the number of people connecting to the internet in Russia. People are able to connect to its services using volunteer-run bridges, which are entry points to the network that can't be blocked, as their details aren't public. The data from the internet monitoring group Open Observatory of Network Interference shows a big rise in the number of people in Russia who use the internet.