ooni / ooni/backend

Generate alerts when specific services get unblocked

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#520 1 comment 1 reaction 1 assignee View on GitHub

@FedericoCeratto is already working on this.

Since Jun 11, 2021.

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Description

Over the years, community members (particularly those working in advocacy) have expressed the need to receive alerts when blocked services get unblocked. This was also more recently requested during RightsCon sessions.

We previously attempted to do this through the RSS feed, but the issue is that our measurements contain false positives and it can be challenging to generate reliable alerts that are not potentially misleading. Furthermore, the large volume of global data (which is constantly increasing) and the large number of tested services makes it challenging to constantly monitor the blocking and unblocking of services everywhere in the world on an ongoing basis. This is surely something we would like to eventually achieve, but probably a lot of backend work first needs to happen before we get there.

Perhaps an interim solution could be the following:

Instead of monitoring the entire global database for censorship changes, perhaps we could set up alerts for very specific services in specific countries (for a specified amount of time)?

For example, we currently know that twitter.com is blocked in Nigeria. Would it be possible to "bookmark" this somehow in the backend so that when/if twitter.com gets unblocked in Nigeria (based on measurements), we receive (and share) relevant alerts?

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