📢 New: Findings from our large-scale study of 1252 US VPN users and 9 VPN providers answer fundamental questions about the VPN ecosystem.

We (@reethika_, @anjvyas) are excited to share our upcoming USENIX'23 paper & our report 🧵

👉 vpnalyzer.org/survey2022 We asked questions wrt users' motivations, needs, and perceptions, digging into their emotional connections to VPNs and more. We interviewed 9 VPN providers to learn about issues from their point of view and (mis-)alignments in their understanding with users.

1/ Russia recently began throttling access to Twitter, their first acknowledged use of throttling for censorship.

My lab investigated, and what we found is an alarming consolidation of Russia's Internet controls.
#russia #throttling
Read our full report:throttletwitter.com 2/ Throttling (slowing a site down) is easy for censors to do but hard for users to attribute or circumvent. Detecting it is tricky—lots of innocent things can make a site slow—and censorship detection platforms aren’t yet well equipped to spot it.

Russia has built a national infrastructure for Internet censorship based on commodity DPI hardware deployed at thousands of ISPs across the country. We, @CensoredPlanet, fear other nations with similar network topologies will follow Russia’s blueprint. #russia #censorship (1/9) @CensoredPlanet To study the rise of decentralized information control, we performed an in-depth investigation of the mechanisms underlying censorship in Russia. Our detailed report is here: censoredplanet.org/russia.
Here are some key takeaways: (2/9)