Roskomnadzor has officially made changes to the unified register of prohibited sites, blocking access to the www.torproject.org website. All IPv4 and IPv6 addresses of the main project site are included in the registry, but additional sites not related to the distribution of Tor Browser, such as blog.torproject.org, forum.torproject.net and gitlab.torproject.org, remain available. The block also did not affect official mirrors such as tor.eff.org, gettor.torproject.org and tb-manual.torproject.org. The version for the Android platform continues to be distributed through the Google Play catalog.
The blocking was carried out on the basis of an old decision of the Saratov District Court, adopted back in 2017. The Saratov District Court declared illegal the distribution of the Tor Browser browser-anonymizer on the website www.torproject.org, since with its help users can access sites that contain information included in the Federal List of Extremist Materials Prohibited for Distribution in the Russian Federation .
Thus, by decision of the court, the information contained on the website www.torproject.org is recognized as prohibited for distribution on the territory of the Russian Federation. This decision was included in the register of banned sites in 2017, but for the last four years the entry has been marked as not subject to blocking. Today the status has been changed to "access restricted".
It is noteworthy that the changes to activate the block were made a few hours after the publication of a warning about the blocking situation in Russia on the Tor Project website, which mentioned that the situation could quickly develop into a full-blown Tor block in the Russian Federation and described possible ways to bypass the blocking. Russia is in second place in terms of the number of Tor users (about 300 thousand users, which is approximately 14% of all Tor users), second only to the United States (20.98%).
In case of blocking the network itself, and not just the site, users are advised to use bridge nodes. You can get the address of a hidden bridge node on bridges.torproject.org by sending a message to the Telegram bot @GetBridgesBot or by sending an email via Riseup or Gmail to email [email protected] with an empty email subject and the text "get transport obfs4". In order to help bypass blocking in the Russian Federation, enthusiasts are invited to take part in the creation of new bridge nodes. Currently, there are about 1600 such nodes (1000 can be used with the obfs4 transport), of which 400 were added in the last month.
Additionally, we can note the release of a specialized distribution kit Tails 4.25 (The Amnesic Incognito Live System), based on the Debian package base and designed to provide anonymous access to the network. Anonymous exit to Tails is provided by the Tor system. All connections, except traffic through the Tor network, are blocked by default by the packet filter. Encryption is used to store user data in the save user data between runs mode. An iso image has been prepared for download, capable of working in Live mode, with a size of 1.1 GB.
In the new version:
- Updated versions of Tor Browser 11.0.2 (no official release yet) and Tor 0.4.6.8.
- The package includes a utility with an interface for creating and updating backups of persistent storage that contains user data that changes. The backups are saved to another USB stick with Tails, which can be considered as a clone of the current drive.
- A new item "Tails (External Hard Disk)" has been added to the GRUB boot menu, allowing you to run Tails from an external hard drive or one of several USB drives. The mode can be used when the regular boot process ends with an error about the inability to find the live system image.
- Added a shortcut to restart Tails in case Unsafe Browser is not enabled in the Welcome Screen application.
- Added links to documentation for troubleshooting common problems in Tor connection error messages.
You can also mention the corrective release of the Whonix 16.0.3.7 distribution, aimed at providing guaranteed anonymity, security and protection of private information. The distribution is based on Debian GNU/Linux and uses Tor for anonymity. A feature of Whonix is ββthe division of the distribution kit into two separately installed components - Whonix-Gateway with the implementation of a network gateway for anonymous communications and Whonix-Workstation with the Xfce desktop. Both components are shipped within a single boot image for virtualization systems. Access to the network from the Whonix-Workstation environment is performed only through the Whonix-Gateway, which isolates the working environment from direct interaction with the outside world and allows the use of only fictitious network addresses.
This approach helps protect the user from leaking the real IP address in the event of a web browser being hacked and even when exploiting a vulnerability that gives an attacker root access to the system. Hacking the Whonix-Workstation will only allow the attacker to obtain bogus network parameters, since the real IP and DNS parameters are hidden behind the border of the network gateway, which directs traffic only through Tor. The new version has updated Tor 0.4.6.8 and Tor Browser 11.0.1, an optional setting has been added to the Whonix-Workstation firewall to filter outgoing IP addresses using the outgoing_allow_ip_list white list.
Source: opennet.ru