Hi everyone, I’m Sadia, one of the authors of this paper. In order to measure Turkmenistan’s censorship, we had to take advantage of bidirectional censorship, in which we had a client outside of Turkmenistan send censored requests to non-responsive IP addresses inside of Turkmenistan to trigger the censor. However, one question we frequently asked ourselves is whether our measurements from the outside→inside direction corroborates with measurements from the inside→outside direction.
It would be great if there were some volunteers within Turkmenistan who could spot-check some of our measurements for us from the inside→outside direction. Please ensure your safety and understand the risks of doing so before proceeding.
You can check whether TMC considers you to be censored by searching for your own IP address here. If you are deemed to be censored, you could test some of the domains that TMC believes to be censored. These domains can be found here and here. In order to test these domains, you could try to use the packet sequence we use for our measurements mentioned in the paper, or just send a simple DNS and HTTP(S) request.
If you determine that your IP address is NOT considered to be censored by TMC, you could still test some domains to determine whether the IP address is uncensored from the inside→outside direction as well.
Thank you.