Web traffic censorship limits the free access to information, making it a global human rights issue. The introduction of HTTP/3 (HTTP over QUIC) yields promising expectations to counteract such interference, due to its novelty, build-in encryption, and faster connection establishment. To evaluate this hypothesis and analyze the current state of HTTP/3 blocking, we extended the open-source censorship measurement-tool OONI with an HTTP/3 module. Using an input list of possibly-blocked websites, real-world measurements with HTTPS and HTTP/3 were conducted in selected Autonomous Systems in China, Iran, India, and Kazakhstan. The presented evaluation assesses the different blocking methodologies employed for TCP/TLS versus the ones employed for QUIC. The results reveal dedicated UDP blocking in Iran and major IP blocklisting affecting QUIC in China and India.

In March 2021, the Russian government started to throttle Twitter on a national level, marking the first ever use of large-scale, targeted throttling for censorship purposes. The slowdown was intended to pressure Twitter to comply with content removal requests from the Russian government.

The popularity of DASH streaming is rapidly increasing and a number of commercial streaming services are adopting this new standard. While the benefits of building streaming services on top of the HTTP protocol are clear, further work is still necessary to evaluate and enhance the system performance from the perspective of the end user. Here we present a novel framework to evaluate the performance of rate-adaptation algorithms for DASH streaming using network measurements collected from more than a thousand Internet clients. Data, which have been made publicly available, are collected by a DASH module built on top of Neubot, an open source tool for the collection of network measurements. Some examples about the possible usage of the collected data are given, ranging from simple analysis and performance comparisons of download speeds to the performance simulation of alternative adaptation strategies using, e.g., the instantaneous available bandwidth values.

The “network neutrality bot” (Neubot) is an evolving software architecture for distributed Internet access quality and network neutrality measurements. The core of this architecture is an open-source agent that ordinary users may install on their computers to gain a deeper understanding of their Internet connections. The agent periodically monitors the quality of service provided to the user, running background active transmission tests that emulate different application-level protocols. The results are then collected on a central server and made publicly available to allow constant monitoring of the state of the Internet by interested parties. In this article we describe how we enhanced Neubot architecture both to deploy a distributed broadband speed test and to allow the development of plug-in transmission tests. In addition, we start a preliminary discussion on the results we have collected in the first three months after the first public release of the software.