Tor Project is now officially blocked in the Russian Federation

At the beginning of this month, there were problems with access to Tor on the territory of Russia, and now it became known that Tor was officially blocked in the Russian Federation.

Users began to experience failures as early as December 1, 2021: the connection to public nodes does not work, and bridges have to be used.

As it became known at the beginning of this week, the Tor developers received a notification from Roskomnadzor, in which they were warned about the upcoming blocking of the torproject.org website. The letter can be seen here, and it was not clear from the text of the message which violations should be eliminated by the representatives of the Tor Project.

Now an official message has appeared on the Tor Project blog, according to which the torproject.org website has been officially blocked by the decision of the Saratov District Court in 2017. Confirmation of this can be found in the register of Roskomnadzor.

Also today, representatives of the department told the media the following:

The reason for blocking was the posting of information on the specified site that ensures the operation of means that provide access to illegal content. Today, access to the resource is limited.

In their message, the Tor developers once again urged all who are not indifferent to launch bridges, spread information and prevent censorship:

If the censorship model that we are analysing for some Russian ISPs is deployed across the country, we will need many more bridges to keep Russians online. Thanks to the researchers, we learned that the default bridges available in Tor Browser do not work in some regions in Russia, including Snowflake bridges and obfs4 bridges dynamically obtained with Moat.

Also, representatives of the Tor Project note that users from the Russian Federation make up approximately 15% of the entire Tor audience, and 300,000 Russians use it daily. Now the developers advise users to use the site mirror if the main resource is not available, and also urge the Russian-speaking community to take part in Tor localization.

It’s not enough to have many bridges: eventually, all of them could find themselves in block lists. We therefore need a constant trickle of new bridges that aren’t blocked anywhere yet. This is where we need your help.Tor Project developers also reported.

Let me remind you that we also talked about the fact that Unknown attackers were controlling thousands of malicious Tor nodes since 2017.

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