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1–12 of 111 findings
A calendar-and-history shutdown hazard did not beat recurrence in development (2022–2025)
In rolling-origin development folds for 2022, 2023 and 2024, a calendar-and-history hazard was rejected in every fold and stratum on the decision line: at a five-alert daily budget it did not beat the strongest simple…
#methodology#early-warning#honest-negative#shutdowns#pre-registration#accountabilityConflict news did not establish better shutdown warnings: a negative forecast result
In one frozen offline backtest on 2024 forecast dates, none of 12 selected models beat every baseline on shutdown-onset F1. Six selections retained history alone. The result is numerically provisional; 2025 forecast…
#methodology#forecast#honest-negative#gdelt#shutdowns#accountability- RU
Russia's foreign-press blockade: 264 blocked news domains — more of them Ukrainian than Russian
Voidly's confirmed-national blocklist for Russia (domains measured blocked across >=3 independent Russian networks, the OONI natblock floor) holds 608 domains, of which 264 are News Media — the largest…
#data#russia#news#press-freedom#foreign-press#exile-media Two networks, one domain, different answers: why we publish single-source blocks as a floor, not a fact
A data-trust audit of the observatory itself. Voidly aggregates three independent networks that measure different things: OONI (active web-connectivity, 5,552 domains / 93 countries, full accessible+blocked verdicts),…
#data#data-trust#methodology#transparency#cross-source#concordance- IR / RU
Where VPNs die: Iran and Russia block 10–15× more circumvention tools than anyone else
Rank every country by how many distinct anti-circumvention tools (VPNs, proxies, Tor services) it blocks NATIONALLY (confirmed across >=3 independent networks) and the distribution is a cliff, not a gradient: Iran 75,…
#data#vpn#circumvention#iran#russia#anon - IR / SA / RU / TR / ID
Religious censorship targets the other: states block minority faiths, rival sects, and apostasy
Take the domains each country blocks NATIONALLY in the Citizen Lab religion category (confirmed across >=3 independent networks) and a sharp pattern appears: states don't block 'religion', they block the religious OTHER…
#data#religion#human-rights#iran#saudi-arabia#russia Why our category counts mirror the test list — a methodology honesty note
Voidly's category breakdowns ('Iran blocks 110 news sites', 'Russia leads on human-rights blocking') are real but answer a narrower question than they appear to: they describe what's blocked AMONG THE SITES TESTED, and…
#data#methodology#transparency#honest-negative#test-list#citizen-lab- KZ / RU / VE / TZ / MM
Two ways to censor a network: VPN-blockers vs news-blockers
Volume hides intent: two networks can block the same AMOUNT and be doing opposite things. Voidly's new per-ISP category view (/v1/measurement/isp-categories) shows the SHAPE of a network's blocking, not just its size.…
#data#isp#asn#selective-censorship#vpn#circumvention - IR / PK / EG / KH / MM / CN
How, not just what: censors reserve TCP-reset for messaging, DNS poisoning for news
How a censor blocks is as telling as what it blocks. Voidly's new per-content-category technique view (/v1/measurement/category-techniques) crosses the blocking METHOD with the content type. DNS poisoning is the…
#data#technique#method#dns#tcp-reset#dpi - IR / RU / CN
Above the BGP layer: how Iran's 2026 shutdown was enforced, content type by content type — an independent corroboration of arXiv:2603.28753
Iran did not block everything the same way. On Voidly's OONI-grounded measurements, where a blocking method can be resolved, Iran blocks news media overwhelmingly by DNS poisoning (85.3% of 116 method-bearing news…
#data#iran#filternet#allowlist#technique#method Why a single threshold can't clean censorship false-positives — a measurement-noise audit
Voidly's national-censorship map flags a domain as nationally blocked when it is confirmed-blocked across >=3 independent networks (ASNs). It has a known weak spot, and this is the honest write-up of two attempts to…
#methodology#data-quality#false-positives#honest-negative#measurement-noise#multi-asnHow fresh is the data behind a censorship verdict? A per-country quality audit
An observatory that asks you to trust its censorship verdicts owes an honest answer to a prior question: how good is the data behind any one verdict? It is not uniform. Voidly has evidence for 215 countries but recency…
#methodology#data-quality#transparency#freshness#coverage#accountability