Several pornographic sites blocked again in Venezuela
Six major pornographic websites have been blocked by at least one mayor ISPs in recent days, including some of the most well-known international sites of this content. The state-owned ISP, CANTV blocked all six, while all other providers checked started blocking at least one of them. This is not the first time that adult content has been censored in Venezuela, most notably in the state ISP several porn sites had been blocked in the past, to then be unblocked and briefly again in October 2020.
The previous time they were blocked occurred as CANTV reinstated many HTTP/HTTPS blocks that were lifted when a networking facility in Caracas was damaged by fire, presumably affecting censorship capacity. Of the sites blocked in October 2020, 26% were porn sites. They were last blocked in October 15, 2020.
El objetivo de estos bloqueos son sitios web de:
— VE sin Filtro (@vesinfiltro) October 12, 2020
Noticias: 13
Porno: 8
Salud pública: 3
Critica Política: 3
Otros: 3
Algunos de los sitios estaban bloqueados por bloqueos de otros tipos simultáneamente. pic.twitter.com/vCWZRAK8IA
The internet providers involved in these blocks are: CANTV, Movistar Digitel, NetUno, Supercable and Inter. In this case, the censorship in CANTV operates through an HTTP block that began on March 2, while a DNS block was applied by Movistar, Digitel, Inter and NetUno since March 9. Supercable started the block a few weeks later on March 29.
The pages affected by the blocks are the following:
Website | CANTV | Movistar | Digitel | NetUno | Supercable | Inter |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
XVideos | HTTP Block | DNS Block | DNS Block | DNS Block | DNS Block | DNS Block |
XHamster | HTTP Block | DNS Block | Accessible | DNS Block | DNS Block | Accessible |
Pornhub | HTTP Block | DNS Block | Accessible | Accessible | Accessible | DNS Block |
Bravotube | HTTP Block | Accessible | Accessible | Accessible | Accessible | Accessible |
Youporn | HTTP Block | Accessible | Accessible | Accessible | Accessible | Accessible |
Tube8 | HTTP Block | Accessible | Accessible | Accessible | Accessible | Accessible |
@VEsinFiltro vesinfiltro.com |
Recommendations to internet users in Venezuela
We recommend the use of trustworthy internet circumvention tools for users in Venezuela. We recommend having several of the following tools installed in the event that one of them is blocked:
-
Psiphon https://psiphon.ca
-
Lantern https://getlantern.org
-
Tor Browser https://torproject.org