China's Great Firewall adds sites to its blacklist within hours of their becoming newsworthy and drops them again just as quickly; conversely, Pakistan's pornography crackdown used a rarely-updated blocklist, causing 50% of consumption to shift to unlisted sites. An outdated probe list will therefore underestimate GFW effectiveness and overestimate effectiveness in countries with static lists.

Survival analysis of 423,265 pages with Wayback Machine histories shows pages on politically controversial topics have substantially shorter lifetimes than those on uncontroversial topics; topic change — not just page deletion — must be treated as 'death' for probe-list purposes, since a page that switches topic no longer contains the sensitive material that made it censorship-relevant.

§6.1 evaluation

Analysis of 758,191 URLs across 22 probe lists found near-zero URL-level Jaccard similarity between nearly all list pairs (most < 0.01), including between country blacklists; even at hostname level, blacklists share little with each other or with researcher-curated lists like ONI's 12,107-URL list, indicating that any single probe list systematically misses large portions of what is actually censored.

§3.3, Tables 1–2 evaluation

Topic correlation analysis across 2,904 list-topic pairs (585 significant after Bonferroni correction at α = 0.05) shows social media is disproportionately represented in country blacklists relative to the broader web; video-sharing sites are also frequently blocked, likely to suppress political organization, copyright infringement, or competition with local businesses.

§7.1, Table 3 detection

Syria's 2015 blocklist contained a disproportionately large share of software-related sites because censors applied indiscriminate TLD-based blocking of all .il (Israeli) domain names regardless of content, demonstrating that non-topic-based criteria (country-code TLD, ASN) can sweep in entirely unrelated infrastructure and are detectable only through anomaly spot-checks rather than content analysis.

§7.1 detection

IRBlock discovered that 1.7M of 3.3M blocked apex domains (52%) were attributed to blanket suffix-level blocking rules rather than individual domain listings. Examples include regex patterns targeting all Israeli domains (.il TLD), adult content (.porn), and country-coded suffixes (.com.mx, .my.id). Of 87K Tranco-ranked apex domains analyzed, 37% fell into adult content, with entertainment and gambling following. Approximately 1.27M apex domains were jointly censored by both DNS and HTTP filters, while the two filters maintained operationally independent blocklists for a significant fraction of domains.

2025-tai-irblock §5.3 dns-poisoningip-blockingkeyword-filtering

For Tier 2 apps (IP geo-blocking only), using a VPN with a foreign endpoint was sufficient to restore access. For Tier 1 apps (SIM + IP geo-blocking), the authors confirmed that (1) removing the Indian SIM card and accessing via WiFi, or (2) intercepting HTTP traffic with a MITM proxy to suppress or rewrite the carrier_region=IN parameter, fully bypassed server-side censorship. The authors note that Indian users primarily rely on mobile Internet, making SIM removal impractical as a user-facing solution.

2024-gosain-out §4.3, §5 ip-blockingkeyword-filtering

After India imposed a permanent ban in January 2021, seven of the eight previously SIM-only-blocked apps escalated to dual-factor filtering: they continued extracting carrier_region=IN from the SIM card while simultaneously adding IP geo-blocking. Accessing these apps now requires both a VPN (for source IP masking) and SIM removal or carrier_region parameter suppression; MICO Chat remained the sole app using only SIM-based blocking.

2024-gosain-out §4.3 (Permanent ban subsection), Table 2 ip-blockingkeyword-filtering

Seven of the 220 banned apps (Tier 1, including TikTok, Likee, Kwai, UC Browser, FaceU, Hago, and V-Fly) used the Android TelephonyManager.getSimCountryISO() API to read the primary SIM's country code and embed a carrier_region=IN parameter in HTTP requests, enabling server-side identification and blocking of Indian users regardless of source IP or VPN state. A dual-SIM phone with an Indian SIM in the secondary slot only (primary empty or non-Indian) bypassed the check.

2024-gosain-out §4.3 ip-blockingkeyword-filtering

GFWeb tested 1.02 billion domains against the GFW over 20 months and discovered 943,000 pay-level domains blocked by HTTP filters and 55,000 by HTTPS filters — the largest GFW blocklist dataset ever published. The HTTP-to-HTTPS ratio (17:1) confirms that the GFW's HTTPS keyword-based and SNI-based blocking covers far fewer domains than its HTTP host-header blocking, likely because HTTPS blocks carry higher collateral-damage risk.

2024-hoang-gfweb Abstract, §5.1 dpidns-poisoningip-blockingkeyword-filteringsni-blocking

The largest measurement study of Turkmenistan censorship to date tested 15.5 million domains and found more than 122,000 domains censored using separate blocklists for DNS, HTTP, and HTTPS. Reverse-engineering the blocking rules revealed approximately 6,000 over-blocking rules that cause incidental filtering of more than 5.4 million additional domains — a 44x collateral damage ratio relative to intentionally blocked domains.

2023-nourin-measuring §Results dns-poisoningdpikeyword-filteringip-blocking