Across three testers all on MTS, whitelist behavior varied by network segment in ways that could not be explained by protocol configuration alone; the operator has zero confirmed data for MegaFon, Beeline, or T2 under whitelist conditions. The open question of whether whitelist policy (site+IP list) is centrally issued by the Ministry of Digital Development while implementation differs per carrier remains unresolved, making cross-carrier generalization of any circumvention finding unreliable.

During apparent whitelist-activation periods on MTS mobile LTE, the affected user experienced a complete network blackout in which even explicitly whitelisted resources (gosuslugi.ru) were inaccessible — behavior inconsistent with a standard default-deny CIDR+SNI whitelist, which should pass approved destinations unconditionally. The operator concludes this may represent a stricter enforcement variant, a SIM-specific restriction, or a mechanism entirely separate from the documented whitelist architecture.

Issue body — main mystery paragraph detection

Community-maintained public CIDR lists of Russian mobile whitelist ranges allow operators to identify specific whitelisted IP blocks within cloud providers: a /22 subnet inside Yandex Cloud's /16 pool appears on these lists, while the ephemeral addresses from a different /20 pool of the same provider do not. Reserving a static IP from the whitelisted /22 allows the Reality handshake to complete and traffic to proxy from external vantage points, though in-whitelist passage on a real mobile device remained unconfirmed at time of writing.

Issue body — Yandex Cloud architecture paragraph deployment

VLESS+Reality with uTLS and decoy SNI pointed at popular domains (vk.com, cloudflare.com) bypasses standard DPI blocking on MTS and has operated stably for one real user over several weeks with thousands of connections logged. However, an identical configuration failed to establish a single connection for a second user on the same carrier but in a different network segment (Moscow number vs. regional/southern number), including during periods confirmed to be outside whitelist activation.

Issue body — confirmed working / not working sections evaluation

TSG's Context-Based Detector (CBD) evaluates circumvention tool signatures across JA3/JA4 TLS fingerprints, SSL certificate issuer fields, UDP payload length, first-packet byte patterns, server IP ranges, and FQDN matches, often combining multiple conditions with logical AND. Of 29 VPN and circumvention tool signatures logged in the VPN Signature File Update Log (March–November 2024), 21 carry risk level 5 (the maximum), indicating aggressive prioritization of blocking major tools including ExpressVPN, NordVPN, Tor Browser, and Psiphon.

2026-ablove-technical-analysis-geedge §4.1, §4.1.2, Table 3, Table 4 dpitls-fingerprinttraffic-shapeip-blockingsni-blocking

Internal Jira tickets reveal that Psiphon lacked obvious protocol signatures, forcing censors to fall back to IP-based blocking of Psiphon3 client IPs combined with a 'whitelist protection mechanism' that allows traffic when the destination SNI matches a popular domain—an explicit collateral-damage tradeoff documented in the Confluence file 'GTN498 The collateral damage analysis of Psiphon3 Blocking.' A ticket from the Ethiopia (E21) deployment shows customers complaining that the VPN deny policy inadvertently blocked non-VPN applications.

2026-ablove-technical-analysis-geedge §4.1.2, Figure 2, Figure 3 ip-blockingsni-blocking

Article 19 documents that Iran's National Information Network (NIN / SHOMA) was designed with explicit reference to China's Great Firewall as a model, with institutional mirroring: Iran's Supreme Council of Cyberspace parallels China's Cyberspace Administration of China, and both governments share a "cyber sovereignty" doctrine used to justify domestic content controls and cross-border technology transfer. The report frames Iran's filtering infrastructure as deliberately architected to replicate GFW capabilities, not as an independently developed system.

2026-article19-tightening-the-net §2, §3 dpisni-blockingdns-poisoningip-blockingbgp-hijackthrottling

CensorLess vanilla mode costs $0.27/month for a single proxy processing 6.76 GB of traffic monthly, a 97.1% reduction (34.4×) over SpotProxy's optimal single-NIC configuration ($9.28/month). The private mode, which adds a t4g.micro EC2 VPS for end-to-end encryption via SOCKS, costs $3.41/month — still 63.3% cheaper than SpotProxy's cheapest option. Costs remain below $3.50/day even when scaling to 300 proxies.

2026-kang-censorless-serverless §6.3, Figure 6 ip-blockingsni-blockingdns-poisoning

DPYProxy-DNS's automated probe-and-select mode identified a working DNS circumvention in an average of 13.78 seconds (median 12.90s) in China and 12.32 seconds (median 8.28s) in Iran across 100 runs each; best-case startup was 0.32s (China) and 0.47s (Iran) when the first-tried combination succeeded, while worst-case exceeded 30.72s in China and 58.16s in Iran due to the slow Last Response mode (3s fixed wait per attempt) being selected early in the randomized probe order.

2026-lange-towards §6.3 dns-poisoningsni-blockingip-blocking

DNS censorship of encrypted protocols is inconsistent in both China and Iran. In China, Yandex resolvers are censored only when the SNI extension is present; omitting SNI bypasses censorship for these resolvers. In Iran, DoH requires SNI omission for Quad9, Google, Adguard, CleanBrowsing, and NextDNS resolvers, but works with SNI for Yandex and Cisco resolvers. These inconsistencies suggest resolvers have been accidentally missed by censors, highlighting the value of automated tools that trial all resolver-mode combinations rather than hard-coding a single strategy. The support evaluation found 47 resolvers supporting DoH, 16 supporting DoH3, and only 8 supporting DoQ out of ~65 tested.

2026-lange-towards §6.2, Table 2 dns-poisoningsni-blockingip-blocking