Direct dated evidence (July 2023) that the Ethiopia (E21) customer actively toggles application-level blocking as a live policy lever: lifting the block on YouTube plus four other apps caused a documented traffic surge and device alerts at the BOL-IGW site.

Side-by-side internal performance comparison across Xinjiang (China Mobile carrier deployment, hostname cmcc-xj-server1-sapp-244), Fujian (domestic), and Ethiopia (E21) explicitly references the same 'app_sketch_maat' diagnostic log format at all three sites, confirming the identical AppSketch app-fingerprinting stack is used for domestic Xinjiang surveillance and for the exported Ethiopia deployment.

TSG's QUIC-parsing layer decrypts QUIC ClientHello payloads and parses a user-agent-like parameter from the decrypted content, deployed at the Ethiopia (E21) DIR-IGW site. A missing bounds check on this field caused a watchdog-timeout crash, confirmed via a MESA_Platform/quic GitLab commit (git.mesalab.cn/MESA_Platform/quic).

Ethiopia customer (E21/E-site) explicitly requested TSG blocking be extended beyond the baseline (Psiphon 3) to a named list of commercial VPNs: Freegate, CyberGhost, Torguard, NordVPN, IPVanish, VPN Unlimited, ExpressVPN, Surfshark, Windscribe, Hotspot Shield, Ivacy, Atlas VPN, PureVPN, ProtonVPN, Norton Secure VPN. Engineering confirmed delivery of NordVPN and Hotspot Shield signatures with successful field tests.

TSG integrates a licensed third-party DPI engine (versioned separately from TSG/App Sketch DB releases) that repeatedly segfaulted across many E21 (Ethiopia) NPB nodes over Oct-Dec 2023 when processing specific packet-encapsulation stacks (Ethernet->MPLS->IPv4->UDP, VLAN->IPv4->UDP), requiring an App Sketch DB version bump to resolve.

Root-caused an Ethiopia SNI-block-failure incident to the detection mechanism itself: APP_SKETCH's FQDN-scanning module -- which exists specifically to identify Psiphon3 and Freegate via top-N SNI matching -- was CPU-expensive enough to saturate cores, triggering sapp's fail-open DDoS bypass and letting some target connections through uninspected. A signature-structure fix roughly doubled throughput (33K/s to 73K/s new connections) and disabling the fail-open bypass restored reliable blocking.

A 3-month E21 (Ethiopia) investigation into unreliable YouTube blocking found two independent, structural detection gaps: (1) at IGW (international gateway) sites, load-balanced multi-path routing causes TSG to see only single-direction (C2S-only or S2C-only) traffic for a meaningful fraction of sessions (~5-10% baseline, worse under load), breaking stateful app-ID/deny; (2) under peak load, NPB boards' CPU-triggered self-protection "bypass" (fail-open passthrough) hit ~50% of new sessions at the busiest site (Bole-IGW, ~86k new sessions/sec at 7.8Gbps/NPB), and TSG explicitly deprioritizes bypass protection for non-HTTP/SSL traffic to preserve web blocking under load.