On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 01:21:04AM +0800, tomli@riseup.net wrote:
It turned out that the entire code has been commented out and apparently Flashproxy became out of service. Why? Has the project discontinued, or just down for maintenance?
Flash proxy is basically retired now. It was removed from Tor Browser a year ago (https://bugs.torproject.org/17428) after it had been supplanted by more effective transports. I don't know why there was a blog post on December 16 promoting flash proxy, because it's no longer used.
Even when flash proxy was part of Tor Browser, it had very few users (less than 100; see https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-transport.html?start=2013-01...), probably because of the difficulty of running it as a client (https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/PluggableTransports/FlashP...). Compare those user numbers to meek (current about 10K) or obfs4 (30K).
The reason I haven't asked people to stop running the flash proxy badge is we're working on a new pluggable transport along the same lines but without the usability challenges: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/Snowflake. I was thinking about adapting existing flash proxy badges to provide capacity to Snowflake instead. This would go for Cupcake as well. The need to get the badge running again hasn't been pressing because Snowflake isn't deployed yet, but we're getting close.
The badge was deactivated by Stanford (without my knowledge, but I found out a while ago). I arranged with them to move it to alternate hosting and have them install a redirect, but that has been a low priority behind other work on Snowflake.
I'm sorry about the confusion. If I get some time I'll add a notice to the flash proxy main page saying that it's been retired.