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.
David Fifield wrote:
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.
I'm working on incorporating Snowflake into Cupcake before Snowflake is added to Tor Browser. Cupcake still has a flash proxy client (only), but obviously this is not particularly useful right now. Not sure whether I'll just switch entirely to Snowflake or keep the legacy flash proxy support as an option in case it comes back into use. The way it shook out, Cupcake users only wound up contributing ~6mb a day at most because there are many more Cupcake users than people who were using the flash proxy option on Tor Browser. With Snowflake, the balance might shift a bit, so it will be interesting to see what happens there. =)
best, Griffin
On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 09:53:25AM -0800, David Fifield wrote:
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.
I've set up separate hosting for the flash proxy badge files at https://flashproxy.bamsoftware.com/, and added redirects from the https://crypto.stanford.edu/flashproxy/ URLs to there. Already deployed badges should continue to work, given the redirects. I added a note to the top of the home page saying that flash proxy is deprecated.
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David Fifield -
Griffin Boyce