Nima Fatemi:
Hi Georg,
Thanks for your feedback. Please find my response below:
[snip]
Keep in mind as well that we have the goal to suggest the user a pluggable transport/bridge that works for her/him anyway in the future in case it is needed. This would avoid having to try all the transports hoping to finally find one that works.
Wow that's news to me and kind of a radical approach. Wouldn't that make PTs a bigger bottleneck than what they already are? Plus PT users soon seem to be going over 4 hops instead of 3 and that dramatically affects the speed, specially for censored users whom are already battling with TLS throttling and DPI. But this is a whole separate conversation and I don't think it belongs to this thread.
Well, this point was only meant to illustrate that we at some point want to take the burden to deal with pluggable transport/bridge selection off of the user. Yes, it is orthogonal to the GSoC idea how and in which form we achieve this. But mentioning it was meant to drive the point home that the option for network tests should might fit better into Tor Launcher althought this idea has drawbacks, too. E.g. it makes Tor Launcher more complex enhancing the risk that users get lost on start-up etc.
Georg