[tor-bugs] #7520 [BridgeDB]: Design and implement a social distributor for BridgeDB

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#7520: Design and implement a social distributor for BridgeDB
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 Reporter:  aagbsn       |          Owner:     
     Type:  enhancement  |         Status:  new
 Priority:  normal       |      Milestone:     
Component:  BridgeDB     |        Version:     
 Keywords:               |         Parent:     
   Points:               |   Actualpoints:     
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 The sixth strategy outlined at https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects
 /design-paper/blocking.html#tth_sEc7.4 describes a social bridge
 distribution strategy:

 {{{
 The sixth strategy ties in the social network design with public bridges
 and a reputation system.
 We pick some seeds — trusted people in blocked areas — and give them each
 a few dozen bridge addresses and a few delegation tokens.
 }}}

 Some other services use a similar system to try and restrict the set of
 users using an invite system. One example is private bittorrent trackers.

 In an email, I described such a system:

 {{{
 Here's a simple concept for how this model might be applied to bridge
 distribution:

 The basic idea is:
 1. Create a handful of tokens that can be exchanged for an account
 that may request a bridge.
 2. Periodically give accounts some tokens to hand out to ther friends.

 Most (all?) of the private trackers employ a ratio system - and you
 lose your account if you don't maintain a ratio above a certain
 threshold. That is, they try to separate users by behavior, and drop
 the ones whose behavior is undesirable.

 In the context of bridges, we want to be able to separate users into
 two groups: users who use bridges, and users who block them.

 1. Each time a user is given a bridge, note the bridges given to that
 user.
 2. Each time a bridge is blocked, increment a per-user counter for
 every user given that bridge.
 2a. Shuffle the affected users so that the same users are not given
 the same bridges twice. If using a hashring, a key consisting of the
 user-id+counter might be sufficient.
 3. Periodically, rank users by this counter, and drop the worst N
 percent of users.
 4. Periodically, allocate new account tokens in proportion to
 available bridges to random users in the 100-N percent.
 }}}

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/7520>
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