[tor-bugs] #9446 [Torbutton]: Support enabling/disabling Pluggable Transports

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#9446: Support enabling/disabling Pluggable Transports
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 Reporter:  bastik     |          Owner:     
     Type:  task       |         Status:  new
 Priority:  normal     |      Milestone:     
Component:  Torbutton  |        Version:     
 Keywords:             |         Parent:     
   Points:             |   Actualpoints:     
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Comment(by bastik):

 Replying to [comment:2 lunar]:

 > Do we really need users to learn the various intrinsic details of the
 various pluggable transports?

 No, everything should be enabled by default. #9445 got stripped down.
 Currently getting everything to work by default is much more important.
 Currently I don't care enough to open another ticket, which would allow
 such a selection on first launch.

 Users don't have to learn anything, '''but if '''they know something, they
 can make their choice, without editing torrc (which I don't consider user
 friendly, although it works).

 > How would it help me to learn the difference between obfs2 and obfs3?

 Users don't have to understand anything about what obfsX is or how it
 works, but if they know (Tor Wiki, TorBlog, friends, simply learned) that
 obfs2 makes them look suspicious and their connection is dead after x
 minutes, they can disable that easily.

 I'm luckily not in the position to require a bridge or even worse on
 Pluggable Transports so it's hard to tell how users acquire that knowledge
 and if they would actually benefit from being able to choose.

 Suppose a system that detects obfs2 (for example) and blacklists the
 target and the source of a request for some amount of time for the source.
 A user could not make new connections for let's say 3 hours. A single
 request that gets detected will result in a dead network for 3 hours; no
 matter how good the other transports are.

 > For Flashproxy, users need some manual configuration on their network,
 but I don't think “choosing” transports is the way to convey that message.

 With WebSockets that is unfortunately true, but let's hope that changes
 with WebRTC.

 Everything should work by default.

 No need to learn or read anything for users whose use-case is agnostic
 about the transport.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9446#comment:3>
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