[tor-dev] bridge's lifetime

Aaron aagbsn at torproject.org
Tue Jul 31 14:53:52 UTC 2012


On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 11:26 PM, ??Phoenixing <1935842336 at qq.com> wrote:
> hi
>
>    I have get more than 1000 bridges and I totally inserted into the torrc
> file. So I can not notice which bridge is no longer work. The bridges can
> not be blocked totally. Some bridges seem that no longer work, but after
> sometime (three days or more) they work again.:-)

You might notice some repetition in the list of bridges you get --
BridgeDB tries to hand out the same 3 bridges to each requesting IP
(If you are using the https://bridges.torproject.org distributor).
Furthermore, there are only about 1000 bridges in the Tor network, and
not all of them are assigned to the https distributor:

  https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html

This is by design, so as to prevent a single person from obtaining the
entire list of bridges. Obviously, someone who has a lot of IP
addresses (e.g. owns a botnet) can get more bridges. This is exactly
the scenario for which ReCaptcha was deployed.

Does that make sense?

--Aaron


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