[tor-dev] Summary of meek's costs, April 2015

[Griffin Boyce]

Mike Perry wrote:
> David Fifield:
>> Here's the summary of meek's CDN fees for April 2015.
>> 
>> total by CDN  $3292.25 + $3792.79 + $0.00 = $7085.04 grand total
>> https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-transport.html?graph=userstats-bridge-transport&start=2015-02-01&end=2015-04-30&transport=meek
> 
> Yikes! Are these costs covered by a grant or anything? Should we be
> running a donations campaign?
> 
>> If you want to help reduce costs, you can
>>  1. Use meek-azure; it's still covered through a grant for the next 
>> four
>>     months.
>>  2. Set up your own App Engine or CDN account. Then you can pay for 
>> your
>>     own usage (it might even be free depending on how much you use).
>>     Here are instructions on how to set up your own:
>>       
>> https://gitweb.torproject.org/pluggable-transports/meek.git/tree/appengine/README
>>       
>> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek#AmazonCloudFront
>>       
>> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek#MicrosoftAzure
>>     Then you will have to enter a bridge line manually. Follow the
>>     instructions at
>>       
>> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek#Howtochangethefrontdomain
>>     but instead of changing the "front=" part, change the "url=" part.
>>     For example,
>>       bridge meek 0.0.2.0:1 url=https://<myappname>.appspot.com/ 
>> front=www.google.com
> 
> Please let me know if anyone takes you up on this!
> 
> I am happy to add the meek bridges of anyone who does this as an option
> in Tor Browser. We can add logic to round robin or randomly select
> between the set of meek providers for a given meek type upon first
> install, or even for every browser startup.

   If there were some randomization logic included, I'd be happy to 
contribute an App Engine or Amazon meek access point.  If a few people 
did that, the costs might be more manageable.  But also the stats might 
be a bit harder to aggregate (which might be important if David is 
writing a thesis/paper/etc).

   Either way, way to go =)

best,
Griffin

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