[tor-relays] any progress on anti censorship features?

[Andrew Lewman]

On Friday, August 26, 2011 00:22:35 Lorenz Kirchner wrote:
> as far as I gather tor is unusable from behind gfw.. a while back I
> suggested that some sort of 'bridge-to-bridge' mechanism might be useful
> so that users within gfw can help each other to get around censorship..
> are there any plans to introduce/improve anti-censorship features in
> tor? I've waited a while but if anything the situation is worse than
> ever with tor from behind gfw. Seems that the jondo project has working
> anti-censorship features..

Tor works fine from China, you just need bridges. The censors in China are 
actively attacking most software that can be used for circumvention, this 
includes vpns, ssh forwarding, etc. China didn't pay attention to us for 
years, now they have teams of people working to block and break the various 
circumvention tools. Tor is working on a number of new items which will both 
protect anonymity and work well to circumvent censorship. One can find these in 
the Tor Specfication git repository, https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git

There are a few thousand daily connections coming from China through bridges.  
See https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=bridge-
users&start=2011-05-28&end=2011-08-26&country=cn&dpi=72#bridge-users

However, having talked to a number of Chinese people from all over the country 
earlier this year, if something doesn't work right away, with zero 
configuration, they move on to something else. Making users have to do extra 
steps is a necessity right now, but greatly limits the adoption of Tor in many 
countries. It doesn't matter how easy it is, anything more than two clicks, 
"download tor and run tor" has tremendous drop-off rates. 

For a few weeks earlier this year, it seemed China was experimenting with AS-
level throttling. If you were trying to send encrypted traffic outside of the 
various ASes in China, connections were slowed dramatically.  As soon as we 
started to gather data, the people reporting it said it stopped happening.

> Personally, I think there is a bigger demand for anti-censorship than
> high-level anonymity.. although both together would be best of course.

There is both.  Many people simply want to circumvent censorship to keep up 
with the latest news about entertainment, world affairs, or other mundane 
topics. Many people live in a culture of fear and demonstrated violence 
against those that do not think the right way, therefore Tor helps them 
protect their circumvented activities. They worry about how viewing the BBC, 
CNN, or Dilbert can be used against them some day.

Increasingly, in the 'western world' people are not so much concerned with 
censorship, but with their data being collected, collated, bought, and sold to 
everyone. If you look at the top 10 countries from where tor connections 
originate, https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?table=direct-
users&start=2011-05-28&end=2011-08-26#direct-users-table, you'll see many of 
them are considered 'free' countries.

-- 
Andrew
pgp 0x74ED336B