[tor-relays] Help the Tor Project by running a fast unpublished bridge

[Lorenz Kirchner]

On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 3:23 AM, Philipp Winter <identity.function at gmail.com
> wrote:


> Yes, assuming the users would not give up out of frustration before :-) We
> can
> actually do the math: According to [0], at the moment the Tor network has
> an
> advertised bandwidth of 3000 MiB/s. Let's assume that all Chinese relays
> would
> account for 30 MiB/s. Even then, the probability of a Chinese relay being
> selected as first hop is only 30/3000 = 0.01 = 1%!
>

How long does it take to make 100 circuit attempts?

>
> However, there still remains a legal problem! You will have a hard time
> hiding
> the fact that you are operating a relay within China. And if this turns
> out to
> be a viable strategy, even more so. I suppose it wouldn't be too hard for
> the
> government to simply confiscate or shut down Chinese relays?
>

Yes, that is not impossible, but it depends how many relays there are and
how easy it is to set them up..
The legal thing is interesting as I have yet to see any rules or laws that
prohibit Chinese to circumvent censorship... afaik officially there is no
censorship in China so it is difficult to accuse someone of circumventing
it, however they most likely will find something else to accuse them of.

If there was a tor sub project producing say a widely available dd wrt
image that is ready to go, I bet there would be thousands of keen Chinese
getting their routers flashed just like many do it with their phones...
every market here has some people who will jailbreak this and that. It
seems to me that it would be a difficult task for the authorities to keep
confiscating...

In my opinion it is not far fetched to expect to eventually see several
tens of thousands of Chinese relays on VPN connections that could arguably
even be exit relays. Wouldn't that help the tor bandwidth cause overall?
Basically, ideally tor is providing the anonymity to safely share the
existing circumvention systems (VPN) across all the internal networks...
sort of thing



>
> [1] www.eecs.umich.edu/~zmao/Papers/china-censorship-pam11.pdf


interesting paper, thanks
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