[tor-relays] turning off BridgeDB and the future of moat bridges

[meskio]

Hello,


tl;rd: moat bridges are not distributed anymore. Don't shut them down as they 
are still used but don't create new bridges with "BridgeDistribution moat".


BridgeDB has being our bridge distribution system since 2007. For years we have 
being developed a replacement of BridgeDB[0] called rdsys[1]. And finally 
yesterday we replaced the last distributors missing in rdsys (email, https and 
moat) and turned off BridgeDB.

The only visible difference is that captchas has disappeared from 
https://bridges.torproject.org and requesting bridges in Tor Browser gives you a 
static captcha and doesn't even verify if the answer is correct (until we have 
the time to update TB to don't request the captcha[2].

The mayor difference for bridge operators is that we don't distribute "moat" 
bridges anymore. We have merged circumvention settings and moat and now is one 
distributor handing over "settings" bridges. For now we are going to keep the 
existing "moat" bridges assigned to "moat" and don't distribute them, so users 
that have one of those bridges can keep using them without risk of censors 
finding it.

New bridges will not be assigned automatically the moat distributor, only 
existing bridges or bridges with "BridgeDistribution moat" will stay in this 
distributor. We plan to watch the usage of moat bridges and evaluate moving them 
to another distributor depending on the usage[3].

Thank you for running bridges.


[0] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgedb/
[1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/
[2] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42086
[3] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/233

-- 
meskio | https://meskio.net/
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
 My contact info: https://meskio.net/crypto.txt
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Nos vamos a Croatan.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: signature
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/attachments/20240919/dac70e58/attachment.sig>