[tor-talk] Dutch Police Investigation & Tor Spike: Correlation Or Also Causation?

Curious Kid letsshareinformation at yahoo.com
Sat Sep 10 15:03:32 UTC 2011


----- Original Message -----

> From: "andrew at torproject.org" <andrew at torproject.org>
> Sent: Saturday, September 10, 2011 2:29 PM
> Subject: Re: [tor-talk] Dutch Police Investigation & Tor Spike: Correlation Or Also Causation?
> 
> The current rumors around this spike in bridge queries and usage is:
> 
> 1. Someone created a package which queries for bridges and automatically
> uses them. We've heard of amorphous packages tied to helping Chinese or
> Iranians circumvent their firewalls which may or may not do this
> automated query and usage of bridges. It seems no one can find an actual
> binary though.
> 
> 2. Vuze Tor usage has suddenly become more popular. This would be a bad
> idea,
> https://blog.torproject.org/blog/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-good-idea.
> 
> 3. A botnet using tor.
> 
> 4. Your hypothesis of the Dutch police causing the bridge queries and
> subsequent spike in usage from Europe and Latin America.

Can we download software to create graphs out of the CSV files? The community can compare countries to look for timing and patterns.

Without undermining anonymity or assisting bridge-blocking efforts, is there a way to exclusively view https pool bridge use or get statistics on https bridge requests?

My first thought was that someone wants to catalog all bridge IP addresses. They may want to block them, look for users that connect to them, monitor them, DOS them, or hog their capacity. If it were law enforcement, I don't see any reason why they wouldn't cooperate globally, but I haven't seen any evidence that this is happening.



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