[tor-talk] Bridge Communities?

[Alex M (Coyo)]

On 04/13/2013 10:35 AM, Griffin Boyce wrote:
> Alex M (Coyo) <coyo at darkdna.net> wrote:
>
>> On 04/13/2013 01:54 AM, Griffin Boyce wrote:
>>>    Here are the common ways: roll a bunch of bridges using Amazon's cloud
>>> [1], have friends/allies/interesting frenemies run bridges using Vidalia
>>> [2], or just use a garden-variety VPN/proxy before entering the Tor
>>> network.
>>>
>>> ~Griffin
>>>
>>> [1]https://cloud.torproject.**org/ <https://cloud.torproject.org/>
>>> [2]https://www.torproject.org/**download/download.html.en<https://www.torproject.org/download/download.html.en>
>>>
>> That is extremely unhelpful.
>>
>> Merely running bridges on a huge ridiculously insecure public cloud does
>> not equal running bridge authorities independent of the bridge authority
>> run by the tor project.
>>
>> I have still not gotten a straight answer about whether or not the bridge
>> community featureset has been released in the stable tor client.
>
>    The answer to your second question is no, because private bridges are
> used in a setting where heavy censorship exists (eg, China), very few
> people want to expose their private bridge networks to outsiders like
> yourself. People frequently roll a set of bridges *for their own use*.

Someone quoted the Tor manual, and noted that one of the options is:

AlternateBridgeAuthority [nickname] [flags] address:port fingerprint

That sounds a lot more like I'm looking for.

All I need is patch an "AlternativeDirectoryAuthority" option, and there you go. :D



>
>    Of course, if you truly have a problem with the Tor network, you're not
> obligated to use it. =P  Other options still exist for a reason.

Not very many!

I mean, most overlays out there are NOT for anonymity, and they do NOT 
offer an equivalent featureset to Tor hidden services.

Sure, i2P exists, but who wants to spin up a huge honking java virtual 
machine just to participate in that relay pool?

Not only that, but i2P (last I checked) does not support IPv6 Eepsites, 
while Tor is (slowly) getting to that point.

IPv6 eepsites/hidden services is an important feature to me.

GNUnet or even more obscure overlays do not have stable featuresets 
regarding generic unmodified TCP or UDP services, be it over IPv4 or IPv6.

Sure GNUnet has IPv6 private VPNs on the eventual roadmap, and sure you 
could extend that to virtual interfaces, and sure you could enable linux 
or whatever to act as a router between those interfaces, you could even 
enable Quagga or whatever to swap an (alternative) BGP peering table, 
but GNUnet has a lot of other priorities, and isn't likely to get around 
to that anytime within the next two decades.