[tor-talk] Default to meek based on location?

Nathan Freitas nathan at freitas.net
Mon Feb 15 16:03:58 UTC 2016



On Mon, Feb 15, 2016, at 04:38 AM, rizzo wrote:
> In some big censored countries, meek pluggable transports are the only
> option to connect to the Tor network without manually obtaining
> bridges, a process which I believe many people don't understand enough
> to figure it out on their own. Has there been any discussion on
> whether meek could be made the default or at least recommended option
> when configuring Tor for the first time from certain locations? Could
> we detect the local time zone and then recommend a way to connect
> based on location?

I think the recent Tor Browser releases have done a better job of
walking people through the process of enabling bridges on setup. Adding
some additional logic based on time zone, language setting, etc, would
be a useful idea to gently nudge people towards using bridges by
default. In addition, I think better error handling of failed Tor
connection would be useful ("It looks like you are having a problem
connecting to Tor, and that Tor may be blocked. Can we try an alternate
approach?").

I am working through these ideas right now with Orbot, because the
amount of support emails I receive that basically say "Tor is stuck at
10%" is a bit overwhelming. Often telling them to enable bridges of some
sort, solves the issue.

+n


More information about the tor-talk mailing list