[Tor www-team] Suggestions for Mirrors in Censored Countries

[William Papper]

Hi everyone,

We've been continuing our work on the download site (current version:
https://wpapper.github.io/tor-download-web/

). We're now looking for suggestions on providing downloads for censored
countries.

Currently, we have a few ideas for making downloads accessible in censored
countries:

1. Host the downloads directly on each mirror
While this would work, the combined size of all of the files is greater
than GitHub's 1GB limit per repository. This means that we'd need to setup
a script to pull from the mirror, setup a cron job to update the files,
cull unnecessary files, etc. This solution gets complex very quickly, so
it's not ideal.

2. Use an external download mirror that is not torproject.org
Could we use something like Amazon S3 or Sourceforge? It's possible, but
then we're just relying on another single point of failure. This isn't
ideal, and it would be better if the downloads were distributed.

3. Provide torrents to users in censored countries
This seems much more difficult to block, which is good. I couldn't find any
official TBB torrents, though.

4. Assume that the user is not living in a censored country
We could always assume that torproject.org is accessible, but we don't want
to make censored users unable to use the mirror.

Does anyone have any comments? Any other proposed solutions?

Thanks for your help.

Sincerely,
Will Papper
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