Re: Block directory authorities, is it possible?

[Pei Hanru <peihanru@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2007-1-13 4:44 CST(UTC+8), Mike Perry wrote:
>> I live in China and was/am having difficulties in using Tor, the problem
>> is: it takes quite a long time to build a circuit for the first time I
>> start Tor on my Windows machine.
>>
>> Am I understanding correctly? Are there any actions Tor can take? After
>> all, we cannot simply assume this will not happen in the future.
> 
> If the problem right now is just IP blocking you can try the tor
> option HttpProxy which will route your dirserver traffic through an
> http proxy you specify. Unfortunately, certain areas have begun
> blocking by the /tor/ url postfix that dirservers use, independent of
> IP. There is an option in 1.2.x/SVN to tunnel this traffic via other
> tor nodes (via SSL), but I believe it is prone to exploding at this
> point in time.

Actually, no IP is blocked at this time, it is due to a natural disaster. :(

It's interesting to evaluate whether the option you mentioned will
defend the attack (that is, blocking all directory authorities), in that
setting, there's no living network-status, how to find "other tor
nodes"? Manually importing required files is an idea, but, it's not that
elegant and finding up-to-date files is a problem.

I'm curious on more details. :)

Thanks,
Hanru