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Re: [tor-talk] Tor Usage Statistics for Iran

Joe - I may be of some help, as I am working on an ongoing project tracking the methods and behaviors of Iranian circumvention tool users. Between May and August, I independently noticed something of a similar trajectory of adoption numbers by Iranian users. What I've found in part is there are a number of concurrent threads that likely contribute to the increase in traffic, but don't account directly. These include:

Increase of public awareness of Tor: There are number of organizations and individuals that have been promoting Tor in the country to political audiences.

Less competition: A number of services such as freegate and gtunnel have reduced their availability to Iranians. Users have moved from HTTP proxies to Ultrasurf and VPNs chiefly, but Tor has also benefited. This is probably the biggest cause.

During the initial results of our research, it appears that there is a meaningful correlation between political activism and specific tool use. However, that's deserves a deeper explanation off list. 

Cordially,

Collin David Anderson
averysmallbird.com | @cda | Washington, D.C.
On Aug 31, 2011 10:29 AM, Andrew Lewman <andrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wednesday, August 31, 2011 09:10:03 Joe Galvin wrote:
> Well I'm not presuming that any of them are from the opposition. I don't
> know what they're doing, which is the point. As I said there's no political
> OR social reason, as far as I'm aware, for the number have users to have
> multiplied x5 since last August. Just interested in why it has happened, if
> there is any particular reason. Maybe there isn't. It's a pretty
> astonishing jump though.

The Persian News Network has been promoting Tor to their viewership in August.
This is likely the cause of the jump in usage from Iran. However, this is just
a correlation.

--
Andrew
pgp 0x74ED336B
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