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Re: [tor-talk] Better bridge management for clients

I think Tor Browser would need to create a statistics database for the
bridges you provide it with and run tests over time and choose the
bridges which have been historically the most reliable.

On 5/18/18 12:40 PM, Georg Koppen wrote:
> CarlSpackler@getbackinthe.kitchen:
>> When using bridges on a daily basis, how may I know which
>> work and which don't? (Say for example you added multiple
>> bridge lines and not simply one bridge)
>>
>> It would be nice to add to the GUI some color coded buttons,
>> like "green" for "working bridge" and "red" for "bridge
>> is no longer usable" and the user is either given the option
>> to tick a box and remove the non functioning bridges with the
>> red color beside them or have them pruned automatically before
>> all is said and done. An option to save (overwrite) the user's saved
>> list of bridges with only working bridges would be nice.
>>
>> In addition to this being a healthy way of managing bridges
>> for clients, it would prevent users from hammering away
>> at IPs where bridges are down, IPs may be dynamic, and some
>> poor fool obtaining an IP formerly used as a Tor Bridge and
>> wondering why he's seeing all of this incoming traffic!
>>
>> Now there may be some internal way of Tor checking this
>> but it does no good to the Tor client user if he is reusing
>> the same set of bridges every day, with no apparent feedback
>> to which are good and which are no longer up.
>>
> 
> I think I agree with the general idea and that it would be a benefit to
> have some kind of differntiation between "bridge is working right now"
> and "bridge is not working right now".
> 
> However, I wonder how we (say Tor Browser) should measure that safely
> and make sure that it is actually the bridge that is down (maybe there
> was just an upstream issue at that time). Or do you mean the latter does
> not really matter to users anyway and as long as bridges are not
> reachable for whatever reason they should be treated as down? Moreover,
> once bridges are marked as down I am not convinced yet we should just
> discard them. Bridges are scarce and it might be just a short time the
> bridge was/is actually not reachable/down.
> 
> An other option could be to incorporate external measurement data but
> that comes with the price of enhanced complexity making sure that all
> users have up-to-date data about bridge reachability readily available.
> And even that is error-prone because even though that external
> measurement might indidicate a bridge is down/up that might not match
> the experience an individual user has.
> 
> So, hrm,
> Georg
> 
> 
>

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