Re: [tor-bugs] #23839 [Applications/Tor Browser]: Testing Framework for Censorship Circumvention

["Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki" <blackhole@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

#23839: Testing Framework for Censorship Circumvention
--------------------------------------+---------------------------
 Reporter:  arthuredelstein           |          Owner:  tbb-team
     Type:  defect                    |         Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium                    |      Milestone:
Component:  Applications/Tor Browser  |        Version:
 Severity:  Normal                    |     Resolution:
 Keywords:                            |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:                            |         Points:
 Reviewer:                            |        Sponsor:  Sponsor19
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Changes (by arma):

 * sponsor:   => Sponsor19


Comment:

 I was going to go make a ticket for this idea ("Make a "censorship
 detection" Tor Browser variant") when I found this ticket already
 existing. It is still a good idea.

 We spoke at various times of a Tor Launcher feature ("make the connect
 option just work") that cycles through bridge types and transport types
 until it gets to one that works. There are tradeoffs with user safety and
 user experience that make us pause.

 But there's a variation of the idea that we could do first, and it would
 be useful now, and the effort would be mostly reusable for that future
 idea:

 '''Let's make a Tor Browser variant, or an option inside Tor Browser, that
 tries all of the various anti-censorship combinations and reports to the
 user on their status.'''

 That way when people are in a crappy network environment they will have a
 simple tool they can fetch and run and it will tell them about their
 ability to use various Tor transports on their network. And if we make it
 clear that this isn't "normal Tor Browser", hopefully we sidestep many of
 the user experience / user confusion questions.

 An advanced step would be to figure out a way to automatically exfiltrate
 the answers, OONI style, via domain fronting or some similar trick. But to
 start, it could just pop up a window / write out a text file with the
 assessment, and the user can copy-paste the analysis, or read it, or
 whatever they want to do.

 Another advanced step would be to have Tor give better feedback to Tor
 Launcher (and thus to our output file) about what went wrong (#28018). But
 I think we can develop this idea in parallel with how exactly Tor will
 report about its success for each permutation attempt.

--
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/23839#comment:4>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
The Tor Project: anonymity online

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