Re: [tor-talk] Tor (and Orbot's) growth in Turkey

[Nathan Freitas <nathan@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 04/04/2014 12:06 PM, Joe Btfsplk wrote:
> On 4/4/2014 10:20 AM, Nathan Freitas wrote:
>> Remember how Tor doubled its user base in Turkey in the last month?
>>
>> https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-relay-country&start=2014-01-04&end=2014-04-04&country=tr&events=off#userstats-relay-country
>>
>>
>> Well, at least ~18,000 of the 30,000 were Orbot users:
>> https://twitter.com/guardianproject/status/452100420505059329
>>
>> which I believe was driven directly from the fact that Twitter for
>> Android includes very easy proxy settings, and that Google Play itself
>> was not blocked. There were a number of articles, tweets, in Turkish,
>> that laid out the easy process to install Orbot, enabled Twitter proxy
>> settings, etc.
>>
>> It would be nice it had been 30,000,000 new users (considering the
>> population of Turkey is 74 million), but it might be good to think about
>> Turkey's Twitter block as a "censorship-lite" event, not unlike the UK
>> or Indonesia, and then figure out how we can encourage more adoption
>> next time.
> Given the backdoors apparently discovered in many cell phones, are they
> the best choice when incarceration is potentially on the line?

No they are not, but for most of these user's, their goal was to be able
to access Twitter, simple as that. Not every censorship-state is a
totalitarian police state and not everyone's threat model includes
baseband/backdoor attacks and torture.

In addition, within the context of what Tor offers, there is no feature
related to physical security of the device it is running on. Tor leaves
passwords, cookies, keys, caches, etc all written without encryption to
the machine it is running on. In most desktop systems, any app you run
as a user, has access to this data.

+n



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