Bridges and China (new thread)

[andrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Rather than continue to hijack the old thread, here's a new one about
bridges and china.

I'm fully aware the GFW seems to have successfully crawled
https://bridges.torproject.org and added all of those bridges into their
blocking regime.  The email distribution method, bridges@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
may also have been crawled and added to the blocking regime.  There are
still 3 other pools of bridge addresses, one of which is held in
reserve.  It seems the other two methods are continuing to work, as a
paltry 5000 connections from China still can access Tor daily.  This is
vastly smaller than the 100,000 or so we used to get.  

The other methods of obtaining bridges are slower and more viral.  They
use social networking technologies like twitter and qq to distribute
bridge addresses.  I've been told if you search on baidu, you can find
such bridge addresses.  And until now, they still work.  We've given
some addresses to trusted networks inside China. What they do with the
bridges is up to them.  I've heard some are bridge addresses are being
released by blog posts, BBS posts, qq, and ads on taobao. I'm assuming
the admins of the GFW read or-talk in some fashion.  They are doing
their job and we're doing ours.

Conversely, Tor supports 3rd party http/https proxies.  Many people use
Tor because they want the privacy aspects of it, not just the ability to
circumvent a firewall.  You can use the 3rd party http/https proxy as
the access layer around the blocking system, and then to tor.

This is an arms race, we're working on next steps in it.

-- 
Andrew Lewman
The Tor Project
pgp 0x31B0974B

Website: https://www.torproject.org/
Blog: https://blog.torproject.org/
Identi.ca: torproject
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