[tor-dev] GreatFire Circumvention Central: tests of speed and stability of circumvention tools in China

[David Fifield]

https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2016/jul/greatfireorg-now-testing-vpn-speed-and-stability-china
https://cc.greatfire.org/en
"Our newest website, Circumvention Central (CC), aims to provide
real-time information and data about circumvention solutions
that work in China. Since 2011, we have been collecting data
about blocked websites in China and now we will add data about
the effectiveness of VPNs and other circumvention tools."

They list various VPNs and other tools. Tor is on the list. (This page
has JavaScript charts that aren't working for me in Tor Browser.)
https://cc.greatfire.org/en/provider/Tor

At the moment, these are the figures I see:
Speed (kbps)Stability
1. HideMyAss504 (+39%)  98% (-1%)
2. VyprVPN  445 (−33%)  98% (+11%)
3. FreeBrowser  440 (+13%)  88% (+1%)
4. XX-Net   356 (New)   97%
5. Astrill  294 (−32%)  97% (+1%)
6. Lantern  262 (+15%)  95% (+3%)
7. VPNSecure259 (New)   87%
8. Psiphon  218 (+6%)   89% (+2%)
9. Ultrasurf206 (+460%) 86% (−4%)
10. Freegate188 (−29%)  91% (+1%)
11. PureVPN 151 (−25%)  94% (+1%)
12. Tor 112 (+237%) 96% (+1%)

The test details have interesting values under the "Settings" header:
https://cc.greatfire.org/en/provider/Tor#http-tests
"0", "socks5", "是", "lantern-proxy", "lantern-proxy,no bridge",
"lantern-proxy,meek-arzue", "proxy,no bridge", "lantern-proxy,obfs4",
"obfs4", "否", "meek-arzue", "obfs4,sock5 proxy".

There's a tool on the list I didn't know, XX-Net. Its GitHub page says
"It uses google app engine (GAE) as a proxy server through the
firewall" and "A Reborn GoAgent."
https://github.com/XX-net/XX-Net
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[tor-dev] BSc Honor Track Research Topic

[Bram van den Heuvel]

Dear all,

I'm currently an undergraduate student double BSc Applied Mathematics/Computer 
Science. This year I'll be doing a small (~500 hour) research project as part 
of my Honor track. I'm looking for a suitable research question I can try to 
answer, preferrably by using mathematical modeling. To give you an idea what 
kind of research I was planning to do, I briefly described my current idea 
below.

I was considering researching path selection, specifically the probability of 
selecting only faulty/malicious nodes and how this might be improved by 
including an extra reputation metric. This hypothetical reputation metric would 
be a "social" like reputation, based on for example real-world connections 
between people. In the most extreme case, one could choose a path of which all 
nodes are ran by real-world trusted people.

As there might be a more usefull research question out there, I was wondering 
whether there are any questions that the Tor Project has that might be answered 
by using mathematical modelling. I could then consider to try and answer this 
question in my research project.


Thanks in advance.___
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