Hi Loz, On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 11:00:11PM +0800, Lorenz Kirchner wrote: >> I guess, that would require a modification of the path selection on the >> clients >> side. Usually, Tor clients randomly pick relays weighted by bandwidth. >> Unless >> the Chinese relays would provide an enormous amount of bandwidth, they >> would >> barely get selected by clients which leads to a poor user experience. > > well compared to now the experience would be better, eventually the reachable > Chinese relays would connect it just might take a while on first startup
Yes, assuming the users would not give up out of frustration before :-) We can actually do the math: According to [0], at the moment the Tor network has an advertised bandwidth of 3000 MiB/s. Let's assume that all Chinese relays would account for 30 MiB/s. Even then, the probability of a Chinese relay being selected as first hop is only 30/3000 = 0.01 = 1%! >> Perhaps it's better to focus on improved bridge distribution strategies [0] >> and >> hard-to-block transport protocols [1]. Also, that would be a universal >> solution >> which would also help in other countries and not a specific - and probably >> hard >> to maintain - Chinese-only solution. > > I think the solution is not a Chinese only solution as it would work anywhere > where censorship actually exists Only if you assume that the censor is always having a hard time censoring content within its own borders. That might hold more-or-less true for China but not everywhere else, right? For example, what about the networks of a company or a small organization? >> I guess, the firewall operators would notice that quite soon when Chinese >> relays >> would start popping up in the consensus or am I missing something here? And >> as >> soon as something is in the consensus, it's particularly easy to block. > > I am not sure how it works but I have a feeling that the firewall operators > have difficulties in blocking hosts inside their networks That might be due to the fact that a lot of filtering (but not all of it) is going on in border ASes. There even is a research paper about that if you are interested [1]. However, there still remains a legal problem! You will have a hard time hiding the fact that you are operating a relay within China. And if this turns out to be a viable strategy, even more so. I suppose it wouldn't be too hard for the government to simply confiscate or shut down Chinese relays? After all, I agree with you that it's an interesting strategy which would tackle the problem from a new angle and I would love to learn more about it. I just believe that right now we should spend the limited resources we have on bridge distribution and pluggable transports. It would surely be worth an experiment, though! Philipp [0] https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html#bandwidth [1] www.eecs.umich.edu/~zmao/Papers/china-censorship-pam11.pdf _______________________________________________ tor-relays mailing list [email protected] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
