On 1/14/12 5:38 PM, arpooya wrote: > Yes, it's really a problem to find a tech-savvy person to run a private > bridge outside the censored regions. Recently, I wanted to test > obfsproxy and that adds to the problem! I had to find a person having > enough time and knowledge to configure an obfsproxy server out there! > > Any idea to make the whole process of "making a machine a Tor bridge" > more automated is great! Right now, Vidalia interface is really > straightforward in setting up a Tor bridge, but to make it operational, > the port forwarding part which should be done manually (in most cases) > is a hassle for a normal user.
Well, that's the main point, to find out "solutions" that even if may appear sub-optimal from technical point of view, could be optimal to leveraged the crowd effect. To let the crowd get engaged in participatory Tor network support, participation must be extremely-simple and extremely-low-resources. Anything that goes above extreme simplicity represent a limitation to the crowd-scalability of a solution. Nowdays internet = web. Users think web. Everything else, including concept like "TCP port" or "NAT" can be difficult to be understood. It would be interesting to imagine a future situation where the Bridge concept evolve into a simpler software acting just as a proxy, but being deploy-able as a web application and usable as web url. A Tor Client (in a tor-blocked country) can just: - start tor - type a bunch of URLs (in place of bridges provided as IP:Port) - navigate via TBB Any webmaster or blogger can participate to the Tor network just by: - load a single .php file on an existing website via hosting control panel/wordpress/drupal/joomla installer The 'Web World' is much bigger than the '*nix nerd world', so being able to engage them in support for Tor would eventually create a huge amount of Tor proxy. -naif _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
