On Sat, Aug 20, 2016 at 12:58:55AM -0700, George Grantham wrote: > I've heard that Tor Bridges and Tor exits are both within serious demand. > > At this point in time within the Tor Network, are Tor Bridges with obfs4 > pluggable transports at a greater need, or are Tor exit nodes?
I think exit relays is the right answer here, if all else is equal on your side. In favor of exit relays: 1) Not everybody is in a position to run an exit relay, so if you can you should. 2) More exit relays can make Tor faster for everybody. 3) More exit relays (in more diverse locations) can make Tor more anonymous for everybody, since it increases the variety of places that adversaries have to watch. Whereas on the obfs4 bridge side, right now our bridge address distribution strategies are not very robust against the steps China takes to discover the bridge addresses, and bridges are overkill basically every other place besides China. So running a few more obfs4 bridges, without also improving the distribution strategies, might not end up benefiting as many people as you hope. Really we ought to do a push to distribute bridges better, in parallel to asking people to run a lot more of them, in parallel to making it super easy for people to run them (apt-get install ..., done). For the first piece, see the "Salmon" paper from this year's PETS for some ideas: https://censorbib.nymity.ch/pdf/Douglas2016a.pdf but that's really a whole separate topic, and historically it also turns out to be more complicated than it sounds. :) And see also https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq#RelayOrBridge Thanks for wanting to help users! --Roger -- tor-talk mailing list - [email protected] To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
