[tor-dev] bittorrent based pluggable transport

[David Fifield]

On Mon, Mar 02, 2015 at 07:10:55PM -0800, Dan Cristian Octavian wrote:
> If I understand correctly, you are arguing that my assumption that bittorrent
> is unlikely to be blocked is faulty. I don't have a strong argument against
> this, other than that it would be a very drastic move since for that part of
> the world bittorrent is the main way to get access to media files. As we've
> seen they've blocked already major things such as facebook or google so it
> would not be surprising.

I think it's reasonable to just state in your threat model that
BitTorrent is not blocked. Even though there will be censors for which
that is not true, I'm sure there are enough where it is true for it to
be interesting. It's a mistake to say that if something doesn't work in
China (or any other single concrete threat environment), then it's
useless. It's a question of motivation, and technical capability, and
resources, all of which vary under different censors. BitTorrent is
interesting because I would guess, at least in the U.S., that you're
more likely to get blocked by your ISP than by a firewall further out.

David Fifield