[tor-dev] Summary of meek's costs, December 2015

[David Fifield]

On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 01:19:22PM -0900, Jesse V wrote:
> On 01/11/2016 12:47 PM, David Fifield wrote:
> > December 2015  $561.29 +  $603.27 +  $172.60 =  $1337.16
> > ...
> > The number of users increased by about 1,000 in December 2015.
> 
> Thanks for the report, David.
> 
> There are now ~1800 users on meek-google sharing 8 Mbits. Of course,
> it's also possible that many are lurking. I wonder if we should think of
> a way to load-balance the CDNs a bit more, assuming Azure is accessible
> from China. Perhaps we could re-order or at least clarify the bridge
> options in the Tor Browser. Since it's logistically challenging to get
> bridges from inside a censored country, it's possible that users try the
> various bridge options using the built-in bridges (which are likely
> blocked) before discovering that meek works, so they use that. I wonder
> how we could encourage users to use other transports that are likely
> faster, then use meek as a last resort.

Azure is accessible in China but it's even more severely rate limited
because it's more expensive than Google. We still have support from
Google, so that $561.29 actually costs about $61.29.

I think you're right that people are choosing meek because it works
without any setup. We have a kind of long-term goal to do a
domain-fronted interface to BridgeDB, so that people could get obfs4
bridges automatically and directly within Tor Launcher.
https://bugs.torproject.org/16550