tor is blocked in china

[andrew at torproject.org]

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 03:34:29PM +0800, luweitest at gmail.com wrote 1.0K bytes in 21 lines about:
: Could someone confirm that tor has been defeated in china? I mean
: running tor natively, not "capped" or through another proxy.

The Chinese GFW team has been actively blocking all public relays since
the 60th Anniversary of the CCP in Sept 2009.  In March 2010, the GFW
admins ramped up and crawled all of bridges.torproject website and flooded
requests to bridges at torproject from around 6000 unique gmail accounts.
We've been re-balancing the various bridge pools to create more churn so
the GFW admins have to keep crawling in order to block the public
bridges.  We released a batch of bridges via social networking sites in
China mid-summer and those bridges are working fine.  

New bridges seem to be blocked within 1-2 weeks.  We are working on a
number of things to improve the availability of tor in China.  In the
arms race of censor vs. circumvention, China's GFW is the furthest
along at Step 3 (attempt to block the bridges).  We are trying to have
this arms race as slow as possible.  One of the problems with the bridge
solution right now is that there are so few of them.  See
https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html for the current count of
bridges in the top graph. 

Many users in China are using vpns and other insecure proxies, and then
using tor over those technologies to protect their traffic and browsing.
Fluffybunny vpn, hot spot shield, and others are popular right now.  

We want to roll out a better bridge design that makes it vastly more
expensive to try to block. The research and development on this step has
been underway for a while. Other projects to simply increase the
quantity of bridges are the Torouter [1] and bridge-bundle [2] plans we're
working on towards a March 2011 release.  

[1]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TheOnionRouter/Torouter

[2]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/projects/ExperimentalBridgeBundles

-- 
Andrew
pgp key: 0x74ED336B
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