[tor-talk] Help users in Iran reach the internet

[Softail]

I can't get this to work at all on Rackspace. I've tried CentOS 6.0 and
Ubuntu 11.10.

For CentOS I had to compile everything but that worked and Tor worked as
a bridge without the obfsproxy. For Ubuntu I followed the direction for
installing from the repositories and Tor worked as a bridge but not with
the proxy. All I ever get in the log on either system even with Log debug is

Feb 11 06:10:28.000 [warn] Could not setup the environment of the
managed proxy at '/usr/local/bin/obfsproxy'.

Not sure what else I can try that would be more revealing.

Ubuntu was Tor v0.2.3.11-alpha (git-8266d633bc577784)
Centos was Tor 0.2.3.11-alpha (git-9ce9836f853d8a31)

On 2/10/2012 3:41 AM, Jacob Appelbaum wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In the last 48 hours a major campaign of filtering has started in Iran -
> it started slow and now appears to be that nearly all SSL/TLS traffic is
> blocked on a few major Iranian ISPs. Details are rather rough but we're
> working on some solutions - we've long had an ace up our sleeves for
> this exact moment in the arms race but it's perhaps come while the User
> Interface edges are a bit rough still.
>
> Here's the deal - we need people to run Tor bridges but a special kind
> of Tor bridge, one that does a kind of traffic camouflaging - we call it
> an obfuscated bridge. It's not easy to set up just yet because we were
> not ready to deploy this for everyone yet; it lacks a lot of analysis
> and it might even only last for a few days at the rate the arms race is
> progressing, if you could call it progress.
>
> There are highly technical instructions here:
> https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy-instructions.html.en
>
> Currently if you run such a bridge, you'll either need to manually tell
> us (via email to tor-assistants at torproject.org ) about it or you'll need
> to share these bridges with people you want to help directly. It's a
> pain and we're working on it.
>
> Here's a bug report where we're working around the clock to get stuff
> going in a user friendly manner:
> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5009#comment:17
>
> This kind of help is not for the technically faint of heart but it's
> absolutely needed for people in Iran, right now. It's likely that more
> than ~50,000 - ~60,000 Tor users may drop offline.
>
> Watch this graph for an idea of the censorship impact of directly
> connecting Tor users:
> https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=direct-users&start=2011-11-12&end=2012-05-10&country=ir&events=on&dpi=72#direct-users
>
> Here's the same graph but for Tor bridge users in Iran:
> https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=bridge-users&start=2011-11-12&end=2012-05-10&country=ir&dpi=72#bridge-users
>
> We're working on easy to use client software and if you're in Iran or
> need one desperately, please email help at rt.torproject.org. We'll try to
> get you a working obfsproxy bridge address and working client software.
>
> All the best,
> Jacob
> _______________________________________________
> tor-talk mailing list
> tor-talk at lists.torproject.org
> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk