[tor-talk] Hi!

[Zachary Alberico]

Hi Gary,

You only really need to use bridges if you're in a country that's
censoring the Tor network.  Bridges are not listed in the public relay
lists that tor clients use to automatically connect to the network so
they're not as easily blocked by 'bad' governments.  There are a few
different ways to get a bridge address if you need one, but if you're
already able to access Tor from where you are then you probably don't.

Pluggable Transports are actually super cool and were born out of a
similar problem (governments attempting to block Tor traffic).  In
this case the governments were using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)
tools to look at packets moving through the network.  They'd look at
traffic and try and find patterns that were representative of Tor
traffic and if they found them they'd then kill the connection.

In order to get around this people have been coming up with different
technical ideas about how to obscure the traffic so it doesn't reveal
itself as Tor traffic and doesn't get blocked.  Most of these ideas
involve copying the look of other types of traffic in order to make it
difficult to determine it's actually Tor.

A framework was created so that man different ideas could be selected
from - the variety here allows for new interesting ideas to be worked
on in parallel and the variety of ways to obscure the traffic makes it
even more challenging for people trying to censor it.

Check out this super cool talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwMr8Xl7JMQ

Check the following docs if you're interested:
https://www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports
https://www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports

As far as your question about hidden services - good and bad largely
depends on who you're talking to and you're unlikely to get an
interesting answer to that question.

The canonical answer to the more general abuse question can be found
here: https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq-abuse.html.en

Zach

On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 10:04 AM, bbrewer <bbrewer at littledystopia.net> wrote:
>
>> On Apr 4, 2015, at 11:51 AM, gary02121993 at openmailbox.org wrote:
>>
>> Which one? Also how do I know when I have to use bridges or pluggable
>> transports? I have used some before and I noticed my connection got slower.
>
> It is common knowledge if you plug into the back, things go slower.
>
> You should try the front.
>
> -Benjamin
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