Put another way, the Infrastructure award prepares the network to handle the surge of users coming from China. We need to make the network better at distributing lots of users across bridges / pluggable transports / vanilla relays in order to handle a surge in users, and the Infrastructure award does that. If we were to open access to the Tor network to many more users without completing the Infrastructure proposal work, the network would have unreliable speeds and sluggish downloads / file transfers / video streaming because of congestion caused by all of the new users connecting in China. The project we are outlining in this proposal makes bridges more accessible and less detectable in China. This project’s impact is directly amplified by another pending DRL project by the Tor Project titled Making the Tor network faster & more reliable for users in Internet-repressive places. The result of this project will be a strong suite of long-term, reliable, and blocking-resistant applications, allowing human rights defenders, journalists, whistleblowers, and marginalized groups to access critical resources, share files, browse, & communicate freely. The goal of this project is to implement new circumvention technologies in Tor-based Android, iOS, and desktop tools to serve a larger and more diverse user base across China, Hong Kong, and Tibet. We need to increase the number of avenues for users to get connected to Tor by updating censorship circumvention to a wide variety of filesharing, browsing, and messaging apps for mobile (Android, iOS, CalyxOS) and desktop (Windows, OS X, Linux) devices.įinally, we need this project to be informed by users in the China context who can help us evaluate our tools, use the right distribution methods, and reach the human rights defenders, journalists, and marginalized people we aim to reach. We also need to respond quickly when bridges are blocked and remove them from distribution so users don’t get bridges that are no longer effective, and we need some of this reachability testing to be automated. That means that our strategy for reaching users in China and the region should involve rapidly adding a diverse set of new bridge entry points to the Tor network and distributing them in ways that are difficult for the censors to learn these IP addresses and block them, but remain easy for our target users to access. The CCP blocks access to Tor largely by finding and blocking bridge IP addresses, not by blocking the protocol used to disguise or hide traffic.
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