Hi folks!
EFF has launched their advocacy campaign for getting more Tor relays
running at universities:
https://toruniversity.eff.org/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/announcing-tor-university-challenge
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-launches-tor-university-challenge
We're focusing on universities in particular, not just to get more
capacity for the Tor network, but also to strengthen the connections
between the Tor network and academia. Universities are great locations for
Tor relays for education (Tor is part of every cybersecurity curriculum
these days), for community (growing connections between students and
research groups), and for research (helping the Tor network stay strong
so people can use it for research):
https://toruniversity.eff.org/administrators/
https://blog.torproject.org/tor-heart-pets-and-privacy-research-community/
Having more relays at universities is especially useful because it can
help others to see that running a relay is a normal and straightforward
thing to do.
So: if you are at a university, or you know somebody who is and want to
help them, please consider setting up relays there. It can be anything
from an exit relay (the most useful to Tor users, but the most work in
terms of local advocacy and relationship-building), to a non-exit relay
(still very useful to Tor users, because we need more network diversity),
to a non-NATed Snowflake bridge (currently used most by people in Iran
to get around their censorship and reach the Tor network).
We started the campaign with thirteen institutions that are already
running relays and/or other public infrastructure pieces:
Technical University Berlin (Germany)
Boston University (US)
University of Cambridge (England)
Carnegie Melon University (US)
University College London (England)
Georgetown University (US)
Johannes Kepler Universität Linz (Austria)
Karlstad University (Sweden)
KU Leuven (Belgium)
University of Michigan (US)
University of Minnesota (US)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
University of Waterloo (Canada)
Hopefully this list will make you impressed / excited / jealous and you
will want to get your university onto it. :)
Later steps in the campaign will be to understand which universities
have IT departments that understand and value Tor, and which ones try
to block you from using Tor on their network or block Tor users from
reaching their webservers. We are also imagining to do an OONI workshop
to help people do "how well does Tor work on this network" tests.
Here is the internal coordination/roadmap ticket if you want to follow
along in detail:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/relays/-/issues/67
Thanks!
--Roger
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