Though AFAICT my bridge is configured correctly, it appears to carry very little traffic. This has raised a number of questions regarding the use of vanilla and obfuscated clients & bridges in windows.
I run a bridge on Win 7, with Tor 0.2.4.24 (git-a8a38e5dd1fbb67a) in its own folder, with standalone Vidalia running off a USB stick. I have the same setup for a Tor client on a different machine on the same LAN. I configure the client as obfsproxy-capable or plain as a way to teach myself about obfuscated clients. Once the Tor circuits come up, I open torbirdied thunderbird for e-mail. The Client: I've been surprised to see that messages under obfsproxy generally go about as fast as plain ones. Are there enough obfsproxy servers that my mail isn't slowing things down for people who really need obfuscation? I guess another way of asking this would be, Is Tor obfuscation now robust enough so that everyone may as well use it? If the client is configured to be obfsproxy-capable, can it still avail itself of vanilla bridges? The Bridge: I'm currently running it as what I take to be obfsproxy-aware. That is, after rummaging around the sparse windows documentation, I've written "ClientTransportPlugin obfs2,obfs3 exec Tor\PluggableTransports\obfsproxy managed" into the torrc. AFAIK this is all one must do to change a vanilla bridge into an obfsproxy-aware one. Is that correct? Will the obfsproxy-aware bridge also accept traffic from non-obfuscated clients? In other words, does it make sense to write something like Bridge obfs3 w.x.y.z:80 ... Bridge a.b.c.d:443 ... into torrc of obfsproxy-configured clients? I realize one wouldn't ordinarily want to do this; one either needs obfuscation or one does not. I ask the question because I'm trying to understand how obfuscation works. I would've tried setting up such a client myself, except that I've lost access to the remote-ISP client that I had used to test such ideas. These days I'm lucky if "Who has used my bridge?" shows one or two 1-8 entries once every two weeks or so. Looking at Globe/Onionoo and the relay DBs, I see that though the bridge's advertized BW runs between 20 and 40 kB/s, the actually used mean written/mean read traffic is in the 100s/10s-Byte range. for either my vanilla or obfsproxy-aware configurations. Does this simply mean that there are enough bridges so that any particular one isn't called on too often? That is, is the behavior I'm seeing typical? Or am I doing some thing(s) wrong? I'd be much obliged for any feedback. - eliaz -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk@lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk