To Connect People Securely, Tor Project Seeks New Bridges 56
An anonymous reader links to an article at Ars explaining the dropping inventory of bridges available to users of the Tor project's encrypted messaging system. They're looking for more bridges, but that doesn't necessarily mean buying new hardware per se. From the article:
"After campaigning successfully last year to get more volunteers to run obfuscated Tor bridges to support users in Iran trying to evade state monitoring, the network has lost most of those bridges, according to a message to the Tor relays mailing list by Tor volunteer George Kadiankakis. 'Most of those bridges are down, and fresh ones are needed more than ever,' [Tor volunteer George] Kadiankakis wrote in an e-mail, 'since obfuscated bridges are the only way for people to access Tor in some areas of the world (like China, Iran, and Syria).' For those who want to donate bridges to the Tor network, the easiest route is to use Tor Cloud, an Amazon Web Service Elastic Compute Cloud image created by the Tor Project that allows people to leverage Amazon's free usage tier to deploy a bridge."
Re:Can money be donated? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Can money be donated? (Score:3, Informative)
https://www.torproject.org/donate/donate.html.en [torproject.org]
Look for the Cupcake project (Score:5, Informative)
Cupcake [github.com] allows you via a browser extension to run a bridge if you won't/can't install the whole Tor suite [torproject.org].
Currently available for Chrome / Chromium [google.com], Firefox is in the works.
Please help Tor!
Re:And the risks ? (Score:4, Informative)
You are correct, as long as you configure your node as non exit, you are pretty much safe in nearly every european country and plenty of others.
No traffic leaves the tor network through your node and thus nothing should point to you (if the network works, if it doesn't, there are a lot of problems for a lot of people).
Depending on your country this can be very different. In some countries that do not have certain liberties simply having tor may be an issue, while tor does it best to hide everything and itself, it will likely stand out simply by being an encrypted connection, it may lead to you and lead to some questioning or worse.
For the sake of all users in such situation, stop making encrypted connections stand out and make them the norm. There really isn't any reason that everybody should be able to know what you do. Not in a "free" country and not in a non free one. Use SSH wherever you can, just that will be helpful for tor since it can then hide between those connections a bit better. Force encryption on your bittorrent, it may even lead to speedup. And if you believe your country is fine, do host a tor relay, it doesn't have to be an exit node to help the network, although there is a shortage of those as well as non exit nodes. Maybe once upon a time everything everywhere will go through a tor like service, once we get pissed off by all the people being able to see what you do.
Re:Can money be donated? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Can money be donated? (Score:4, Informative)
Have a read here:
http://www.torservers.net/donate.html [torservers.net]