To Connect People Securely, Tor Project Seeks New Bridges

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."

wait, what? why?

[slashmydots]

How about someone with a fiber connection that I keep hearing about on slashdot just opens vidalia and configures it to run as an intermediary node. Isn't that functioning as a bridge? I have a 10MB connection but the upload is 1MB and my computer doesn't run anywhere near 24/7 or I'd run an intermediate node that way. Why the hell is anyone bother with amazon web services? Just for the bandwidth? Because I think my i5-2400 could encrypt thousands of people's SSL traffic on the fly easily so that just leaves bandwidth. So is there something else I'm missing or can people with massive bandwidth easily self host a bridge?

silkroad should pay

[purnima]

Tor is totally decentrlized. But surely there has to be a decetralized system that incentives people to bridge in the network. Presently, we're asked to do this out of the goodness of our hearts, like a charity. "Think of the poor Iranian freedom lover's," meh, when we know fully well that much of the traffic is silkroad related and what ever other illegal crap has found a home in the Tor space.

Whoever is running the apparently lucrative silkroad can make small bitcoin donations to "bridging" volunteers. It's cheaper than paying their taxes to a real government. You wanna distribute the north east Iranian goodies? pay for the network!

Re:wait, what? why?

[raxx7]

You're not missing anything, running a bridge at your home is fine.
But since you're not willing to spare your scarce bandwidth, then AWS instance is an easy and cheap way to contribute.