I wrote the block of text attributed to Eugene below, and total agree with you, Andrew. Much of the activist tech support I do is for Tibetans inside Occupied Tibet, and as we know Tor in China right now is quite a difficult proposition. Traditional VPNs can and do work, especially when the user simply needs circumvention, and has enough of a risk safety net that they won't be questioned or detained for simply using a vpn. As the primary developer of Orbot as well, I also deal with mobile latency issues quite a bit as well, and this has led me to think quite a bit about how the real time browse and click model of the web is highly incompatible with the realities of Tor. I think the solution for users who want both strong anonymity and circumvention via Tor, and are operating in a high latency environment, is to use applications like offline web cacheing tools (from pay per minute, dial up era), RSS readers, Twitter clients, Podcast apps and even Mail clients, which support synchronization and offline content access. These types of apps minimize the latency a user has to experience, while maximizing the amount of content that can then be shared via sneakernet or LANs. In summary, I think we should try to expand the way people use Tor, as opposed to pushing them towards less safe solutions. +n8fr8 -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. Andrew wrote: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 12/2/2011 4:19 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:

This also works against Tor in many cases, where people might understand it is the best option, but will use a less safe VPN or single-hop proxy, because they want something 'faster' or need to stream a YouTube video in Flash. In that case, they are following the wrong instincts, but it is the same mechanic at play

We have to be more pragmatic tor is horrendously slow/unusable in some of these countries, and as long as you take some steps like not using single hop for either Proxies or VPNs, then you are addressing the treat model that they face, not one that we are making up in our heads. I realize that it is not perfect, and there is a trade off, but people on the ground are looking at it and making that choice for themselves. I've spent a lot of time working on issues with Syria lately, the universal report is that tor is terrible slow, they can't use tails because it takes too long to download/ is blocked, and their data might leak if if they use Tor, so using a VPN with some precautions taken is much more appetizing. - -Andrew -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.17 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJO2VWEAAoJEJW/J8aB8dYICFwIALhvq3K49XfOnd1PJ1jVlWJv YOvWDBZCDkdo8ygMFZpAfRmAELUT4aPw9B3UKJOhBI87Hcjm6RA1BpDw09YdQdbl 4mK1U+X0DZL0dIjQZioqo95w3ey6Jzj6ddF0rctmwC3zAkLUdVg9wTvCUurH+UII TKrTLBaSVacGIqPxrgYOpLpSEUt4HzYQbOJla0VsaUw+voG/03GWaKo5CJrKKhTa Gx+lFlSxrYl+tyHa47vuuJrHdvR9j4sr/AQ2aJyYdXdumUWVMyBIOsssMbqG0xu3 6Y2cbRSTHZJlyFdZasgRsUE3gNiDup9LZ0AuW2hcVDzdaLCWmhkLxoB6kaJmn/A= =JnWc -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _____________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE