Over the past few months the number of bridge users has spiked, most prominently in Italy, but also plenty in Spain, Brazil, Israel, and others.

It seems clear that somebody's unofficial Tor bundle automatically grabs some bridges for its users, and that this somebody didn't understand the notion of being polite to a remote service -- I think each user is hitting the bridges page roughly every 30 seconds.

But the question first is: what's going on? Can those of you near or in these countries please ask around and try to get some answers?

In Italy, a law (well, not exactly, a decree by the telecommunication authority, AGCOM) about an IP blacklist for file sharing websites is being discussed. A final decision was supposed to be made in July, but was finally delayed, probably till next November. Some links in English that discuss it: http://preview.tinyurl.com/3jw6ju4 http://preview.tinyurl.com/44tocuc Because of this, many links and short guides to Tor are being posted around, mostly by inexperienced users that do not warn about the potential security problems, and are in generally quite misleading as to what Tor actually is and how it works. In this context, the idea that an unofficial, and apparently badly built Tor bundle might be out there only makes sense. Paolo _______________________________________________ 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