Concept: Mobile proxies for downloading pdfs

[Ted Smith]

On Tue, 2013-01-15 at 15:34 -0600, Bryan Bishop wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 3:26 PM, Ted Smith wrote:
> > Why a mobile app?
> 
> Because all college students have phones. 

That's true, but they don't have the same phones. Plenty still don't
have iOS or Android phones. Plenty have Blackberries. 

In contrast, all of them have computers, and it's pretty easy to write
something that will run on any of them.

> I suspect that many of these
> students would be interested in participating in this protest.
> 
> > I doubt this would be very widely used, so going mobile for that is
> > probably unnecessary.
> 
> What makes you think it wouldn't be widely used? I think there's at
> least 1,000 students that would run these proxies. That's a huge
> amount of access.

Where are you getting that number from?

As a current college student, I think that getting a thousand users is a
huge stretch. There are maybe a handful of clicktivist types that would
actually install something, on a mobile device or a larger computer;
there's a slightly larger handful that would think it's cool; the vast
majority wouldn't care; the last handful remaining would be against it
because they'd see it as stealing (MAFIAA propaganda works).

> >       * a Tor hidden service
> 
> The tor network is already heavily congested. I don't think that using
> tor would be efficient. I think a tor mode option would be useful
> though.

If you need to do connectback, you need some NAT holepuncher, and Tor is
the fastest to get going.

Tor is high-latency, but latency doesn't seem like much of a problem
when all you're doing is fetching PDFs. I don't think Tor is "congested"
-- slow, certainly, and it could use more bandwidth, but 

Demand will definitely overwhelm supply (in the wildest success stories,
this will only be true initially), so you'll have to have queuing
anyway, to avoid immediately outing any student running a proxy by
causing them to initiate a flood of requests for papers and subsequent
outbound traffic.

Further, *nobody* will install anything like this if they don't have
very ironclad guarantees of their own safety. At my own university, it's
considered common knowledge that the network administrators
block/monitor filesharing, even though they don't in fact do so -- and
it doesn't help that this effort is organized in the wake of a prominent
activist with far more resources than they have access to killing
himself in response to massive state retaliation for doing exactly what
you're asking them to do.

-- 
Sent from Ubuntu

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