[liberationtech] Many VPNs and Psiphon are currently blocked in Iran right now

[Nathan of Guardian]

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On 02/22/2014 07:36 PM, Pranesh Prakash wrote:
> A 2012/2013 study by Robinson + Yu (albeit done on a very small
> sample) on Chinese Internet users showed that speed was amongst the
> biggest complaints and was the second most important factor while
> choosing a circumvention tool:

Something to consider is perception of speed based on usage of desktop
web browser going through circumvention networks vs the experience of
mobile users on circumvention networks.

My premise is that desktop web browsing is the most difficult
application for a complex-latency multi-hop circumvention network like
Tor, while using service-specific native apps on a mobile device is
the best user experience for Tor.

In other words, a desktop web browser opens many socket connections
per page visited, and forces the user to be aware of the
request/response time delay, meaning it is a synchronous experience.
The Twitter app on Android, on the other hand, mostly just opens one
socket now and then to update the feed, and does so in the background,
in an asynchronous manner. Even if we were talking about browsing
through Orweb, if you access a mobile version of a site, say
https://m.facebook.com, it will be quite a bit lighter than
facebook.com, and thus load faster.

I know what the users say, and we can only change their mind if we
actually change their mind and provide them a solution that they
consider usable. I just hope that the "Tor is slow" meme, along with
other famous ones like "PGP is hard" and "No one cares about privacy",
are continued to be challenged, tested and not accepted as inevitable.

+n


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