[liberationtech] What could we at Liberationtech do to help pro-democracy HK activists protest China's new security law?

[Adam Fisk]

I do think Martin's point, which I fully agree with, highlights a
common misconception, namely that Tor is widely used as censorship
circumvention tool. While the Tor team has done incredible work in
this general area, particularly with the idea of pluggable transports
and with David's great work furthering domain fronting with meek, the
reality is that Tor is overwhelmingly used as a privacy tool and is
quite rarely used for censorship circumvention, particularly when
compared with other tools. This is certainly not a criticism of Tor,
but rather an effort to clear up a widespread misunderstanding that's
frequently repeated.

Sina's perfectly correct point about meek in China actually
illustrates this in a couple of ways. First, meek over Azure, were it
were to have more funding, is one of the most expensive ways to bypass
censorship because you have to pay Azure CDN rates. If that were to
reach scale (like, say, over 10Gbps), you could theoretically
negotiate better rates, but it would still be 2x or more the cost of
other approaches because the CDN hop is just an additional cost.
Beyond that, routing via CDNs with domain fronting is typically slower
due to the extra hop and also, depending on the implementation, extra
wrapping of messages to tunnel TLS end-to-end. If users require
anonymity, that could be well worth the extra cost and slower speed,
but it doesn't apply to most users for practical purposes.

Regarding HK, I agree that providing access to citizens in mainland
China so that they stay informed could theoretically be effective.
With the current National People's Congress meetings, all widespread
tools I'm aware of are under some form of attack, with many blocked.
The only other piece that comes to mind as potentially useful is
translations of tools into Cantonese. VPN use in HK has skyrocketed
over the last week or so.

-Adam

On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 8:46 AM Richard Brooks <rrb at g.clemson.edu> wrote:
>
> Current crowdsourced rankings of GFW resilient VPNs:
>
> https://cc.greatfire.org/en
>
> Never heard of Torjan.
>
>
> On 5/28/20 6:19 AM, Martin Johnson wrote:
> > Tor does not work in China. There is a bridge available that is supposed to run over Microsoft
> > Azure, but in my experience it doesn't work either. Tor has very few users in China.
> >
> > Psiphon does work but tends to perform at below-average speed.
> >
> > Lantern has a long record of performing quite well in China. In addition I would recommend our own
> > circumvention tool - FreeBrowser - for Android users.
> >
> > On 5/27/20 2:55 PM, Sandy Harris wrote:
> >> Anything that helps users bypass the Great Firewall will also help Hong Kong, certainly by letting
> >> people on the mainland get uncensored info instead of just the Party Line & possibly by preventing
> >> monitoring of HK communications. Tor & Psiphon are the best-known such projects, but there are lots
> >> of others.
> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psiphon
> >>
> >> Could we help out by getting Tor, Psiphon and/or other tools incorporated into Linux router projects
> >> and/or Freedom Box?
> >> https://freedomboxfoundation.org/
> >>
> >> Could we go further? One of the GFW's blocking methods is to send out bogus TCP reset packets in
> >> both directions to break the connection. Should all routers connecting to China drop those packets?
> >> Should end user systems like Linux distros have an easily set option to ignore them? Anyone want to
> >> write a Best Current Practice RFC?
> >
> >
>
> --
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Adam
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President
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