Re: Tor in Russia: A call for more WebTunnel bridges

On Fri, 6 Dec 2024, Anonymous wrote:

> Recent reports from Tor users in Russia indicate an escalation in online censorship with the goal of blocking access to Tor and other circumvention tools. This new wave includes attempts to block Tor bridges and pluggable transports developed by the Tor Project, removal of circumvention apps from stores, and targeting popular hosting providers, shrinking the space for bypassing censorship. Despite these ongoing actions, Tor remains effective.
>
> One alarming trend is the targeted blocking of popular hosting providers by Roscomnadzor. As many circumvention tools are using them, this action made some Tor bridges inaccessible to many users in Russia. As Roscomnadzor and internet service providers in Russia are increasing their blocking efforts, the need for more WebTunnel bridges has become urgent
>

A question about that. How much of a challenge would you say banning of 
all encryption would be for projects like tor and i2p?

I always thought that if I would be an evil dictator, with little care 
about anything else besides my grip on power, I would by default ban all 
encryption and configure my great firewall to close any connections that 
are encrypted, except for specially white listed sites such as banks, 
government departments etc.

How would you get around that? Some kind of steganography? And if that is 
possible, how much of a drag on performance would that steganography be?

The thought just came to mind that thanks to letsencrypt a lot of sites no 
longer offer access without encryption, and therefore the set of all 
accessible non-encrypted sites would be quite small.