It’s currently difficult for bridge operators to keep up with the changes in pluggable transports world. You’ve to be following tor development and censorship-war very closely to know which transport is needed currently and how to run them.
There are many people who are still running vanilla bridges thinking they’re helping people in censored networks. Unfortunately those bridges are not anyone any good while burning operator’s resources.
After some discussion on #tor-project a little while ago, the idea of having a meta-package that includes all or the most recent transports came up. Where people would install this meta package and it would automatically take care of the required steps to get the latest obfsproxy and set it up.
From a UX perspective, ideally you’d set up a bridge with small and consistent steps like this:
$ sudo apt-get install tor-bridge $ tor-bridge —-setup OR $ tor-bridge-setup
and then it will automatically get the most recommended PT (eg obfs4), tor itself (if not installed), config your torrc, do a reachability test, publish the bridge to bridgdb automatically and give you the result in stdout:
# Congrats! your bridge is up and running on $port # Your bridge is published in BridgeDB. # Thanks for fighting censorship!
Additionally we can have more flags for different transports, ip, port and so on. For example if you want to run obfs4proxy on an specific port and not publish it, I imagine running something like this should get you there:
$ tor-bridge-setup —-private —-obfs4 —-ip 1.2.3.4 —-port 5000
# Congrats! your bridge is up and running on port 5000 # You have chosen to not to publish your bridge. Users would need to manually copy and paste the following line in their Tor Browser to use your bridge. # # bridge obfs4 1.2.3.4:5000 C73ADBAC8ADFDBF0FC0F3F4E8091C0107D093716 cert=gEGKc5WN/bSjFa6UkG9hOcft1tuK+cV8hbZ0H6cqXiMPLqSbCh2Q3PHe5OOr6oMVORhoJA iat-mode=0
The purpose of this email is to see whether this is a good approach (if not, how can we improve it), and what is needed to move towards it.
Feedback from everyone, specially packagers and relay operators are encouraged and welcome :)
Best,