On Tue, May 05, 2015 at 11:04:58PM -0400, Griffin Boyce wrote:
Mike Perry wrote:
David Fifield:
Here's the summary of meek's CDN fees for April 2015.
total by CDN $3292.25 + $3792.79 + $0.00 = $7085.04 grand total https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-transport.html?graph=usersta...
Yikes! Are these costs covered by a grant or anything? Should we be running a donations campaign?
If you want to help reduce costs, you can
- Use meek-azure; it's still covered through a grant for the next four months.
- Set up your own App Engine or CDN account. Then you can pay for your own usage (it might even be free depending on how much you use). Here are instructions on how to set up your own:
https://gitweb.torproject.org/pluggable-transports/meek.git/tree/appengine/R... https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek#AmazonCloudFront https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek#MicrosoftAzure Then you will have to enter a bridge line manually. Follow the instructions at https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek#Howtochangethefrontdo... but instead of changing the "front=" part, change the "url=" part. For example, bridge meek 0.0.2.0:1 url=https://<myappname>.appspot.com/ front=www.google.com
Please let me know if anyone takes you up on this!
I am happy to add the meek bridges of anyone who does this as an option in Tor Browser. We can add logic to round robin or randomly select between the set of meek providers for a given meek type upon first install, or even for every browser startup.
If there were some randomization logic included, I'd be happy to contribute an App Engine or Amazon meek access point. If a few people did that, the costs might be more manageable. But also the stats might be a bit harder to aggregate (which might be important if David is writing a thesis/paper/etc).
Thanks Griffin. At this point we'd need, what, 60 operators in order to cost on average $30/month? At current usage rates.
I think we already have plenty of aggregated stats. It's been nice to be able to separate cleanly amazon/azure/google, but we shouldn't try to keep that forever at the expense of becoming more scalable.