20 Mar
2016
20 Mar
'16
10:02 p.m.
On Sun, Mar 20, 2016 at 05:18:16PM +0000, Rusty Bird wrote:
- moria1 (source 128.31.0.39 vs. consensus 128.31.0.34)
- longclaw (source 199.254.238.52 vs. consensus 199.254.238.53)
Yes, this is intentional.
In the past, this approach has caused governments who tried to censor connections to the Tor network to miss these bootstrapping avenues.
It's certainly not a robust trick, but it has few downsides, so I think it's reasonable to keep it in place.
(It does, every so often, result in a confused researcher who thinks she has "blocked all the Tor relays", yet is surprised when Tor Browser bootstraps anyway. To me this presents a good opportunity to increase understanding of how censorship works and doesn't work.)
--Roger