Tor Project calls to bring more than 200 obfs4 bridges online by December

The Tor Project offers rewards to users who will set up a Tor server after observing a significant drop in the number of Tor relays and Tor bridges.

Bridges are private Tor relays that allow users to circumvent censorship, their role is essential in countries, that block Tor connections such as China, Belarus, Iran, and Kazakhstan.

Unfortunately, maintainers of the project reported that the number of Tor bridges has decreased since January, for this reason, they are urging users to set up new servers.

“We currently have approximately 1,200 bridges, 900 of which support the obfs4 obfuscation protocol. Unfortunately, these numbers have been decreasing since the beginning of this year. It’s not enough to have many bridges: eventually, all of them could find themselves in block lists. We therefore need a constant trickle of new bridges that aren’t blocked anywhere yet. This is where we need your help.” reads the announcement published by the Tor Project.

The Tor Project aims at bringing more than 200 obfs4 bridges online by the end of this year with the support of the users. The maintainer at the project are offering unique and exclusive Tor reward kits. Users that will run 10 obfs4 bridges for one year, will receive a Golden Gate bridge kit, including 1 Tor hoodie, 2 Tor T-shirts, and a sticker pack.

Below are the kits offered by the Tor Project:

1. Golden Gate bridge (limited to 10 kits)

• Run 10 obfs4 bridges for 1 year.
• Reward kit: 1 Tor hoodie + 2 Tor T-shirt + stickers pack.

2. Helix bridge (limited to 20 kits)

• Run 5 obfs4 bridges for 1 year.
• Reward kit: 1 Tor T-shirt + stickers pack.

3. University bridge kit (limited to 10 kits)

• Run 2 obfs4 bridges for 1 year in your university.
• Reward kit: 1 Tor T-shirt + stickers pack.

4. Rialto bridge (randomly select 10 new bridge operator)

• Run 1 obfs4 bridge for 1 year and you will be part of the ‘reward lottery’.
• We will randomly select 10 new bridge operators to receive a metallic roots Tor t-shirt as a token of our gratitude for your help defending the open internet.

The offer will be available until January 7, 2022.

The announcement includes instructions to set up a bridge and technical requirements.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Tor)

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