china

As reported, Tor was partially blocked by China on September 25th or so in anticipation of the CCP October 1, 2009 60th anniversary.

Here's what one directory mirror recorded for September,

And here's the growth of bridge users in response. Alas, like our graphs of bridge use in Iran in June 2009, we only have relative counts for bridge use, not absolute counts. But with a 70x increase in a week, we are talking about 10000+ bridge users:

Here's what the Tor Project accomplished in September 2009.

New Hires read more »

• Carolyn Anhalt is our new Translation and Community Manager. Carolyn has years of experience managing and growing content translation, as well as wrangling online communities and developing volunteer moderators and support roles from the community. She’s fluent or conversant in a number of languages, such as: Russian, French, English, German, Italian, and Welsh. Carolyn’s initial goals are to grow the translator community to keep everything Tor translated, work out better translation tools for translators, and to generally assist translators.
• Karen Reilly joins us as our Development Director. Karen has years of experience in growing both community-based and foundation-based funding, as well as helping to fulfill the mission of organizations through outreach and community-building. Karen’s initial goals are to further develop community funding, work with our current donors, help create an annual report, and expand Tor’s outreach efforts.

On September 25, 2009, the Great Firewall of China blocked the public list of relays and directory authorities by simple IP address blocks. Currently, about 80% of the public relays are blocked by IP address and TCP port combination. Tor users are still connecting to the network through bridges. At the simplest level, bridges are non-public relays that don't exit traffic, but instead send it on to the rest of the Tor network.

If you want to help people in China get access to the uncensored Internet, run a bridge.

Feel free to mirror this post, or the Tor website. We have a list of mirrors at https://www.torproject.org/mirrors.html.en or search for tor mirrors via Google, Yahoo, Baidu, etc.

Links to other helpful sites (not run by us): read more »

• http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/9ofr7/we_need_more_tor_bridg...

Design
We continued enhancements to the Chinese and Russian Tor website translations. We also have a second Chinese translator for the website now, so hopefully we will get more prompt translations there. Our Farsi translation from this summer is slowly becoming obsolete; we should solve that at some point.

We added a new "30 second summary" web page for Tor:
https://www.torproject.org/30seconds
and a new "easy download" page since the original is so complex:
https://www.torproject.org/easy-download

In the upcoming Vidalia 0.2.0 development release:
- Support changing UI languages without having to restart Vidalia.
- Updated Czech, Polish, Romanian and Turkish translations.

In the upcoming Vidalia 0.1.10 stable release:
- Add a prettier dialog for prompting people for their control port password that also includes a checkbox for whether the user wants Vidalia to remember the entered password, a Help button, and a Reset button (Windows only).
- Fix a crash bug that occurred when the user clicks 'Clear' in the message log toolbar followed by 'Save All'.
- Uncheck the Torbutton options by default in the Windows bundle installer if Firefox is not installed.
- Add an Windows bundle installer page that warns the user that they should install Firefox, if it looks like they haven't already done so.

It looks like Australia is soon to be joining the ranks of countries with a nationwide filtering regime:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081016-net-filters-required-for-a...

Proposals
We finished the first iteration of our auto-updater spec:
https://svn.torproject.org/svn/updater/trunk/specs/thandy-spec.txt
We detail our current auto-updater progress below. read more »

We didn't expect Tor wouldn't be blocked in China for a long time before it became true days ago.  We've got a lot of users' reports on that from different regions in China about torproject.org was blocked by Great Firewall system in China.  
McFred's Blog said:

torproject.org is the official Tor(The Onion Router) web site, found recently been blocked by China's national firewall, also known as Great Firewall.
Trace route from Beijing, China shows the destination is unreachable, seems they changed the route table on the router at IP 202.97.66.37, refuse connection to Tor web site.

Jacky talked on his Chinese blog:

Just there's an online survey on Tor usage in China, I found Tor official site has been "harmonized" when I was curious about how it said about any news...

Fons said on his "China Herald" blog:

Over the past year most 'blocks' of foreign websites had disappeared and made way for more sophisticated filtering techniques. Blocking well-known proxies seems to mean the relative tightening of the censorship at a time when China had promised more openness at the internet for its foreign guests. read more »

In Tor's annual board meeting in January, we added Isaac Mao to our board of directors. Isaac is a well-known blogger, especially among the Chinese blogging community, and adding him is the first part of our push to make the Tor board (and The Tor Project in general) more international in scope and awareness.

Isaac will take over Rebecca McKinnon's spot on the board, though Rebecca is planning to stick around and continue helping with advice about how to interact with the media and Tor's role in society, especially in Asia. Isaac has a lot of ideas about how to make Tor easier to use and how to get the word out to all the different groups that need it. We're looking forward to working with him!