[talk] upcoming hackathon proposal: NYC BSD Tor bridges

[Shawn Webb]

On Tue, Aug 08, 2017 at 03:28:00PM +0000, George Rosamond wrote:
> Most of you are probably familiar with the Tor BSD Diversity Project
> (https://torbsd.github.io/). We ported Tor Browser to OpenBSD, conducted
> a number of BoFs, presentations and workshops over the years, and have a
> positive net impact on Tor land.
> 
> The operating system diversity numbers in the Tor network are ugly, and
> the more we poke, the uglier it gets. All statistics point to an
> overwhelming Linux monoculture, with just under 6% of total public
> network bandwidth provided by one BSD variant or another.
> 
> These are some of the stats:
> 
> https://torbsd.github.io/oostats.html
> 
> While public Tor relays have some non-Linux/BSD presence, it's really
> disturbing when it comes to bridges. Bridges are non-public entry nodes
> for users blocked from the Tor network.
> 
> https://torbsd.github.io/oostats/bridges-bw-by-os.txt
> 
> Yes... about 99.1% of bridge bandwidth is Linux.
> 
> And the absolute numbers reveal more:
> 
> https://torbsd.github.io/oostats/bridges-os-count.txt
> 
> There's only 31 *BSD bridges.  That's a number we could quickly change
> just based on a small portion of people around NYC*BUG and on the talk@
> list.
> 
> Bridges are easy to run from any residential home network. Bridge IPs
> are not publicly listed (as relays are), and the IP will not be
> blacklisted. Bridges are purely for entry, and don't push any exit traffic.
> 
> Many people in and around NYC on this list have decent bandwidth at
> home, whether with one of the cable providers, FIOS, etc. Allowing up to
> 5 or even 10 megabytes of traffic will have no impact on your home
> network, and it's not under consistent usage.
> 
> I want to put this workshop together to conduct a hands-on session that
> will put another five or ten *BSD bridges into the Tor ecosystem. You
> don't need to go an buy some fat 2U Supermicro box that will make ConEd
> happy and give you the constant droning of a data center. Any small
> system should be fine, whether you have it sitting around or you buy an
> APU2, Soekris, RPi, BeagleBone, an old thin client desktop.
> 
> Any thoughts on this?  Concerns?

I'd love to drive up for this. Would someone be able to offer their couch
for me to surf on? If not, I'll see if I can get a hotel approved by my
employer.

Thanks,

-- 
Shawn Webb
Cofounder and Security Engineer
HardenedBSD

GPG Key ID:          0x6A84658F52456EEE
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