Inform users in Tor Browser of which settings are best for them based on their country
Tor Browser Launcher would, for countries where we know Tor to either work for sure or not work for sure, advise users on whether to use a bridge or not.
This does open the question of "How does Tor Launcher know the country of the user"?
I think this is at the end of the day a UX question, that can have various ways of doing it. For example you can have the user input their country (but that is maybe a bit sketchy from the users perspective) or you could show them a list of countries where tor is known to work OK and a list of where it's known to not work.
Designs
- tpo/ux/research #16Sponsor 30 - Objective 2.2
- tpo/anti-censorship/team #87Sponsor 96: Rapid Expansion of Access to the Uncensored Internet through Tor in China, Hong Kong, & Tibet
- #40477Sponsor 30 - Objective 3.3
- #40560Sponsor 96: Rapid Expansion of Access to the Uncensored Internet through Tor in China, Hong Kong, & Tibet
Activity
added TorBrowserTeam202005 in Legacy / Trac component::applications/tor launcher in Legacy / Trac owner::mcs in Legacy / Trac parent::31283 in Legacy / Trac priority::medium in Legacy / Trac s32-o32a2 in Legacy / Trac severity::normal in Legacy / Trac sponsor::30-can in Legacy / Trac status::assigned in Legacy / Trac type::enhancement in Legacy / Trac ux-team in Legacy / Trac labels
Adding the ux-team keyword to get their attention, since how to inform the user is one of the biggest questions here.
I think the approach where we tell the user a list of countries that need special configuration, and then the user can notice that they're in one of those countries, is a pretty compelling approach. Especially while that list of countries is 3 or 4, not 15 or 20.
Trac:
Keywords: N/A deleted, ux-team added-
And then see also https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2018Rome/Notes/OneClickCensorshipCircumvention for many more words.
The degree of censorship often varies more within a country between networks than between countries. Consider the typical user (many/most censored Tor users) on a restrictive surveilled network but in a country without filtering at the tier 1 Internet backbone level. If Tor Launcher tells them Tor works fine for them without bridges that is a false statement, and if it auto-selects vanilla Tor with no bridges that is unhelpful and useless at best.
Or someone could be in a country with national DPI but using a network whose route to the Internet is already tunneled through the DPI.
If there's a place to tell users in for example China that Tor is unlikely to work in their country, maybe on the download page? But it isn't a dynamic page.
Replying to cypherpunks:
If there's a place to tell users in for example China that Tor is unlikely to work in their country, maybe on the download page? But it isn't a dynamic page. To the best of my knowledge meek-amazon does work in China and it's what is recommended on irc when someone from China wants their tor to work. Also I guess most Chinese people download their Tor Browser from Github (I tested at the time in 2017 with a proxy in mainland China and I found that Github didn't censor TB (the gettorbrowser repository), unlike something like this:
https://qz.com/718465/chinas-fierce-censors-try-a-new-tactic-with-github-asking-nicely/
but it could well be the case that this has changed).Edit: Yay, TB repository isn't blocked: https://github.com/github/gov-takedowns
Trac:
Parent: N/A to legacy/trac#31283 (closed)
This ticket is similar to legacy/trac#28531 (moved), in which we're trying to publish a snapshot of how one can get Tor to work in different countries. Tor Browser could use this snapshot to decide that's best for the user.
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Replying to phw:
This ticket is similar to legacy/trac#28531 (moved), in which we're trying to publish a snapshot of how one can get Tor to work in different countries. Tor Browser could use this snapshot to decide that's best for the user.
Following up on this comment: We briefly discussed this ticket during our Sponsor 30 kickoff meeting in Stockholm. In summary, we need 1) a way for Tor Browser to figure out where it is (ideally, we want to know the client's country and autonomous system number) and 2) data that can tell Tor Browser what to do, once it knows where it is.
To accomplish 2), we could curate a censorship measurement snapshot (see legacy/trac#28531 (moved)) and put it into Tor Browser. This snapshot maps countries and/or autonomous system numbers to circumvention methods. For example, the snapshot can tell Tor Browser that if a user is in ASN1234 in Egypt, Tor Browser requires a bridge from BridgeDB to bootstrap. Equipped with this information, Tor Browser can then immediately make a moat request without any assistance from the user. This will decrease the friction for users because they don't need to figure out what does and does not work in their country. As cypherpunks pointed out above, we won't always get it right, so Tor Browser should try to be helpful if our circumvention snapshot is incorrect.
Does this sound reasonable? If so, the anti-censorship team can start populating this snapshot with whatever we know about censoring countries.
Trac:
Cc: mcs, antonela, phw to mcs, antonela, phw, cohosh mentioned in issue legacy/trac#24623 (moved)
mentioned in issue legacy/trac#29590 (moved)
mentioned in issue legacy/trac#31283 (closed)
moved from legacy/trac#24527 (moved)
changed milestone to %Sponsor 30 - Objective 3.2
Covered in tor-browser-spec!7 (closed)
added Sponsor 30 - FINISHED label
Moving this to tor-browser (as it will probably be implemented there, instead of tor-launcher), and reopening this as the quickstart subticket to do after #27476 (closed).
moved from tor-launcher#24527 (moved)
added Next label
mentioned in issue tor-launcher#11132 (closed)
marked this issue as related to #31284 (closed)
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It's worth referencing tpo/community/outreach#28531 (moved) here because that's where we are working on the JSON file that can tell Tor Browser what works where.
marked this issue as related to tpo/ux/research#16 (closed)
marked this issue as related to tpo/community/outreach#28531 (moved)
marked this issue as related to tor-launcher#11132 (closed)
mentioned in issue #40477 (closed)
marked this issue as related to #40477 (closed)
