Tor calls for help as its supply of bridges falters

&#62; For those who want to donate bridges to the Tor network, the easiest route is to use Tor Cloud, an Amazon Web Service Elastic Compute Cloud image created by the Tor Project that allows people to leverage Amazon's free usage tier to deploy a bridge.<p>What are the risks involved in doing this? Both in regards to legal responsibility for traffic, and Amazon ToS.

I know this is a little off topic but what in general are the risks of going onto the Tor network?<p>Like I say, I know it is off topic but I can't find anything conclusive to how risky it is?<p>I want to see what is on there but at the same time I hear of hackers at every corner and child porn. I don't want to encounter either ever.<p>Is there a safe way of browsing it whilst taking a casual look around?

See also: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5564358" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5564358</a>

You can also donate to <a href="http://www.torservers.net/about.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.torservers.net/about.html</a><p>And sponsor a node. They are based in SF and accept BTC.<p>They list their exit node servers here: <a href="http://www.torservers.net/exits.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.torservers.net/exits.html</a>

also <a href="http://crypto.stanford.edu/flashproxy/" rel="nofollow">http://crypto.stanford.edu/flashproxy/</a> (which seems to work - i have seen the colour of the image change on my pages; in fact one is in use right now).

In case others are also having trouble finding them, the instructions on how to participate are in the email linked from the article: <a href="https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2013-April/002089.html" rel="nofollow">https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2013-April...</a><p>I'm interested, but still trying to learn more. In particular, are there ways to limit the traffic or prioritize other packets?

Quickest road to deploy on AWS <a href="https://cloud.torproject.org/#get_started" rel="nofollow">https://cloud.torproject.org/#get_started</a><p>(Select Obfs3)

This seems like a fatal flaw for one of Tor's stated use cases: helping political dissidents living with highly repressive governments. How do you publicize a service and at the same time not allow the relevant authorities to discover it? What they're doing seems to make it <i>harder</i>, but in principle it will always be detectable. This would make me think twice if my life depended on my connection not being detected.

I tried helping out Tor. I installed their software that was supposed to make it one-click to set up a relay. Didn't work. Then I fumbled around a bit and Googled the error messages I was getting. No luck. Reboot a few times and try again. Nope.<p>Sorry. They need to make it way easier to get involved.

Has Tor tried to do anything to reduce potentially unnecessary use of their bridges? Maybe I'm being naive, but I think some teenager using Tor to pirate stacks of blue-ray movies should have to wait in line behind a Chinese civil rights blogger.

I'm signing up as we speak.. it's taking Amazon a while to confirm my subscription

Well, the problem is that if bridge is discovered by child pornographers and used by them - police will get knocking to bridge owner's door.<p>No one needs that, hence the supply is low.