The Tor Project has called on its community to establish 200 WebTunnel bridges to help users in Russia get connected to the free web. The call comes after Russian authorities clamped down on Tor bridges, making some bridges inaccessible to many users.
The organization recently received reports from its Russian users that Tor was inaccessible. These attacks include removing circumvention apps from app stores and targeting hosting providers of bridges and pluggable transports.
For those that don"t know, bridges are an optional setting in the Tor Browser that is typically not needed unless you"re living in a repressive country that censors Tor. There are several options available to try and get connected to Tor but as we can see from these reports, authorities can still clamp down.
WebTunnel bridges are a new type of bridge that the Tor Project made available this year. It disguises traffic running across it as ordinary traffic, making it harder to detect, and allowing it to evade censors. The Tor Project says that it wants its community to set up 200 of these bridges by the end of the year so Russians can get on the free web.
Russia first tried to block Tor in 2021 but failed to stop users from getting online via bridges. Obfs4 is the most popular pluggable transport to get on Tor in the country but it"s blocked on some 4G networks. Another protocol called Snowflake has also been partially blocked in Russia.
When WebTunnel launched this year, there were only 60 bridges. Today, this has risen to 143 bridges but it wants to get this even higher. That"s why it"s calling now for more of its technical community members to set up WebTunnel bridges. For those who set up 5 or more bridges, it will give a free Tor t-shirt.
If you want to help, you can find instructions for setting up a bridge here.