[guardian-dev] Orbot/meek users in Brazil

[Nathan of Guardian]

On Fri, Mar 17, 2017, at 03:42 PM, David Fifield wrote:
> According to Tor Metrics, the number of bridge users (mostly meek) in
> Brazil has settled down, after about 9 months of being (seemingly
> abnormally) elevated. 
> https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-combined.html?start=2016-06-01&end=2017-03-17&country=br

Interesting!

> Do you have any thoughts as to what could have caused it? Isabela, after
> speaking to some Brazilians, said that it didn't seem to be genuine
> users, but rather some automated system, perhaps malware. 

That's strange. Why malware? It is only a few thousand users, which
doesn't seem like that many considering we have so many Orbot installs
in Brazil. I would love to know more about the reasoning here.


>Vern Paxson
> suggested that perhaps Orbot updates were being blocked (causing clients
> to use a stale configuration? I admit I don't really understand this
> possibility).

It takes a long time for users to actually choose to upgrade on Android.
It is not obvious, unfortunately, and most people don't have auto
upgrade on.

> The recent drop in meek users on March 3 is no doubt a result of the
> deactivation of the former meek-azure CDN endpoint:
> https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2017-March/000981.html
> What it suggests to me, is that most of the meek users in Brazil were
> using meek-azure, and not meek-amazon.

Agreed. Though, you would think Brazilians would prefer the Amazon...
heh!

+n
-- 
  Nathan of Guardian
  nathan at guardianproject.info