Tor Project Sees Decline in Server Numbers, Will Offer Rewards for New Bridge Operators

The Tor Project said this week that it has seen a drop in the number of Tor relays and bridge servers and is now offering various rewards to users who help bring the number back up. From a report: Rewards include the likes of hoodies, t-shirts, and stickers and are meant to provide some sort of meaningful gift to those who help keep the Tor anonymity network alive and resilient to censorship. More specifically, the rewards will be provided to those who run "Tor bridges," which serve as entry points into the Tor network for users located in countries that block access to Tor servers. "We currently have approximately 1,200 bridges, 900 of which support the obfs4 obfuscation protocol," said Gustavo Gus, Community Team Lead for the Tor Project. "Unfortunately, these numbers have been decreasing since the beginning of this year. It's not enough to have many bridges: eventually, all of them could find themselves in block lists. We therefore need a constant trickle of new bridges that aren't blocked anywhere yet," the Tor Project member said.

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