Quote from: moksha on June 29, 2012, 05:59 pmJust wanted to say thanks Vlad, all your posts are oozing with useful info, definitely doesn't go unappreciated.Thanks Moksha,I don't claim to be any kind of expert on these matters but in a way I think that helps as when I (finally!) learn something I can explain it to other people in simple terms. I first discovered this when a friend asked me to help her son and daughter to prepare for a Mathematics exam (she assumed because I work in a bank I do sums every day... not necessarily true as you know!) - I found the kids were confused by exactly the same things I had been when I was at school, so knew how to set things right - there's really something in this, we'll have to a pen a paper on it sometime.Anyway enough of my rambling, in the mean time feel free to take a look at :https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridgesThis has a helpful video on how to access "public" Tor bridges. Primarily these are used for two reasons:- To use Tor when your ISP automatically blocks access to Tor relays and/or- You live in a country where accessing known Tor relays is blocked automatically (e.g the Great Firewall of China :-) )You can get the addresses of the three latest "public" bridges from:https://bridges.torproject.org/I got into trouble as I mentioned before last time I spoke about this (http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=27050.0;topicseen) but in simplest terms using a public bridge makes it easier for you to bypass censorship as all Tor entry/exit nodes are publicly listed and it would otherwise be feasible for an Orwellian government/ISP to block access to them, hence the creation of "bridges" which are not publicly listed and are therefore harder to block. As Shannon rightly says in another thread even without using bridges, it's still not possible to prove that you visited a specific Tor hidden service but I don't like the idea of being singled out for any kind of monitoring, and I understand that Tor data packets are pretty easy to spot, even if the contents can't be decrypted. The advantages of using a Private bridge with what is known as a "protocol obfuscator" is that you can both hide your original IP when connecting to the Tor network and mask the fact you're using Tor at all. In my naivete I was going to offer to run a Private Bridge of my own from a server I had set up but as I stated above the more technically minded users persuaded me that this is something you really do need to set up on your own for maximum privacy - I am trying to write a layman's guide to this.I can tell you for nothing you'll need a tool known as obfsproxy which protects you by transforming the Tor traffic between your client and the bridge. (unlike when using a Public bridge). This way, censors, who usually monitor traffic between the client and the bridge, will see innocent-looking transformed traffic instead of the actual Tor traffic.I will be posting the guide for review when it's ready. I have a couple of irons in the fire but it should be available in the next week or so.See also : https://blog.torproject.org/blog/different-ways-use-bridgeV.