However we know there will always be exceptions to that, and there are many users who prefer to configure their connection manually as well. We hope that the majority of our users living under extreme censorship will be able to connect to Tor at the press of a button, thanks to Connection Assist. Users from countries where the Tor Network may be blocked (such as Belarus, China, Russia and Turkmenistan) can test the most recent iteration of this feature by volunteering as an alpha tester, and reporting your findings on the Tor forum. While Connection Assist has reached the milestone of its first stable release, this is only version 1.0, and your feedback will be invaluable to help us improve its user experience in future releases. It manages to do so without needing to connect to the Tor Network first by utilizing moat – the same domain-fronting tool that Tor Browser uses to request a bridge from. In collaboration with the Anti-Censorship team at the Tor Project, we've sought to reduce this burden with the introduction of Connection Assist: a new feature that when required will offer to automatically apply the bridge configuration we think will work best in your location for you.Ĭonnection Assist works by looking up and downloading an up-to-date list of country-specific options to try using your location (with your consent). This placed the burden on censored users (who are already under significant pressure) to figure out what option to pick, resulting in a lot of trial, error and frustration in the process.

What's more, censorship of Tor isn't uniform – and while a certain pluggable transport or bridge configuration may work in one country, that doesn't mean it'll work elsewhere. However, circumventing censorship of the Tor Network itself remained a manual and confusing process – requiring users to dive into Tor Network settings and figure out for themselves how to apply a bridge to unblock Tor. We began reshaping the experience of connecting to Tor with the release of Tor Browser 10.5 last year, including the retirement of the Tor Launcher and the integration of the connection flow into the browser window. What's new?Īutomatic censorship detection and circumvention This new release builds upon features introduced in Tor Browser 10.5 to transform the user experience of connecting to Tor from heavily censored regions.

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