Comments about: Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2025-07-17

I read the recent post Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2025-07-17

What interested me was the part about when “Iran blocked partialy internet” and issue #40465 Increase in clients with denied connection (#40465) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab “Increase in clients with denied connection”.

I saw nothing about how Iran was able to do such a good job (or bad from a Tor point of view). Anyone know how or what they did differently to achieve this.

The reason I ask is that I noticed an “Increase in clients with denied connection” also on my Snowflake proxy during the time period mentioned. And my highest users connetions are from IR. I know there is nothing I can do but am curious anyway.

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That is not something you can notice on a Snowflake proxy, because “denied” means “the broker did not return a proxy to the client”, thus no client ↔ proxy connection attempt was made in the first place.

But yes, failed connection rate also rose, apparently, as was said here Increase in clients with denied connection (#40465) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab.

As you can see in the issue comments, there is no clear single cause of this yet. What contributed to the increase in “denied” counts could be juts the fact that there are more clients occupying the proxies, thus shrinking the pool of available proxies, which makes the broker return “no proxies available”, i.e. “denied”.

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