Hello,
tl;rd: moat bridges are not distributed anymore. Don't shut them down as they
are still used but don't create new bridges with "BridgeDistribution moat".
BridgeDB has being our bridge distribution system since 2007. For years we have
being developed a replacement of BridgeDB[0] called rdsys[1]. And finally
yesterday we replaced the last distributors missing in rdsys (email, https and
moat) and turned off BridgeDB.
The only visible difference is that captchas has disappeared from
https://bridges.torproject.org and requesting bridges in Tor Browser gives you a
static captcha and doesn't even verify if the answer is correct (until we have
the time to update TB to don't request the captcha[2].
The mayor difference for bridge operators is that we don't distribute "moat"
bridges anymore. We have merged circumvention settings and moat and now is one
distributor handing over "settings" bridges. For now we are going to keep the
existing "moat" bridges assigned to "moat" and don't distribute them, so users
that have one of those bridges can keep using them without risk of censors
finding it.
New bridges will not be assigned automatically the moat distributor, only
existing bridges or bridges with "BridgeDistribution moat" will stay in this
distributor. We plan to watch the usage of moat bridges and evaluate moving them
to another distributor depending on the usage[3].
Thank you for running bridges.
[0] The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / BridgeDB · GitLab
[1] The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / rdsys · GitLab
[2] Deprecate moat CAPTCHAs (#42086) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab
[3] what to do with the moat bridges? (#233) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / rdsys · GitLab
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