The TOR website is blocked in mainland China, as is TOR itself, but it works via obfsproxy, all it requires is someone to send you the executable/source. Most people who bypass the great firewall use VPNs, however.
Is it common for chinese citizens to do this , or is it only done by some tech guys ?
I don't know the answer to this and of course the following was easily dismissed with a tinfoil hat comment, but when China decided recently to unban porn there were people suggesting it was to make bypassing the great firewall less 'necessary' for the average user.
Also: "As the Turkish government’s effort to ban use of Twitter continued Friday, the country’s Internet users rushed to install apps such as Hotspot Shield, which had 270,000 downloads from Turkish users within 12 hours, according to David Gorodyansky, the company’s chief executive." I think Tor's a bit of an overkill. This message sent over Hotspot Shield from Vietnam because of my Facebook addiction (blocked on an…
Why and how is Tor an overkill? With Hotspot Shield, you are trusting them with everything you are doing. With Tor, there is no trust with a single server because it is decentralized.
Tor is certainly far more decentralized, but you seem to harbor a common misconception that Tor doesn't reuqire trust. The exit node of your circuit (the last hop before the "real" internet) handles your directly. At best, the destination of your packets is unencrypted, giving the exit node a narrow but pertinent view into your communications. At worst, the entire packet is unencrypted, and the exit node can manipulate it in whatever way it wishes, undetectably. This is why you must, must, must layer other encryption on top of Tor, ie, HTTPS. As they say at the Tor Project, "plaintext over Tor is still plaintext," except that you've attracted a lot attention to send it.
No, I don't think so. Look at a bigger time frame: https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-re... There was a huge spike in Mid 2013, cause by a botnet that installed tor. Before there was almost not oscillation. After that there is quite a bit. I think there are many infected PCs at companies.
Do you still got a reference to news/blogs about that botnet install?