I really wonder if anyone installs it on their machine. May be I am one off but I am Hearing about this for first time, don't recognize any of their partners.
I would love to contribute, but i do not think it is a good idea to install and run this in China…enough said. Also i already know the outcome: network is fast, everything is blocked
Do they arrest you just for trying to load a blocked site?
They do not. But it is pretty pointless I would guess: probably most of the domains this tries to visit will be blocked.
Documenting that fact is the point.
In China's case, it is a very well known and documented fact that heavy censorship is present. Of course if one thinks additional knowledge on that is useful enough to solicit wide user participation, that is certainly one way of thinking.
Censor lists can be slightly different on different networks. Also the exact addresses that are censored changes over time. The probe collects this data. "Everyone knows it's censored" is not data. There is a good chance that someone else on your network ran the probe recently though, if that's what you mean by your excuse.
The probe also collects data like the exact mechanism of censorship, the IP or domain it redirects to if applicable, the DNS server to detect if DNS has been redirected, and so on.
It's part of nixpkgs so I tried it out. I killed the process when it started writing something big to my disk. Why is it doing that?
Many of the partners are country focused but the Tor Project, Citizen Lab, and Internet Society are well known to me.