Tor at the Heart: Bridges and Pluggable Transports by ssteele.
From the post:
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Censors block Tor in two ways: they can block connections to the IP addresses of known Tor relays, and they can analyze network traffic to find use of the Tor protocol. Bridges are secret Tor relays—they don’t appear in any public list, so the censor doesn’t know which addresses to block. Pluggable transports disguise the Tor protocol by making it look like something else—for example like HTTP or completely random.
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Ssteele points out censorship, even censorship of Tor, is getting worse, so the time to learn these tools is now. Don’t wait until Tor has gone dark for you to respond.
December seems to be when all the begging bowls come out from a number of worthwhile projects.
I should be pitching my cause at this point but instead, please donate to support the Tor project.