February 2016 - ooni-dev - lists.torproject.org

Working with OONI reports; or, how we used OONI to find discrimination against Tor exits
by David Fifield 24 Mar '16

24 Mar '16

I am working on a project with Sheharbano Khattak, Sadia Afroz, Mobin Javed, Srikanth Sundaresan, Vern Paxson, Steven Murdoch, and Damon McCoy to measure how often web sites treat Tor users differently (by serving them a block page or a captcha, for example). We used OONI reports for part of the project. This post is about running our code and some general tips about working with OONI data. I hope it can be of some use to the ADINA15 participants :) The source code I'm talking about is here: git clone https://www.bamsoftware.com/git/ooni-tor-blocks.git One of its outputs is here, a big poster showing the web sites with the highest blocking rates against Tor users: https://people.torproject.org/~dcf/graphs/tor-blocker-poster-20150914.pdf I am attaching the README of our code. One of OONI's tests does URL downloads with Tor and without Tor. The code processes OONI reports, compares the Tor and non-Tor HTTP responses, and notes whenever Tor appears to be blocked while non-Tor appears to be unblocked. Our code is focused on the task of finding Tor blocks, but parts of it are generic and will be useful to others who are working with OONI data. The ooni-report-urls program gives you the URLs of every OONI report published at api.ooni.io. The ooni.py Python module provides an iterator over OONI YAML files that deals with encoding errors and compression. The classify.py Python module is able to identify many common types of block pages (e.g. CloudFlare, Akamai). Now some notes and lessons learned about working with OONI data. The repository of all OONI reports is here: http://api.ooni.io/ The web site doesn't make it obvious, but there is a JSON index of all reports, so you can download many of them in bulk (thanks to Arturo for pointing this out). Our source code contains a program called ooni-report-urls that extracts the URLs from the JSON file so you can pipe them to Wget or whatever. (Check before you start downloading, because there are a lot of files and some of them are big!) wget -O ooni-reports.json http://api.ooni.io/api/reports ./ooni-report-urls ooni-reports.json | sort | uniq > ooni-report-urls.txt The choice of a YAML parser really really matters, like 30× performance difference matters. See here: https://bugs.torproject.org/13720 yaml.safe_load_all(f) function is slow. yaml.load_all(f, Loader=yaml.CSafeLoader) is what you want to use instead. yaml.CSafeLoader differs slightly in its handling of certain invalid Unicode escapes that can appear in OONI's representation of HTTP bodies, for example separately encoded UTF-16 surrogates: "\uD83D\uDD07". ooni.py has a way to skip over records like that (there aren't very many of them). With yaml.CSafeLoader, findblocks takes about 2 hours to process 2.5 years of http_requests reports (about 33 GB compressed). There are some inconsistencies and format differences in some OONI reports, particularly very early ones. For example, the test_name field of reports is not always the same for the same test. We were looking for http_requests tests, and we had to match all of the following test_names: http_requests http_requests_test tor_http_requests_test HTTP Requests Test In addition, the YAML format is occasionally different. In http_requests reports, for example, the way of indicating that Tor is in use for a request can be any of: tor: true tor: {is_tor: true} tor: {exit_ip: 109.163.234.5, exit_name: hessel2, is_tor: true} And even in some requests, the special URL scheme "shttp" indicates a Tor request; e.g. "shttp://example.com/". The ooni.py script fixes up some of these issues, but only for the http_requests test. You'll have to figure it out on your own for other tests. A very early version of this processing code appeared here: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/ooni-dev/2015-June/000288.html

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Re: [ooni-dev] Request for feedback on resuming of publishing of the reports
by Tyler Fisher 11 Mar '16

11 Mar '16

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Hi Arturo, - --- Currently for our data processing needs we have begun to bucket reports by date (every date corresponds to when a certain report has been submitted to the collector). What I would like to know is of the two following options what would be most convenient to you for accessing the data. The options are: OPTION A: Have 1 JSON stream for every day of measurements (either gzipped or plai n) ex. - https://ooni.torproject.org/reports/json/2016-01-01.json - https://ooni.torproject.org/reports/json/2016-01-02.json - https://ooni.torproject.org/reports/json/2016-01-03.json etc. OPTION B: Have 1 JSON stream for every ooni-probe test run and publish them inside of a directory with the timestamp of when it was collected ex. - - https://ooni.torproject.org/reports/json/2016-01-01/20160101T204732Z NL-AS3265-http_requests-v1-probe.json.gz - - https://ooni.torproject.org/reports/json/2016-01-01/20160101T204732Z US-AS3265-dns_consistency-v1-probe.json.gz etc. Since we are internally using the daily batches for doing the processing and analysis of reports unless there is an explicit request to publish them on a test run basis we will probably end up going for option A, so don’t be shy to reply :) - --- I agree with David in that it will be easier to access specific ooni-probe test results using option (B) (i.e. the current solution). What benefits did you identify when considering to switch to option (A)? A few reasons to stick with option (B) include: - - Retaining the ability to run ooni-pipeline on a subset of reports associated with a given time period by filtering by date prefix, and substrings within key names; - - Retaining the ability to distribute small units of work easily among subprocesses; and - - Retaining the idempotent nature of ooni-pipeline, and the luigi framework - switching from lots of small files to a single large file for a given day will invariably increase the time required to recover from failures (i.e. if a small dnst-based test fails to normalise, you'll have to renormalise everything as opposed to a single test; - - Developers will not have to download hundreds of megabytes of data in order to access a traceroute test result that is only a few kilobytes in size; and - - It's generally easier to work with smaller files than it is to work with big files. Cheers, Tyler GPG fingerprint: 8931 45DF 609B EE2E BC32 5E71 631E 6FC3 4686 F0EB (tyler(a)tylerfisher.org) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 iQIcBAEBCAAGBQJWn1+qAAoJEGMeb8NGhvDr6hUP/R6XcXEejwT8DYuKLoVBpujs CqXtIj88A5JYhtt1npRF/a0peNihzFRbYuQpAUX/D1EdPa1UHDwCuqp1hO642xIJ WePgWHWIS7qzYK/i5LbMXC+oWmfAA0J25SawmjyNWclK+NCgIwQ1k7kleyFP7Ul5 PFjJKLCcuqJkQl1hnZlW7YhgLYZAf2QHOD1cJauLM5aDCNBDUSgfIP+/P/xfFLq3 XqLGFBfNrMXaWmOfDGLR7tV4mS3R4M5L7rL66AiomQULdld4cuLonAht4CWLDuhV MKyKrURixRqgTUoing59OcjgOcGEVQD5P5NaMuVruU1hFbHW0wr430/mEq8pdDW9 BQHZh/VZ/f2xz4rjWiE8Mfl3mgmGfbFiT6WMKQTRY3vr5mwbmefg0/IneJ1eHtIo A/XMX579DQt3V19tMa7rO4TjpdBKIWwJ8/6mwwaw9QrS/I2pmlg8AscLU0oQtMqc 3CcWELOdoV7uIPBVg3TfiL+RLDSxzIJIp0k6IM19tkwZAxGLmD+cZvDo+dxME3fd Y7+fYxovuQrt4vvhaPFU15EDzFWHMoMqlNUSOeC0FuIhpbYbM0Dqn1qL4EScJ+PA +p/rtMTZLiiIJLtYuZCRiZjbaMvqsfZAmPEZ5ZgSShJKsB4jhV4/5LsmHedYCHeW S/IdJ81xUzTfxMUZBqgI =kztT -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Reminder for weekly OONI dev gathering Monday 2016-02-15 17:00 UTC (18:00 CEST)
by Arturo Filastò 15 Feb '16

15 Feb '16

Hello Oonitarians, This is a reminder that today there will be the weekly OONI gathering. It will happen as usual on the #ooni channel on irc.oftc.net at 17:00 UTC (18:00 CEST, 12:00 EST, 09:00 PST). You can join via the web from: https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.oftc.net/ooni (Note: sometimes Tor is blocked by OFTC, but it should mask your IP if you trust that stuff). Everybody is welcome to join us and bring their questions and feedback. See you later, ~ Arturo

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Reminder for weekly OONI dev gathering Monday 2016-02-08 17:00 UTC (18:00 CEST)
by Arturo Filastò 08 Feb '16

08 Feb '16

Hello Oonitarians, This is a reminder that today there will be the weekly OONI gathering. It will happen as usual on the #ooni channel on irc.oftc.net at 17:00 UTC (18:00 CEST, 12:00 EST, 09:00 PST). You can join via the web from: https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.oftc.net/ooni (Note: sometimes Tor is blocked by OFTC, but it should mask your IP if you trust that stuff). Everybody is welcome to join us and bring their questions and feedback. See you later, ~ Arturo

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OONI team progress report for January 2016
by Arturo Filastò 03 Feb '16

03 Feb '16

# What we did in January 2016 * Merge the work done by Tyler on his version of the pipeline into our version of it. * Progress towards finalising the ooni-explorer. An MVP is now implemented and can be viewed at http://explorer.ooni.io/ (merge the pending PRs into master and scope of out the remaining tasks) * Setup redundant copy of the pipeline on the humboldt server * Start review of the ooni data formats to reflect the normalisations done in the pipeline: https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-spec/pull/49 * Start writing specification for the new test that should replace http_requests, dns_consistency and tcp_connect called “web_connectivity” https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-spec/pull/48 * Start implementing JSON support for the backend: https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-backend/pull/62 * Start implementing JSON support in ooni-probe: https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe/pull/456 * Start implementing the web_connectivity test helper in the backend: https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-backend/commit/c8bdf9b31ede6eb5551033… * Start implementing the web_connectivity test in ooni-probe: https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe/pull/457 * Progress on measurementkit to integrate traceroute test from portolan * Progress on measurementkit to support starting of tor * Ran the following weekly gatherings: http://meetbot.debian.net/ooni/2016/ooni.2016-01-04-16.59.html http://meetbot.debian.net/ooni/2016/ooni.2016-01-18-17.01.html http://meetbot.debian.net/ooni/2016/ooni.2016-01-25-17.00.html # What we plan on doing in February 2016 * Continue working on the web_connectivity test * Continue work on the web_connectivity backend * Restore the publishing of reports in the new data-format ~ Arturo

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Reminder for weekly OONI dev gathering Monday 2016-02-01 17:00 UTC (18:00 CEST)
by Arturo Filastò 01 Feb '16

01 Feb '16

Hello Oonitarians, This is a reminder that today there will be the weekly OONI gathering. It will happen as usual on the #ooni channel on irc.oftc.net at 17:00 UTC (18:00 CEST, 12:00 EST, 09:00 PST). You can join via the web from: https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.oftc.net/ooni (Note: sometimes Tor is blocked by OFTC, but it should mask your IP if you trust that stuff). Everybody is welcome to join us and bring their questions and feedback. See you later, ~ Arturo

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