November 2017 - tor-project - lists.torproject.org

Notes from November 2 2017 Vegas team meeting
by Karsten Loesing 03 Nov '17

03 Nov '17

Notes for November 2 2017 meeting: Karsten: 1) Making good progress on integrating webstats into CollecTor, but not there yet. Roger: 1) I'm finally getting time for the Tor Research Safety Board open cases this week 2) Alison and I should conspire to pitch a "tor relay operator liaison" paid position [alison: I have lots of notes on this from the meeting and also it's on the community team roadmap!] 3) Rob Jansen and I are submitting an NSF CRI Preliminary proposal today, on Shadow enhancements 4) Rome invites 5) Still optimistic about the China work Nick: 1) kudos to Isabela for organizing inter-team roadmap-share. Let's all remember to treat it as an alpha process, and iterate. 2) more hacking, more programming, stuff goes onward. 3) Another alpha next week. Trying to do two per month. 4) It's November! PLEASE REMEMBER that many people go on vacations in December: if you need to coordinate with another human, plan accordingly! Georg: 1) Final month for Sponsor4 stuff (looking at the remaining things it still seems doable to meet the deadline modulo the moat work maybe) [isa: we did got the extension for jan 31st] Shari: 1) got some grant proposals in 2) end of year campaign going pretty well; October donations: 2014-$4,025, 2015-$22,190, 2016-$45,840, 2017-$56,664 3) emailing major donors 4) getting ready for quick trip to San Francisco next week to meet with a potential funder 5) out of the office week after next for OTF Summit in Valencia 6) starting invitation process for Rome 7) we're moving headquarters to a bigger office downstairs in the same building Alison: 1) still brainstorming a RightsCon talk 2) also thinking about a Tor State of the Onion for LibrePlanet. Will discuss more with Steph tomorrow 3) the support portal is being built! hiro, Antonela, and Isa got right to work. Phoul and I gave them the content and are standing by. :) really excited about this. 4) one more day for Montreal meeting feedback; then we'll discuss it here. 5) meeting with some tor-south folks next week to talk about LatAm Tor Meetup needs and looking for some funding for that 6) Phoul and I are working on the blog post to encourage relay operators 7) waiting on some feedback about the code of conduct draft from Erin Wyatt and the Community Council. hoping to get it out for the proposal period in another week or so. anyone who wants to view and comment on the current draft can contact me. Steph: 1) Fundraising campaign going well 2) Tommy published a post on the new dirauth 3) Working w asn on next-gen post and sharing 4) Newsletter portal is ready, hiro added to the site. Will send an issue next week and once a month including donate call to action. We'll send a fundraising email every 2 weeks 5) Phoul helped me get the Tor Animation title translated 6) Talking to Alison tomorrow about LibrePlanet submission isabela: 1) working on DRL report 2) working on inter-teams roadmaps coordination 3) organizing things at the UX team to resume meetings next week - sent a note to the UX list about it. 4) submitted modularization proposal last friday and design proposal last monday 5) was invited to be part of a panel organized by MDF at the end of the month 6) planning at being in Seattle for the holiday party :) Arturo: 1) Published a blog post on writing cross platform desktop apps: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/writing-a-modern-cross-platform-desktop-ap… 2) Reviewed tickets related to improving mobile app embedding of Tor 3) CIPIT Kenya published a post based on OONI data, examining throttling during the elections: http://blog.cipit.org/2017/10/29/internet-speed-throttling-surrounding-repe… 4) Maria will be presenting OONI at FSCONS in Oslo this week 5) Started writing a specification and threat model for the OONI Probe orchestration system 6) Doing logistics around organising the OONI presence at CCC (having a stall, ordering t-shirts and other swag, etc.)

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Support team: changes in meek-amazon that may affect users
by David Fifield 01 Nov '17

01 Nov '17

Today at 18:10 UTC I turned off the CDN endpoint formerly used by meek-amazon. Tor Browser switched away from this endpoint 7 months ago (https://bugs.torproject.org/21918) but Orbot only recently switched. Just before I turned it off, the endpoint was still being heavily used, so it's possible that some users will have been suddenly disconnected. == How to fix == Users should upgrade their Tor Browser or Orbot. Tor Browser 7.0.8 Orbot 15.5 Users can use meek-azure if they need connectivity in order to upgrade. == Technical information == d2zfqthxsdq309.cloudfront.net is the old, deactivated endpoint. d2cly7j4zqgua7.cloudfront.net is the current endpoint. If a user has a custom bridge line that looks like: meek 0.0.2.0:2 B9E7141C594AF25699E0079C1F0146F409495296 url=https://d2zfqthxsdq309.cloudfront.net/ front=a0.awsstatic.com they need to change it to: meek 0.0.2.0:2 B9E7141C594AF25699E0079C1F0146F409495296 url=https://d2cly7j4zqgua7.cloudfront.net/ front=a0.awsstatic.com Most users will not be using custom bridge lines like this and only need to upgrade.

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Grants Update, October 2017
by Tommy Collison 01 Nov '17

01 Nov '17

Quick report on what I got up to in October. Grants: - Submitted a grant to DRL to modularize Core Tor. - Gave OTF more info about our design proposal. - Researched a whole bunch of new grants and started noodling on grants stuff for 2018. As a reminder, https://pipeline.torproject.net exists as a place where you can tell me about projects you’d do if you had the funding. What gets funded isn’t my decision, but I can do research and maybe play matchmaker with suitable foundations. Other: - We launched our end-of-year crowdfunding campaign! [1] We’ve raised over $50,000 in the first week alone (i.e. $100,000, thanks to Mozilla’s matching program). Super grateful to the rest of the comms team for their help getting this off the ground. o/ - Coordinated Tor’s participation in the Outreachy internship program. - This weekend, I’ll be down in San Francisco for the Aaron Swartz hackathon. See ya there? [2] - Dyed my hair blue [3]. [1] https://blog.torproject.org/powering-digital-resistance-help-mozilla [2] https://www.aaronswartzday.org/sanfrancisco/ [3] https://twitter.com/tommycollison/status/921781336737660928

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OONI Monthly Report: October 2017
by Arturo Filastò 01 Nov '17

01 Nov '17

Hi Tor Project list, The OONI team started a new contract with the OTF in October 2017! We carried out research and published a document outlining the architecture and design considerations for the implementation of the native OONI Probe apps for Windows and macOS. We also published two research reports on internet censorship in Pakistan (in collaboration with Bytes for All, Pakistan) and on censorship events that occurred during Catalonia's independence referendum (in collaboration with Virtual Road/Qurium). We updated various test lists with URLs provided by community members, and we published a post outlining our sessions at our team meeting in Montreal. ## Research on writing OONI Probe desktop apps Over the next year we will be building native OONI Probe apps for Windows and macOS. To implement these apps, we started by making the decision of what technology stack to use, and the high-level architecture. We experimented with various solutions and documented their advantages and disadvantages. We published a blog post outlining the architecture and design considerations that we made for the implementation of OONI Probe desktop apps, as a result of research and experimentation with a variety of different libraries and approaches. This document, outlining the rationale behind our choices for the OONI Probe desktop apps, is available here: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/writing-a-modern-cross-platform-desktop-ap… ## Published research report on internet censorship in Pakistan In collaboration with Bytes for All, Pakistan, we published a research report examining internet censorship in Pakistan. This report is available here: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/pakistan-internet-censorship/ Our report includes an analysis of all OONI Probe network measurements collected from Pakistan over the last three years, between 2014-2017. The report received the following press coverage: * https://www.dawn.com/news/1364766 * https://www.dawn.com/news/1365441/internet-censorship * https://www.techjuice.pk/pakistan-blocked-200-urls-3-years-report/ * https://www.phoneworld.com.pk/more-than-200-urls-blocked-in-pakistan/ * https://ceylontoday.lk/print20170401CT20170630.php?id=32601 ## Published research report on internet censorship during Catalonia's independence referendum In collaboration with Virtual Road/Qurium, we published a research report examining internet censorship events that emerged during Catalonia's independence referendum. Our report is available here: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/internet-censorship-catalonia-independence… Community members translated our report to the following languages: * Catalan: https://ooni.torproject.org/ca/post/internet-censorship-catalonia-independe… * Spanish: https://ooni.torproject.org/es/post/internet-censorship-catalonia-independe… * French: https://ooni.torproject.org/fr/post/internet-censorship-catalonia-independe… This report received a fair amount of social media attention and some press coverage (https://www.agi.it/estero/catalogna_spagna_hacker-2278801/news/2017-10-22/) ## Wrote article on investigating internet censorship with OONI data for the Data Driven Journalism Project The Data Driven Journalism project published our article explaining how to investigate internet censorship with OONI data. Our article is available here: http://datadrivenjournalism.net/resources/ooni_data We hope that this article will help engage more data journalists with OONI data. ## Updated test lists We collaborated with community members and OTF fellows on updating various test lists. Thanks to the URLs they provided, the following test lists have been updated: 1. TM and UZ: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/235 2. RU, UA, Global: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/241 3. Global: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/248 4. BY: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/242 ## OONI team meeting in Montreal The OONI team gathered for a 4-day meeting in Montreal to reflect, regroup, hack and plan in preparation for our new contract with the OTF. We published a post including: * A summary of the main things that the OONI team is working on * All sessions hosted as part of the meeting and all session notes * Meeting outcomes This post is available here: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/ooni-team-meeting-montreal-2017/ All session notes are available here: https://github.com/OpenObservatory/gatherings/tree/master/internal/2017-10-… ## Tor meeting in Montreal The OONI team also attended the Tor meeting in Montreal, between 11th-15th October 2017. As part of this meeting, we facilitated the following sessions: * OONI and Tor Browser collaboration: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2017Montreal/Not… * OONI and Tor Metrics collaboration: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2017Montreal/Not… ## Userbase In October 2017 OONI Probe was run 128,522 times from 1,661 different vantage points across 152 countries around the world. This information can also be found through our stats here: https://api.ooni.io/stats ~ The OONI team.

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