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

Re: [tor-project] meek-azure funding has run out
by Sina Rabbani 19 Apr '17

19 Apr '17

Dear Team, I have good news, Rabbi Rob Thomas (robt(a)cymru.com) is going to cover the costs associated with keeping meek alive. So far I have setup 2 new accounts with Amazon and Azure and working to confirm the functionality. https://d183ohpl22nq2f.cloudfront.net/ https://meek.azureedge.net/ Cloudfront is working fine and i'm trying to resolve issues with the Azure CDN. Is there a ticket I can update with these details? I think I should also bring up a backend server (bridge) and share the new config lines for the Tor Browser Bundle. I'm hoping to get all this done by Monday or sooner. Thank you David for keeping this service operational for so long and thank you Rob for keeping it alive! All the best, Sina "Be the change that you wish to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi ----- On Jan 19, 2017, at 2:17 AM, Yawning Angel yawning(a)schwanenlied.me wrote: > On Mon, 9 Jan 2017 20:08:03 -0800 > David Fifield <david(a)bamsoftware.com> wrote: > >> On Mon, Jan 09, 2017 at 03:06:17PM -0800, Shari Steele wrote: >> > Hey David. >> > How much money do we need for 2017? >> >> The total for meek-azure November 2015 to November 2016 was $6290.69, >> or about $525 a month on average. I believe it could go 2× or higher >> if we relaxed rate limits. meek-amazon is higher, $13756.30 or >> $1150/month over the same time period. > > Has there been any progress on finding alternative funding for this? > dcf's comments on trac indicate "no", which would be unfortunate. > > -- > Yawning Angel > > _______________________________________________ > tor-project mailing list > tor-project(a)lists.torproject.org > https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-project

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meek-azure funding has run out
by David Fifield 05 Mar '17

05 Mar '17

The grant I was using to pay for meek-azure ran out at the end of 2016. It was for $10,000 and it paid for meek-azure and meek-google (until the latter was shut down) throughout 2016. I can support it personally for maybe one more month but after that I'll have to shut it down. >From these graphs you can see that meek continues to be very popular, with both backing bridges constant pushing against the rate limits we imposed to control costs. I had hoped that by now we would find a way to pay for sustained deployment, but it hasn't happened. https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/F4AD82B2032EDEF6C02C5A529C42CFAFE5165… https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/AA033EEB61601B2B7312D89B62AAA23DC3ED8… If someone wants to take over the service and raise funds I'm happy to let you. I've been able to manage keeping on top of monthly invoices and all that, but it's not my strong suit. I don't have any problem with continuing to run the bridge that the CDN forwards to, as that is much less expensive than the CDN, like $20/month rather than $600/month.

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Fwd: Support computer-user freedom by exhibiting at LibrePlanet 2017 again
by Moritz Bartl 02 Mar '17

02 Mar '17

tl;dr: LibrePlanet wants us back with a booth. Since Tor was put on FSF's High Priority List (since Richard uses it now I hear?) very recently, this sounds like a good idea. https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-announces-a-major-overhaul-of-free-software-hi… Anyone? -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Support computer-user freedom by exhibiting at LibrePlanet 2017 again Date: Mon, 06 Feb 2017 15:05:48 -0500 Dear Moritz, Thank you very much for supporting us through the exhibit hall at LibrePlanet in 2014! Over the past 8 years, **LibrePlanet** (<https://www.libreplanet.org/2017>) has become a prominent free software conference for a vibrant, diverse community of developers, policy experts, activists, students, and users who care about the intersection of technology, education, and user freedom. With past keynote speakers including **Edward Snowden**, **Sue Gardner** (Wikimedia Foundation), and **Allison Randal** (Open Source Initiative), LibrePlanet is a banner event with 400 attendees and thousands more watching conference sessions online. It is also one of the only technology conferences to run its infrastructure entirely on free software. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Student Information Processing Board are working hard organizing **LibrePlanet 2017: The Roots of Freedom -- Saturday and Sunday, March 25 and 26, 2017 at the MIT Stata Center**. This year will feature keynote speakers **Cory Doctorow** (author, activist, and co-editor of boingboing.net) **Kade Crockford** (ACLU Massachusetts), **Sumana Harihareswara** (Changeset Consulting), and **Richard Stallman** (FSF founder and president). The conference is funded and staffed by the Free Software Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity, and we need your support. **Will you join us at LibrePlanet 2017 as an exhibitor again?** Exhibiting at LibrePlanet will ensure Tor: - has an exhibitor table in our lively, centrally located hall, - is listed in the program book and on the event website as an exhibitor, - receives 2 registrations for all conference events. LibrePlanet could not happen without the contributions of donors, sponsors, and exhibitors. In addition to other logistics, sponsors and exhibitors fund gratis admission for all students and travel/lodging scholarships to help speakers and students who would not be able to make it otherwise. Last year, we received 37 applications for scholarships and were able to fulfill 10. This year, we hope to do even more with your support. You can be confident in our financial stewardship and responsible use of resources -- the FSF has been in operation for over 30 years, and we have the highest rating possible on Charity Navigator (4 stars). LibrePlanet offers tremendous visibility, allowing you to showcase your support of free software to users, developers, and potential employees. While everything you do may not be free software, it is likely that a substantial portion of your organization relies on it. Sponsoring is a great way to give back and support the community that continues to make and improve the pool of software available to you. Conference sponsors and exhibitors are able to engage all the attendees and organization representatives at the two-day event, thousands of viewers who watch online, the FSF's 4,000 members and 130,000+ subscribers, and nearly 20 million unique web visitors who visit fsf.org, libreplanet.org, and gnu.org each year. You can find more information on LibrePlanet sponsorship and exhibitor opportunities at <https://libreplanet.org/2017/sponsors/>. We would love for Tor to be part of the exhibit hall again. If you are interested, please let me know at <membership(a)fsf.org> by March 5th. Thank you again for supporting our work to promote, protect, and develop free software. Sincerely, j. -- Jeanne Rasata Program Assistant Free Software Foundation GnuPG Key: F24B 3F64 31A1 90D6 1CCC 0394 E8FD 48A0 DE0D C371 P.S.: Check out this short video about LibrePlanet, made with free software: <https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/libreplanet-2016-fork-the-sys…>.

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Notes from February 23 2017 Vegas team meeting
by Karsten Loesing 28 Feb '17

28 Feb '17

Notes for February 23 2017 meeting: Georg: 1) We need to coordinate the network audit for our switch to ESR 52 <- Mike has agreed to do this by April 1 Nick: 1) Has been doing measurements with AFL for Sponsor4 to reduce directory download size. Preliminary results are promising. 2) I'm doing the 024..030 release process and bugfix stuff on my own; it's gotten a bit gnarly. Hoping for the best. Alison: 1) Lots of planning for the Tor Meeting. Will be reaching out to folks individually about potential agenda items and intra-team meetings. 2) Tor glossary is up here for now (Colin is still working on internal linking): https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/community/glossary next step is for it to go onto the support portal. 3) UX and community teams are working on the support portal together; Alison and Linda will continue this in Seattle next week. 4) New translations have been merged into the Tor Browser manual. 5) Trainings: planning a lot of both LFP and Global South workshops right now. 6) Community council guidelines are in the discussion phase right now and will go up for a vote after next week. When that's completed, we will vote to keep the existing social contract or modify it with some of the suggestions we received from our greater community. Mike: 1) Misc. Arturo: 1) ooniprobe now support 4 languages: English, Spanish, French and Italian. New mobile app will be released tomorrow or next week. 2) Began implementing the probe orchestration system. 3) People can now join the ooni IRC channels via a slack bridge: https://slack.openobservatory.org/ Karsten: 1) Worked with Cass and iwakeh on writing a funding proposal for metrics things. 2) Released metrics-lib 1.6.0 together with iwakeh. 3) Made plans with irl for a blog post on Atlas/Onionoo usability fixes, scheduled for Monday, March 6. 4) Worked with RaBe and iwakeh on more website redesigns of CollecTor and Onionoo based on what we did for Metrics. Josh: 1) Onboarding: paperwork, read/watched much of *.torproject.org, getting accounts, etc. 2) Merged my press contacts with existing lists 3) Spoke with reporter from Fast Company, Steven Melendez (@smelendez) for upcoming story related to OTF. He previously wrote a good story about Tor and SecureDrop. 4) Learning about UAE issue (uptick in connections) and deciding how to follow-up with reporter from The Intercept. Josh to email vegas-team list with notes. 5) Putting together ideas, goals, and strategies for Seattle meeting, focusing on social media, press, community, and web site. Isabela: 1) working on digging information from july - 2014 till nov - 2016 on sponsorS for the final report - fun times! Due feb 28 2) Looking good to finish next milestone of sponsor5 (orfox work) Due feb 28 3) Working with Hiro on a survey about moving away from Trac - is not an easy mission but we are on it!. Hiro also is working with metrics and made schleuder work! which was a big pain in the ass. 4) Linda is working with support team on their new site, and making sure it goes along with the big plan of building new portals as part of tpo redesign 5) Dealing with small personnel stuff (people who worked on orfox payments etc). Trying to get some stuff prepared for the meetings in Amsterdam. Preparing for trip next week to Seattle - while in seattle will try to set up the table stuff at planetlibre

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Fwd: GSoC 2017: Tor has been accepted as a mentor organization!
by Damian Johnson 27 Feb '17

27 Feb '17

Woohoo! We've been accepted! ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Google Summer of Code <summerofcode-noreply(a)google.com> Date: Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 9:01 AM Subject: GSoC 2017: Tor has been accepted as a mentor organization! To: atagar1(a)gmail.com [image: Google Summer of Code] Congratulations! Tor has been selected as a Google Summer of Code 2017 mentor organization. You can now invite mentors and update your organization profile. Please click here to visit your dashboard: https://summerofcode. withgoogle.com/dashboard/ This email was sent to atagar1(a)gmail.com. You are receiving this email because of your participation in Google Summer of Code 2017. https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com To leave the program and stop receiving all emails, you can go to your profile <https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/dashboard/profile/> and request deletion of your program profile. For any questions, please contact gsoc-support(a)google.com. Replies to this message go to an unmonitored mailbox. © 2017 Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA

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Diversifying Bandwidth Measurement
by teor 27 Feb '17

27 Feb '17

Hi Rob and bandwidth authority operators, I've just been contacted by an Exit operator whose Exits have all seen a 60% drop in traffic over the last few weeks. This drop has been caused by a drop in bandwidth authority measurements, which seems to affect Exit connections that transit to bwauth.torproject.org (cymru) through Cogent. For example, from Australia, I get about 3 MB/s to bwauth.torproject.org [0]. A relay operator in France gets 500 KB/s. This affects at least Online S.a.ss, Feralhosting, and trabia. Do we want Exit traffic concentrating in the US? (It seems all the affected networks are UK/EU.) Is there any way that we can fix this? It also has a social impact: there are a number of disappointed exit operators out there. Can someone run another bwauth HTTPS download server on another (non-North American?) network? The required files are listed here[1]. If they did, would the bandwidth authority operators apply a patch to use it? Or could it go on 38.229.70.2 ? (That's the alternate bwauth address in the source code[2], but it's down.) [0]: https://bwauth.torproject.org/bwauth.torproject.org/64M [1]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torflow.git/tree/NetworkScanners/BwAuthority/… [2]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torflow.git/tree/NetworkScanners/BwAuthority/… T -- Tim Wilson-Brown (teor) teor2345 at gmail dot com PGP C855 6CED 5D90 A0C5 29F6 4D43 450C BA7F 968F 094B ricochet:ekmygaiu4rzgsk6n xmpp: teor at torproject dot org ------------------------------------------------------------------------

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We need project ideas for GSoC 2017!
by Damian Johnson 26 Feb '17

26 Feb '17

Hi all! This week I'm getting our ducks in a row to apply for Google Summer of Code 2017... https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/ I just trimmed our volunteer page of projects that were done last year and sadly that doesn't leave us with much. We need mentors and project ideas! Got anything you'd care to mentor this summer? If so please let me know! Just send me a description like the ones on the following and I'd be happy to add it to our site... https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#Coding Please note that all projects must have two mentors, one of which is an established tor person. If you're not part of our internal community that's fine, but please find a core developer to co-sponsor your project and act as a secondary mentor. Thanks! -Damian

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[Invite] Meeting to discuss features for lightsaber (a trac-cli utility)
by isabela 22 Feb '17

22 Feb '17

Hello Tor, tl;dr; Me and Hiro will be meeting this Friday (Feb 17) at 1400 UTC at #tor-project to discuss features to lightsaber, a trac-cli utility to interact with Trac that Hiro is working on. == Background: Around an year ago the Network Team discussed the idea of having a command line tool to interact with Trac, so you could use it to query Trac in ways you can't really do with their UI. This was part of a broader discussion around pain points we had on the team development process (other things came out of it that solves other problems e.g. git lab for long code reviews). == What we will do at the this meeting: As we were discussing this tool we listed some wishes we had for it in a pad: https://storm.torproject.org/shared/N_GwLqVE8Bcr1atMiUwZua35vvFVogyPGvWo2-l… When Hiro joined Tor I showed this pad to her and she came up with Lightsaber: https://github.com/hiromipaw/lightsaber At this meeting we will review what is in that pad and try to define concrete features we could add to lightsaber. == Invitation I thought would be a good idea to invite the rest of the community to this conversation as many of us interact with Trac all the time and probably have some ideas of what could make your life easier with it. So, if you would like to join us please come to #tor-project, this Friday (Feb 17) at 1400 UTC. Cheers, Isabela

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Notes from February 16 2017 Vegas team meeting
by Karsten Loesing 20 Feb '17

20 Feb '17

Notes for February 16 2017 meeting: Nick: 1) Hacking all the time 2) Trying to wrap up 0.3.0 and earlier releases; in the weeds on bugfixing. 3) asn and dgoulet being awesome on sponsor R. 4) Trying (with ahf) to make sure that design work happens on schedule for sponsor 4. 5) Not around the net much next week Karsten: 1) Did some light coding towards metrics-lib 1.6.0 release which will come out on Friday. 2) Tried setting up a second Onionoo host, but failed due to serious I/O requirements. 3) Atlas usability improvement project is on schedule, blog post planned for February 27 or 28. 4) Tor Tech Report(s) on collecting and reporting statistics is making good progress, should be ready for discussion by Amsterdam. 5) OnionPerf replacing Torperf scheduled for end of February. 6) Working on adapting CollecTor and Onionoo to Tor Metrics design. Mike: 1) Continuing to work on adaptive padding implementation. 2) Still prodding Kevin about the blog :/ 3) Sent a mail to trendmicro about getting Tor Browser into Pwn2Own in 2018. (I think we're too late for 2017). Isabela: 1) Sent sponsor4 monthly reports for core tor and tor browser work 2) created wiki pages for sponsor4 and 5 - next is to update sponsors wiki pages adding links to reports 3) Hiro finished schleuder installation \o/ - tomorrow we are hosting a meeting at #tor-project to brainstorm features for lightsaber 4) Linda is in touch with many volunteers that are helping with UX team - Antonela is one of them and both are helping the community team with their support page 5) created an example of usage of OKRs / will work next on updating the growth strategy 6) Following up with proposals that are in review process - and working on ISC Orfox project (next milestone is at the end of the month) - still having weekly syncs with Brad (its been quite useful) Alison: 1) UX team and community team met last week to discuss initial plans for the design of support.torproject.org. We plan to do a lot of work together during the meeting in March. 2) Linda and I (and other team leads) will do some of this work in Seattle at the end of the month too. 3) We connected with an advocate in Egypt which means our Global South training regions now include MENA, East Africa, and South Asia. 4) We'll start building the agenda for the Tor Meeting this week (based on the feedback we collected). 5) Phoul will soon add the Tor glossary to Transifex. Arturo: 1) We now have full multi-lingual support in ooni-wui and ooniprobe-mobile. Translations for the mobile app have started to come (Spanish is 100% done). 2) We cleaned up the citizenlab global test list and migrated to the new category code scheme 3) Progress on the data processing pipeline. We hope to manage to deploy a staging instance of it this week or next week. Shari: 1) Did my self-assessment and got it to the board. Now they're "it." 2) Hired a new Communications Director and have been helping to acclimate him. 3) working on 2017 budget; kinda hard because we still don't have final numbers for 2016 4) reminder I'm gonna be mostly offline from 2/22 thru 2/26

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Many bridges (22%) have nickname "ki"
by David Fifield 15 Feb '17

15 Feb '17

This is a bit of a followup to my earlier post on obfs4 bridges with formulaic nicknames: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2016-November/000809.html Those bridges are still there, but today I noticed a new weirdness: 756 bridges all having the nickname "ki". 756 is 21.8% of the total number, 3464. At the moment, "ki" far outnumbers every other nickname, apart from "Unnamed": $ wget -O bridges.json https://onionoo.torproject.org/details?type=bridge $ ./nodeinfo < bridges.json | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head 1519 Unnamed 756 ki 16 UbuntuCore133 6 anonymous 5 hacktheplanet 4 ididnteditheconfig 3 default 3 CoolComputers 2 UbuntuCore95 2 masterFluellen All the "ki" bridges have other things in common: they run no pluggable transports and they have platform "Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux". Their last_restarted time ranges from 2016-12-05 17:51:45 to 2016-12-13 15:34:06. Here is a sample of 20 of them. $ ./nodeinfo < bridges.json | awk '$2 == "ki" {print}' | sort -k 7 | head -n 20 hashed_fingerprint nickname first_seen last_seen last_restarted platform transports F69BE147A7CB0A1EDAE8A5E9EFF70E672CF117DF ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 17:41:03 2016-12-05 17:51:45 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux FA0F7052B6BB5572960BB08BD44C58A143F9B227 ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 17:41:03 2016-12-05 18:07:00 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux 1431FFE68CFC0383456619D87431AF23FFA2E183 ki 2016-12-05 18:41:03 2016-12-06 17:41:03 2016-12-05 18:21:30 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux 945B0892CADA14722EA3D28354995D5907CFB3AB ki 2016-12-05 18:41:03 2016-12-06 17:41:03 2016-12-05 18:34:04 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux DDB025FD0BC51FE5391D8A4F80E773334D2E523C ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 18:41:03 2016-12-05 18:52:16 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux DB4245D09CC3C705CAD292C398DDA1ABFB40DB52 ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 18:41:03 2016-12-05 19:07:01 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux 772D118449E0F938657BBD5F472088270D742F39 ki 2016-12-05 19:41:03 2016-12-06 18:41:03 2016-12-05 19:21:27 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux F8DE4C2595715190D69732FBB47EAA17255FCF3A ki 2016-12-05 19:41:03 2016-12-06 18:41:03 2016-12-05 19:34:00 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux CA7ACBB15A80381BB216939AA3D6345D4E2A6CE5 ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 19:41:03 2016-12-05 19:51:51 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux 60AE31B0D81ABE763264D442E0A8A48161ADCBD6 ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 19:41:03 2016-12-05 20:07:42 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux 0522394400AA8425445742828C577A560159AAC3 ki 2016-12-05 20:41:03 2016-12-06 19:41:03 2016-12-05 20:21:31 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux 8A9BFB4DABD6D4F0AD692C414FB3E75DC33ED47E ki 2016-12-05 20:41:03 2016-12-06 19:41:03 2016-12-05 20:34:01 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux F9AE2B2E26EACE32A6BA697118F73AC20DAA0A01 ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 20:41:03 2016-12-05 20:52:33 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux DAFFEED5B1268C8B7BEEA3AD411690E7C74024EB ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 20:41:03 2016-12-05 21:06:31 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux 7690F311EE18901A2C2B0353DF868C31C43746C7 ki 2016-12-05 21:41:03 2016-12-06 20:41:03 2016-12-05 21:21:29 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux C51B3FA6A60D116C84C867F2DC2AE0BE33CB117F ki 2016-12-05 21:41:03 2016-12-06 20:41:03 2016-12-05 21:34:00 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux 8F6C3F388EDD6D9400B5743AE29DE3AAB88E43E9 ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 21:41:03 2016-12-05 21:51:56 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux 0547724D0F88377D5A0F01D90B8BF523B869326A ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 21:41:03 2016-12-05 22:07:16 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux EE969338212C905E0425394B658FEDE1CF3BDE4E ki 2016-12-05 22:41:03 2016-12-06 21:41:03 2016-12-05 22:21:28 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux EFCD5C5E5A608DC017980A4F67CCDB51BBA50FD4 ki 2016-12-05 22:41:03 2016-12-06 21:41:03 2016-12-05 22:34:15 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux

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