April 2020 - tor-project - lists.torproject.org

Are there countries where using Tor is illegal?
by Cristian Consonni 11 May '25

11 May '25

Hi, (Sorry if this question has already been asked in the past, feel free to point me to the relevant resources.) I know that the legal FAQs by the EFF state that: «we believe that running a Tor relay — including an exit relay that allows people to anonymously send and receive traffic — is legal under U.S. law.»[1] I also know there is a list of countries for which there is legislation that exclude communication service providers from liability. They are indicated in the Legal of the Tor Exit Guidelines page[2], they are USA, Germany, Netherlands, Austria, France, and Sweden. >From some articles in the press[3a][3b] it may be illegal - depending on how you interpret the wording[*] - to use Tor (and other technologies such as VPNs or proxies) in the UAE, with fines ranging in the millions of dirhams (hundreds of thousand of dollars). A couple of weeks ago it was discussed - on this list as well - that a law was introduced to the state parliament to ban Tor[4a][4b]. This follows a case of some months ago of a Russian Tor exit node operator being arrested for inciting mass riots and terrorism[4c][4d]. The idea of blocking VPNs or Tor seems to have already been considered in the past[4e]. This infographic about pluggable transports[5] suggests access to the Tor network is censored or limited in China, Uzbekistan, Iran, and Kazakhstan. Tor being censored orblocked may be different from it being illegal. What about other countries? Is there a place where I can find more about this topic? Cristian [1]: https://www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq.html.en [2]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorExitGuidelines [3a]: http://www.emirates247.com/news/emirates/dh500-000-fine-if-you-use-fraud-ip… [3b]: http://news.softpedia.com/news/people-caught-using-vpns-tor-or-proxies-in-t… [*]: «Whoever uses a fraudulent computer network protocol address (IP address) by using a false address or a third-party address by any other means for the purpose of committing a crime or preventing its discovery» [4a]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2017-June/043293.html [4b]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/22055 [4c]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2017-April/043109.html [4d]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/24/dmitry-bogatov-tor-russia/ [4e]; https://torrentfreak.com/vpn-and-tor-ban-looming-on-the-horizon-for-russia-… [5]: https://www.torproject.org/images/PT/2016-07-how-to-use-PT.png

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Anti-censorship meeting notes, 30 Apr 2020
by Philipp Winter 30 Apr '20

30 Apr '20

Hi all, Here are our meeting minutes: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2020/tor-meeting.2020-04-30-17.59.html And here is our meeting pad: Anti-censorship work meeting pad -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday April 30th 18:00 UTC Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 18:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC (channel is logged while meetings are in progress). == Goal of this meeting == Weekly checkin about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor. Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at Tor. == Links to Useful documents == * Our anti-censorship roadmap: https://gitlab.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/roadmap/boards * Our roadmap consists of a subset of trac tickets. For 2020 Q1, the trac keyword is anti-censorship-roadmap-2020Q1 * Next planning session: last week of April * The anti-censorship team's wiki page: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/AntiCensorshipTeam * Past meeting notes can be found at: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/ * GetTor's roadmap: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/torproject/anti-censorship/gettor-proj… * Tickets that need reviews: from sponsors we are working on: * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor30 * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor28 * Anti-censorship related tickets that we want other teams to fix: * https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-tickets-keep ------------------------- --- April 30th 2020 -- ------------------------- == Announcements == * We created anti-censorship-alerts(a)lists.tp.o for service outage alerts. * Feel free to subscribe. * https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/anti-censorship-alerts * Alerts for * gman999's sysmon instance * prometheus instance * nagions instances * gettor's email autoresponder * bridgedb's email autoresponder * Also, send email there if any of our services are broken. == Discussion == * We should monitor indicators that tell us if we're on the right track * # of bridge users * # of bridge users from bridges that were privately distributed * # of bridges/snowflakes * volume of traffic on snowflake / meek bridges * snowflake https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/5481936581E23D2D178105D44DB6… * meek https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/8F4541EEE3F2306B7B9FEF1795EC… * Make it easier for people to report bugs -> gives us an idea of what users are struggling with * Blog more and hear from users in comments * Read frontdesk emails & get a sense of the variety of questions and how many get resolved * Track a project's "activity" by keeping track of its commits * Check what other people are tracking, in different contexts, and see if we can apply their indicators * Track # of user-reported tickets * Number of countries where vanilla Tor Browser works / doesn't work, where Tor Browser + default bridges work/doesn't work, and + obfs4. == Actions == * Please add your April 2020 work highlights to our monthly team report: * https://pad.riseup.net/p/CANAMyvGfb-wtKfzN2R_ == Interesting links == * https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/understanding-and-circumventing-network-censo… * Surveillance Self-Defense: Understanding and Circumventing Network Censorship * https://protonmail.com/blog/anti-censorship-alternative-routing/ * Protonmail will introduce a new "alternative routing" feature. * No technical details. May be domain fronting. == Reading group == * We will discuss "MassBrowser: Unblocking the Censored Web for the Masses, by the Masses" on April 30 * https://censorbib.nymity.ch/#Nasr2020a * https://massbrowser.cs.umass.edu/ * Questions to ask and goals to have: * What aspects of the paper are questionable? * Are there immediate actions we can take based on this work? * Are there long-term actions we can take based on this work? * Is there future work that we want to call out, in hopes that others will pick it up? == Updates == Name: This week: - What you worked on this week. Next week: - What you are planning to work on next week (related to anti-censorship work). Help with: - Something you may need help with. phw: This week (2020-04-30): * Emailed a bunch of people to get an idea of meek-azure's financial situation. * Offboarding activities. * Addressed feedback for our lightweight censorship analyser (#30794). * Asked for new mailing list for anti-censorship service alerts. * Asked for Nagios alerts to be sent there (#34028). * Reviewed #33666, #33835, and #34035. * Continued work at wolpertinger. Added code to read serge's extrainfo descriptors. * Started taking a look at ICLab's measurements of our default bridges. * More talking to sysadmins to finally move our monitoring forward. Next week: * Help with: * #30794 Gaba: () Last week (2020-03-30): * not much related to anti-censorship This week (planned): * anti-censorship retrospective cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2020-04-30 Last week: - so many reviews - refactored some GetTor code (#34035) - rebased pion-webrtc update patch in tbb (#33576) - looked at datachannel timeout in client (#34042) - squished some new snowflake bugs (#34049) - update node wrtc package (#34053) - updated snowbox to work with new repo setups - updated snowflake web proxy - started building snowflake for android (#28672) - squashed some GetTor bugs (#34061, #34062, #34027) - kept up with sponsor 28 evaluation phase This week: - test snowflake for android on mobile device - set up some kind of NAT topology testing suite (#25595) - figure out what we need to do to revive the twitter responder in GetTor (#33036) - look at old GetTor mirrors (#33893) - investigate #33669 - clean out and update any old tickets lying around - help with sponsor 28 PI meeting slides Needs help with: - review of GetTor fixes (#34061, #34062) juggy : Temporary hiatus due to finals prep This week: - Researched XUL and dug into previous conversations around integrating Tor Launcher into Tor Browser, why porting to Web Extensions might not work, etc. Next week: - Implement audio captchas in moat, figure out how to reduce audio captcha request size - Keep studying BridgeDB Help with: - arlolra: 2020-04-30 Last week: - some sporadic review Next week: - follow ups to #33365 - start on #31201 Help with: - follow up review of #33365 dcf: 2020-04-30 Last week: - merged snowflake turbotunnel branch and redeployed bridge (#33745, thanks arma and cohosh) - removed client-side buffering from snowflake, and related refactorings (#33897, #33982, #33984, #33994, #33995, #33996, #33997, #34002, #34049, #34050, thanks cohosh and arlolra) - filed a ticket to reduce snowflake client connection timeout (#34042) - made a branch for updating to turbotunnel snowflake in Tor Browser (#34043) Next week: - patch to reduce connection timeout (#34042) - convert snowflake turbotunnel merge (#34043) into a Tor Browser ticket - check with Kyle about snowflake fingerprinting results - share access to the snowflake broker CDN configuration (#30510) Help with: cjb: 2020-04-30 Last week: - gonna be afk with kids Next week: Help with: agix:2020-04-30 Last week: - Incoperated phw's feedback on #33835 and #31528 Next week: - finalize #33835 and #31528 - Pick up a new ticket Help with: - catalyst: 2020-04-16 last week: - more work on #5304 (PT outbound bind address) - started looking at #29128 (assemble bridge line) this week: - more background research and work on s28/s30 tickets thymbahutymba: 2020-04-02 Last week: - CI/CD pipeline for multiarch docker images, which has a problem with the apt tor version even though the apt repository have been changed into the Dockerfile. Next week: Help with:

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Community Council activity summary, October 2019 - March 2020
by Taylor Yu 30 Apr '20

30 Apr '20

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Hi all, Here is a brief summary of the Community Council's activities from October 2019 through March 2020. March 2020 The Council participated in the membership audit process. February 2020 The Council talked with some people from the relay operator community about extending the code of conduct for relay operation. It probably makes more sense to make a separate guidelines document about ethical relay operation. January 2020 The Council started a dialog with grants and communications teams about making sure the potential donors and guest bloggers are aligned with our community values. December 2019 no significant actions November 2019 The Council reviewed an existing community health concern. October 2019 The Council received an email containing suggestions for revising the Code of Conduct. One immediately actionable suggestion was to fix an incorrect email address for the Community Council. An appropriate email alias was created to work around the problem. - --- end of summary --- This summary will also be posted on the Council's wiki page. If you have any feedback about this summary format, or any other feedback to the Council, please contact us at tor-community-council(a)lists.torproject.org. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 iQGcBAEBCAAGBQJeqjBDAAoJEKMvF/0AVcMFQoML/iKK2UbDWpbBQjweas22EROF MDSIgoBD35ywGV7qlWUNO/sZCFhgs/c4HSsmC2xCvUD1FjF/J9YBDzIHmCX6Ew4o TkK39/yAo3P+IbRFDxcNcEPaGT/8MqlpMUC6lvic5CmygLxRJeBi49j4bdXcI1to 7M0Omi2cbK7RFUQCxk6VrmSuE+C/NwUbEZPzCRQgzDXPFtoecIip6EtbupciDFFz ePRItO6mlyqpBoqex+f5TrxDfhuvmqGpD4ld93azsWWO2dFK9M8pMt+cNnxA/lMl KCoIzVO/Cy/jcQ8IkRz+TeVROQrJtpxjRCVoS55bDJYhtT3sGgLGjv0QK8N0xx9Q RC4k3rFOEpUmYaVALChSL5isxIS86m+paxvHBH5avCqBWD2vYz3UiFgNZRHzRJut DkmTQNgJzKzfpmm9KER9yleNDvb4OeboTficC6pVipAr4xmY4mgXmbrqduO75gEi m+Eo02YD+qVWJKqh0mKyDbqDd6VXYKyodfJqqwGVXA== =hYTD -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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February Fundraising Report
by Sarah Stevenson 29 Apr '20

29 Apr '20

Below you will find the Fundraising Team's February report. Please let us know if you have any questions! ## Grants DRL: We have been working on submitting two full proposals to DRL, one for usability (joint project with Tails & Guardian Project) and another for scalability. We will submit these at the beginning of March. Zcash Foundation: Zcash Foundation granted us $50,000 to work on the Specification phase of the Walking Onions proposal[1]. Thank you Chelsea for making this connection, and to Nick for helping to write the proposal and advocate for the work. We still need funding for the proof-of-concept and implementation phases of Walking Onions. If you know someone, or some entity, that might be interested in supporting this work, please let us know! Nathan Cummings Foundation: A joint proposal with FPF we submitted was declined. DIAL Open Source Center: We submitted a small proposal to DIAL to help support the Walking Onions work. OTF: We are working on a third round of OTF revisions on the Tor Browser proposal. We submitted a Learning Lab application to help publicize the onion services work in Sponsor 30. OTF also agreed to fund an in-person meeting to do some work on DDoS protections as it pertains to high profile onion services. We submitted some informal requests to the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism & Ideas and the Omidyar Foundation. We also met with the Internet Society Foundation. ## Donate Buttons on Website We closely monitor organic donations made via donate.torproject.org. By ‘organic’ we mean non-monthly donations generated primarily via donate links throughout our webpages. It is important to track this income because it accounted for $231,472 in FY18, $239,479 in FY19, and $334,418 so far in FY20. Small changes to our web pages can affect this income. This graph[2] shows average daily online income per month. This clearly illustrates the importance of our EOY campaign and the call to action on about:tor. There are a few other events to note in the past year. The new website launched in March 2019. The first iteration did not include a prominent donate button and the average daily income decreased until we made the donate button yellow April 26th. Then average daily income increased modestly, and increased significantly after May 26th when we added the donate link to about:tor. Since that addition, we have been averaging $600 per day in organic donations (except during the campaign when the average was significantly more.) At the end of February 2020, we saw a sharp decline in these organic donations. We suspected the redesign of /download was partially responsible. Antonela quickly added the yellow donate button back to that page and we saw donations go back up to about where they were in early February. This prompted us to take a look at other modifications and we decided to highlight the donate language on /thank-you and the donate language on about:tor will be updated upon the next release. We are also beginning plans to update donate.torproject.org and are working with Giant Rabbit to be able to make those changes ourselves. ## Events We are still planning for the major donor event in San Francisco March 26th and foundation lunch in New York April 13th. Hopefully covid-19 will not alter those plans. ## Newsletter/Email list We are still seeing around 10,000 people join our email list each month and now have over 179,000 subscribers. Since the list was so large, it was taking around 24 hours to send an email message to the whole group. Giant Rabbit made some changes to our system and now a bulk email is delivered in around 3 hours. Each new subscriber gets a welcome email a day or two after they join the list and then are offered a sticker pack for a $17 donation a few weeks after that. [1] https://grants.zfnd.org/proposals/1642205075-walking-onions-scaling-the-tor… <https://grants.zfnd.org/proposals/1642205075-walking-onions-scaling-the-tor…> [2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/attachment/wiki/org/teams/Fundrais… <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/attachment/wiki/org/teams/Fundrais…> Sarah Stevenson (she/her) Fundraising Director The Tor Project sstevenson(a)torproject.org Take back the internet with Tor. https://donate.torproject.org/ Public Key: 93B3 AC08 4257 FA3D D4BB 8E95 CC08 5DBA C015 612A

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Anti-censorship meeting notes, 23 Apr 2020
by Philipp Winter 23 Apr '20

23 Apr '20

Hi all, Here are our meeting minutes: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2020/tor-meeting.2020-04-23-17.58.html And here is our meeting pad: Anti-censorship work meeting pad -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday April 23th 18:00 UTC Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 18:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC (channel is logged while meetings are in progress). == Goal of this meeting == Weekly checkin about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor. Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at Tor. == Links to Useful documents == * Our anti-censorship roadmap: https://gitlab.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/roadmap/boards * Our roadmap consists of a subset of trac tickets. For 2020 Q1, the trac keyword is anti-censorship-roadmap-2020Q1 * Next planning session: last week of April * The anti-censorship team's wiki page: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/AntiCensorshipTeam * Past meeting notes can be found at: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/ * GetTor's roadmap: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/torproject/anti-censorship/gettor-proj… * Tickets that need reviews: from sponsors we are working on: * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor30 * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor28 * Anti-censorship related tickets that we want other teams to fix: * https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-tickets-keep ------------------------- --- April 23th 2020 -- ------------------------- == Announcements == * We've now officially split snowflake into two repositories * Go implementation: gitweb.torproject.org/pluggable-transports/snowflake.git/ * Web-based proxy code: gitweb.torproject.org/pluggable-transports/snowflake-webext.git/ * Kyle, the researcher who is investigating Snowflake's network fingerprint, has found differences in Snowflake's DTLS handshake (different offered extensions) relative to Facebook Messenger, Hangouts, and Discord. He is planning to file a ticket with details. == Discussion == * == Actions == * == Interesting links == * == Reading group == * We will discuss "MassBrowser: Unblocking the Censored Web for the Masses, by the Masses" on April 30 * https://censorbib.nymity.ch/#Nasr2020a * Questions to ask and goals to have: * What aspects of the paper are questionable? * Are there immediate actions we can take based on this work? * Are there long-term actions we can take based on this work? * Is there future work that we want to call out, in hopes that others will pick it up? == Updates == Name: This week: - What you worked on this week. Next week: - What you are planning to work on next week (related to anti-censorship work). Help with: - Something you may need help with. phw: This week (2020-04-23): * Offboarding meeting for Tor's exit scanner. * Spent a bit of time looking into porting exitmap to Python 3. * Reviewed #32912, #33835, and #31528. * More improvements to script that tests BridgeDB's email autoresponder (#12802). * Some organisational tasks (TTP grant, DARPA PI meeting). * Asked around wrt status of meek-azure. * Moved forward with "censorship snapshot" (#28531). * In the process, improved our lightweight censorship analyser, which can help with that (#30794). * More thinking about feedback loop between BridgeDB and OONI. * There are similarities to Salmon: we may want to implement a simplified Salmon for this task. Next week: * Help with: * #28531 Gaba: () Last week (2020-03-30): * not much related to anti-censorship This week (planned): * anti-censorship retrospective cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2020-04-23 Last week: - lots of meetings - discussed #28325 and #33953 with GeKo and boklm - revised solution to snowflake proxy failures (#33666) - revised and merged PRs to separate snowflake repos (#33593) - merged cleanup of gettor scripts (#32912) - popets things - sponsor 28 evaluation work - started looking at GetTor twitter responder and telegram bot work (#33036, #22011) This week: - get a tor browser android build running - start working on snowflake for android (#28672) - set up some kind of NAT topology testing suite (#25595) - look into setting up a TURN server (#25596) - figure out what we need to do to revive the twitter responder in GetTor (#33036) - look at old GetTor mirrors (#33893) Needs help with: - review of snowflake proxy failure solution (#33666) juggy : This week: - Researched XUL and dug into previous conversations around integrating Tor Launcher into Tor Browser, why porting to Web Extensions might not work, etc. Next week: - Implement audio captchas in moat, figure out how to reduce audio captcha request size - Keep studying BridgeDB Help with: - arlolra: 2020-04-16 Last week: - start on #33365 - review of #33593 Next week: - follow ups to #33365 - review of #33666 - start on #31201 Help with: - review of #33365 dcf: 2020-04-23 Last week: - reviewed Go 1.13 upgrade (#32027) - commented on design for self-limiting failing proxies (#33666) Next week: - respond to feedback on turbotunnel merge branch (#33745) - branch for snowflake turbotunnel merge into Tor Browser - share access to the snowflake broker CDN configuration (#30510) Help with: cjb: 2020-04-23 Last week: - gonna be afk with kids Next week: Help with: agix:2020-04-23 Last week: - Kept working on #33835 Next week: - finalize #33835 - finalize #31528 Help with: - catalyst: 2020-04-16 last week: - more work on #5304 (PT outbound bind address) - started looking at #29128 (assemble bridge line) this week: - more background research and work on s28/s30 tickets thymbahutymba: 2020-04-02 Last week: - CI/CD pipeline for multiarch docker images, which has a problem with the apt tor version even though the apt repository have been changed into the Dockerfile. Next week: Help with:

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update on team meetings this week
by isabela 20 Apr '20

20 Apr '20

Hi there, Here is an update regarding team meetings this coming week, as you can see must teams wont be having their weekly meetings this week. We will send another update at the end of the week regarding when meetings will be resumed. Teams that will not have meeting: Metrics Network Community Network Health Browser www (contact: hiro) UX Teams that will have meeting: anti-censorship Please email teams at their email lists if you have any specific questions for them. thank you, isabela -- Isabela Bagueros Executive Director The Tor Project https://www.torproject.org http://expyuzz4wqqyqhjn.onion/

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Anti-censorship meeting notes, 16 Apr 2020
by Philipp Winter 16 Apr '20

16 Apr '20

Hi all, Here are our meeting minutes: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2020/tor-meeting.2020-04-16-17.59.html And here is our meeting pad: Anti-censorship work meeting pad -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday April 16th 18:00 UTC Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 18:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC (channel is logged while meetings are in progress). == Goal of this meeting == Weekly checkin about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor. Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at Tor. == Links to Useful documents == * Our anti-censorship roadmap: https://gitlab.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/roadmap/boards * Our roadmap consists of a subset of trac tickets. For 2020 Q1, the trac keyword is anti-censorship-roadmap-2020Q1 * Next planning session: last week of April * The anti-censorship team's wiki page: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/AntiCensorshipTeam * Past meeting notes can be found at: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/ * GetTor's roadmap: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/torproject/anti-censorship/gettor-proj… * Tickets that need reviews: from sponsors we are working on: * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor30 * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor28 * Anti-censorship related tickets that we want other teams to fix: * https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-tickets-keep ------------------------- --- April 16th 2020 -- ------------------------- == Announcements == * == Discussion == * We have a new respository for the snowflake webextension repo: https://gitweb.torproject.org/snowflake-webext.git/ * Do we want this in pluggable-transports/ ? * result of discussion: yes, under pluggable-transports/. == Actions == * == Interesting links == * http://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/implementing-elligator * Relates to the obfs4/extra25519 deprecation. "There I was, implementing my own crypto, with nothing to compare to. No reference implementation, no test vectors, nothing. For use cases that are best justified when the stakes are frighteningly high." == Reading group == * We will discuss "SymTCP: Eluding Stateful Deep Packet Inspection with Automated Discrepancy Discovery" on April 16 * https://censorbib.nymity.ch/#Wang2020a * Questions to ask and goals to have: * What aspects of the paper are questionable? * Are there immediate actions we can take based on this work? * Are there long-term actions we can take based on this work? * Is there future work that we want to call out, in hopes that others will pick it up? == Updates == Name: This week: - What you worked on this week. Next week: - What you are planning to work on next week (related to anti-censorship work). Help with: - Something you may need help with. phw: This week (2020-04-16): * Created pull request for OONI to remove noisebridge01. * Rebased and merged #17548 (removed PGP support from BridgeDB). * Wrote monthly team report. * Followed CovidCon stream a bit. * Merged docker obfs4 bridge patch. * More work on #32740 (BridgeDB feedback loop). Reached out to Censored Planet and ICLab for feedback. * https://gitlab.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/wolpertinger * Closed #33464 after Yawning took care of missing dependency in his obfs4 repo. * GSoC reviews and organisation. Next week: * Help with: * Gaba: () Last week (2020-03-30): * not much related to anti-censorship This week (planned): * anti-censorship retrospective cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2020-04-16 Last week: - created ticket to track down very old GetTor mirrors (#33893) - reviewed TurboTunnel merge branch (#33745) - reviewed BridgeDB GPG patch (#17548) - cleaned up old GetTor scripts (#32912) - sorted out snowflake repository changes (#33593) - implemented a partial solution for snowflake proxy failures (#33666) - gave feedback on OONI/bridgedb feedback loop (#32740) - reviewed GSoC proposals This week: - Resume obfs4 tests (#31701, #32657) - see if i can help push snowflake for android along (#28672) - set up some kind of NAT topology testing suite (#25595) - look into setting up a TURN server (#25596) - take a look at reviving the twitter responder in GetTor (#33036) - look at old GetTor mirrors (#33893) - review of #33365 Needs help with: - review of GetTor scripts clean up (#32912) hiro? - review of snowflake repository changes (#33593) - review of snowflake proxy failure solution (#33666) juggy : This week: - Researched XUL and dug into previous conversations around integrating Tor Launcher into Tor Browser, why porting to Web Extensions might not work, etc. Next week: - Implement audio captchas in moat, figure out how to reduce audio captcha request size - Keep studying BridgeDB Help with: - arlolra: 2020-04-16 Last week: - start on #33365 - review of #33593 Next week: - follow ups to #33365 - review of #33666 - start on #31201 Help with: - review of #33365 dcf: 2020-04-16 Last week: - made a snowflake turbotunnel merge branch and Tor Browser packages (#33745) - archived WIP snowflake turbotunnel packages - https://archive.org/details/tor_project_archives?and%5B%5D=subject%3Asnowfl… Next week: - respond to feedback on turbotunnel merge branch (#33745) - branch for snowflake turbotunnel merge into Tor Browser - remember uniuri is not needed anymore too - share access to the snowflake broker CDN configuration (#30510) Help with: cjb: 2020-04-16 Last week: - gonna be afk with kids Next week: Help with: agix:2020-04-09 Last week: - Worked on #33835 and submitted patch Next week: - Implement feedback on #33835 - Check out check.torproject's code base Help with: - catalyst: 2020-04-16 last week: - more work on #5304 (PT outbound bind address) - started looking at #29128 (assemble bridge line) this week: - more background research and work on s28/s30 tickets thymbahutymba: 2020-04-02 Last week: - CI/CD pipeline for multiarch docker images, which has a problem with the apt tor version even though the apt repository have been changed into the Dockerfile. Next week: Help with: Hiro: (last updated before 2020-01-09) Started restoring Twitter Responder. When retrieving tweets I need to check for new tweets only otherwise Gettor will end up responding to old back log and already answered messages. <-- is this #27330 ? Next Week: - Work on gettor specs <-- Is this #3781? - More with review of strings and website content and translation

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weekly meetings to move gitlab migraiton forward
by Gaba 15 Apr '20

15 Apr '20

Hey! We are going to be meeting every Wednesday at 1700 UTC in #tor-meeting in irc.oftc.net The agenda will be - where we are at - next steps BUT for today, April 15th, we are meeting at 1800 UTC in the same place. cheers, gaba [0] context: https://nc.torproject.net/s/3MpFApQ7cwfrPZE -- Project Manager: Network, Anti-Censorship and Metrics teams gaba at torproject.org she/her are my pronouns GPG Fingerprint EE3F DF5C AD91 643C 21BE 8370 180D B06C 59CA BD19

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minutes from the sysadmin meeting
by Antoine Beaupré 14 Apr '20

14 Apr '20

Hello everyone! We held our usual meeting a week late in April. But still, here are the minutes, preceeded by a usual, carefully hand-crafted variable header by your favorite editor (the human, not the software). Stay safe, inside, wash your hands, and take care of each other. :) # Roll call: who's there and emergencies anarcat, hiro and weasel are present (gaba late) # Roadmap review We changed our meeting template to just do a live roadmap review from Trac instead of listing all the little details of all the things we did in the last month. The details are in Trac. So we reviewed the roadmap at: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/SysadminTeam> SVN, Solr got postponed to april. kvm3 wasn't completed either but should be by the end of the week. hopefully kvm4 will be done by the end of the month but is also likely to be postponed. We might need to push on the buster upgrade schedule if we don't want to miss the "pre-LTS" window. We also note that we don't have a good plan for the GitLab deployment, on the infrastructure side of things. We'll need to spend some time to review the infra before anarcat leaves. # Voice meetings Anarcat and hiro have started doing weekly checkups, kind of informally, on the last two mondays, and it was pretty amazing. We didn't want to force a voice meeting on everyone without first checking in, but maybe we could just switch to that model it's mostly just hiro and anarcat every week anyways. The possibilities considered were: 1. we keep this thing where some people checkin by voice every week, but we keep a monthly text meeting 2. we switch everything to voice 3. we end the voice experiment completely and go back to text-monthly-only meetings Anarcat objected to option 3, naturally, and favored 2. Hiro agreed to try, and no one else objected. A little bit of the rationale behind the discussion was discussed in the meeting. IRC has the advantage that people can read logs if they don't come. But we will keep minutes of the monthly meetings even if they are by voice, so people can read those, which is better than reading a backlog, because it's edited (by yours truly). And if people miss the meeting, it's their responsability: there are announcements and multiple reminders before the meeting, and they seem to have little effect on attendance. So meetings are mostly hiro and anarcat, with gaba and weasel sometimes joining in. So it makes little sense to force IRC on those two workers to accomodate people that don't get involved as much. Anarcat also feels the IRC meetings are too slow: this meeting took 30 minutes to evaluate the roadmap, and did not get much done. He estimates this would have taken only 10 minutes by voice and the end result would have been similar, if not better: the tickets would have been updated anyways. So the plan for meetings is to have weekly checkins and a monthly meeting, by voice, on Mumble. * weekly checkins: timeboxed to 15 minutes, with an optional 45 minutes worksession after if needed * monthly meetings: like the current IRC meetings, except by voice. timeboxed to 60 minutes still, replacing the weekly checkin for that week We use Mumble for now, but we could consider other platforms. (Somewhat off-topic: Anarcat wrote a [review of the Mumble UX][] that was somewhat poorly received by the Mumble team, so don't get your hopes up about the Mumble UI improving.) [review of the Mumble UX]: https://anarc.at/blog/2020-04-09-mumble-dreams/ # Other discussions No other discussion was brought up. # Next meeting Next "first monday of the month", which is 2020-05-04 15:00UTC (11:00:00EDT, 17:00CET). # Metrics of the month * hosts in Puppet: 76, LDAP: 80, Prometheus exporters: 123 * number of apache servers monitored: 31, hits per second: 168 * number of nginx servers: 2, hits per second: 2, hit ratio: 0.89 * number of self-hosted nameservers: 6, mail servers: 10 * pending upgrades: 1, reboots: 0 * average load: 1.03, memory available: 322.57 GiB/1017.81 GiB, running processes: 460 * bytes sent: 211.97 MB/s, received: 123.01 MB/s * completion time of stretch major upgrades: 2020-07-16 Upgrade prediction graph still lives at https://help.torproject.org/tsa/howto/upgrades/ Now also available as the main Grafana dashboard. Head to <https://grafana.torproject.org/>, change the time period to 30 days, and wait a while for results to render. -- Antoine Beaupré torproject.org system administration

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Tor Browser Release meeting this week - Wednesday 15th April @ 18UTC
by Pili Guerra 14 Apr '20

14 Apr '20

Hi everyone, This is your usual reminder of the Tor Browser Release meeting happening this Wednesday 15th April @ 18UTC. We will be discussing the 9.5stable release date this week, among other things :) Thanks, Pili — Project Manager: Tor Browser, UX and Community teams pili at torproject dot org gpg 3E7F A89E 2459 B6CC A62F 56B8 C6CB 772E F096 9C45

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