November 2021 - tor-project - lists.torproject.org

OnionShare Desktop S96, October progress report
by Micah Lee 05 Nov '21

05 Nov '21

This is the October progress report from the OnionShare Desktop team for the S96 project. We moved the OnionShare Desktop repository from my personal Github account to a new OnionShare GitHub organization, and created new repositories for the mobile app. The desktop team have been working in a separate "censorship" branch, and making pull requests into that branch for the work so far. In October we: * Began work on the quickstart screen that is going to detect censorship and automatically circumvent it * Compiled meek-client into the package * Wrote code to use meek for domain-fronting requests to Moat, and also for the new Censorship API * Added Snowflake support * Added Moat support, so users can anonymously request bridges from BridgeDB * Split the Settings window into two separate windows, Settings and Tor Settings, and completely refactored the Tor Settings to look better and save settings in a smarter way * Based on UX feedback, turned the Settings and Tor Settings windows into tabs, instead of windows Here's a video that shows off a lot of the new stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djaKOpmj3kM Here are the open issues we currently have for this project: https://github.com/onionshare/onionshare/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+labe…

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Anti-censorship meeting notes, 2021 November 4
by Cecylia Bocovich 04 Nov '21

04 Nov '21

Hi everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2021/tor-meeting.2021-11-04-15.59.html and the meeting pad: Anti-censorship work meeting pad -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday November 4th 16:00 UTC Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 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. == Announcements == welcome shelikhoo! == Discussion == - change in proxy NAT types we had an issue with the slow recovery of "unrestricted" proxy NATs opened https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - Confused about the meek client metrics in Turkmenistan https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-combined.png?start=2021-08-… https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40030 snowflake seems to be blocked we have prioritized an easier way to get snowflake connection info: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… == Actions == please fill out the monthly report for september + october https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-monthly-report-keep == Interesting links == https://github.com/xiaokangwang/VLite == Reading group == We will discuss "Measuring QQMail's automated email censorship in China" on 2021-11-11 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3473604.3474560 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. Help with: - Something you need help with. cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2021-11-04 Last week: - some reviews - updates to changelog - NSF grant planning - wrapping up snowflake for v2 release (snowflake#40063) - worked on snowflake + shadow performance work - onboarding preparation tasks - helped debug snowflake domain name resolution (snowflake#40057) - created snowflake#40076 for client network event callbacks - monitored snowflake broker prometheus metrics This week: - automate blocking detection for rotating IP bridges (censorship-analysis#40020) - more snowflake performance work (snowflake#40026) Needs help with: arlolra: 2021-08-12 Last week: - Migrate to v3 of the webextension manifest Next week: - Maybe get back to snowflake-webext #10 - Write up the pitch for our use case for supporting creating PeerConnections in background service workers https://github.com/w3c/webrtc-extensions/issues/77 Help with: - dcf: 2021-11-04 Last week: - rebooted snowflake VPSes https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - made issues for probetest failures https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - looked up issues possibly related to bridge bootstrap failures https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40396#note_2757812 Next week: - will miss 2021-11-11 meeting Help with: agix:2021-11-04 Last week: - Next week: -Adjust BridgeDB Patch to Gitlab -Start with rdsys issue#40 (twitter gettor distributor) Help with: -@meskio: Is it ok for you if I work on the twitter gettor distributor? hanneloresx: 2021-3-4 Last week: - Submitted MR for bridgestrap issue #14 Next week: - Finish bridgestrap #14 - Find new issue to work on Help with: - maxb: 2021-09-23 Last week: - Worked on https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… re: utls for broker negotiation - Had conversation with someone about upstream utls http round tripper https://github.com/refraction-networking/utls/pull/74 - Too busy with work :/ Next week: - _Really_ want to get a PR for utls round tripper meskio: 2021-11-04 Last week: - Make prometheus alerts for snowflake (snowflake#40072) - starting to have an implementation of bridgedb bridge using rdsys (bridgedb#40031) - copy snowflake technical overview into our wiki https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… Next week: - make bridgedb a rdsys distributor (bridgedb#40031) - improve bridgestrap manage of the cache (bridgestrap#27)

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Job Opening - Brand Designer for UX Team
by Erin Wyatt 04 Nov '21

04 Nov '21

Hello, everyone! I am excited to announce that we have a new job opening — we are looking for a Brand Designer to join the UX Team! (https://www.torproject.org/about/jobs/brand-designer/) Please help us spread the word. Thank you! Cheers, Erin Wyatt Director of People Operations (she/her) ewyatt(a)torproject.org PGP: 35E7 2A9F 6655 45F9 2CB6 6624 BA0C 9400 F80F 91CE https://www.torproject.org http://2gzyxa5ihm7nsggfxnu52rck2vv4rvmdlkiu3zzui5du4xyclen53wid.onion/ ———————————————————————>8 # Internet Freedom Nonprofit Seeks Brand Designer for User Experience Team November 2, 2021 The Tor Project, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization advancing human rights and freedoms by creating and deploying free and open source anonymity and privacy technologies, is seeking a Brand Designer to be a part of the User Experience Team. As a Brand Designer, you will be responsible for the creative direction of The Tor Project's identity wherever it is presented, ensuring our visual language is both compelling and cohesive across the organization. Though small, the UX Team at the Tor Project is a "full stack" design team – encompassing the disciplines of graphic design, interface design, experience design, and ethical user research. Our mission is to promote the principles of human-centered design across the organization and the wider Tor community, improving our users' experiences at each point along the way. This is a full-time remote position. Salary for this position is $75,000 USD and there is voluntary opt-in salary transparency for employees and contractors. ## Job Requirements In this role, you will: • Establish a clear identity and brand voice, including the development of a multi-platform brand style guide to provide greater consistency going forward. • Lead the creative development of our annual Year End Campaign, alongside other major fundraising and awareness campaigns throughout the year. - Support broader content marketing efforts on social media, email, the Tor Project blog, press releases and more. • Produce and manage the Tor Project's documentation templates, including reports, presentations, workshop and training materials, and anything else required by the team. • Create high-fidelity web designs, particularly for the websites we operate that are less technical and more brand focussed (e.g. www.torproject.org) • Collaborate extensively with and receive design critiques from the User Experience, Communications, and Fundraising teams. Additionally, you will occasionally be expected to provide ad hoc product design support for the UX Team, including the creation of high-fidelity user interface designs and helping to maintain our web and product design systems. However, you will not be expected to undertake complex User Experience and/or Information Architecture tasks, and support from a dedicated UX Designer will always be available. ### Required experience: • Experience designing primarily for digital brands. Although we do some print material, our audience and brand is online. • Ability to produce original illustrations, iconography and a good understanding of typography (on that last point, we advocate for using Free and Open Source fonts wherever possible). • Excellent proficiency with vector design tools. • High level of organization in all aspects of the design process, from producing clean vectors, to the organization of your design files, and maintaining consistency with established style guides wherever possible. • Comfortable working remotely with a global team distributed across many timezones. • Sufficient proficiency in English to be able to accurately present and receive feedback on your work. ### Preferred experience (not required): • Experience collaborating with other designers in Figma, our vector design tool of choice. However should you not have experience with Figma directly – don't worry! It should be easy for anyone used to Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, Sketch, Adobe XD or similar software to pick up. • A history of designing or advocating for the causes of free-software, open source technology, human-rights, privacy, censorship-circumvention or an interest in internet-freedom in general. • Familiarity with the challenges faced by our users who are subject to surveillance and censorship. - Experience producing 3D graphics or short animations – although this is not neccessary for the role, and would simply be an added bonus. ## How to Apply To apply, submit a cover letter, your CV/resumé and a link to or copy of a portfolio featuring recent samples of your work. In your cover letter, please include the reason you want to work at the Tor Project and explain how your qualifications meet those required in the job description. IMPORTANT: Please email application materials in PDF format (where applicable) to job-ux at torproject dot org with "Brand Designer" in the subject line. ## About The Tor Project The Tor Project's workforce is smart, committed, and hard working. We currently have a paid and contract staff of around 30 developers and operational support people, plus many thousands of volunteers who contribute to our work. The Tor Project is funded in part by government research and development grants, and in part by individual, foundation, and corporate donations. Tor is for everyone, and we are actively working to build a team that represents people from all over the world - people from diverse ethnic, national, and cultural backgrounds; people from all walks of life. We encourage people subject to systemic bias to apply, including people of color, indigenous people, LGBTQIA+ people, women, and any other person who is part of a group that is underrepresented in tech. The Tor Project has a strong culture of transparency and democratic processes, and long-standing community guidelines and cultural norms. Our community is committed to creating an inclusive and welcoming environment. Please read more here: • Our Code of Conduct: https://gitweb.torproject.org/community/policies.git/tree/code_of_conduct.t… • Our Social Contract: https://gitweb.torproject.org/community/policies.git/tree/social_contract.t… • Our Statement of Values: https://gitweb.torproject.org/community/policies.git/tree/statement_of_valu… The Tor Project has a competitive benefits package, including a generous PTO policy, 16 paid holidays per year (including the week between Christmas and New Year's, and a flexible work schedule. Insurance benefits vary by employment status and country of residence. The Tor Project, Inc. is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer.

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minutes from the sysadmin meeting
by Antoine Beaupré 04 Nov '21

04 Nov '21

Hi! TPA had their weekly meeting, and here are its minutes. # Roll call: who's there and emergencies anarcat, kez, lavamind present. no emergencies. # "Star of the weeks" rotation anarcat has been the "star of the weeks" all of the last two months, how do we fix this process? We talked about a few options, namely having per-day schedules and per-week schedules. We settled on the latter because it gives us a longer "interrupt shield" and allows support to deal with a broader range, possibly more than short-term, set of issues. Let's set a schedule until the vacations: * Nov 1st, W45: lavamind * W46: kez * W47: anarcat * W48: lavamind * W49: kez * W50: etc So this week is lavamind, we need to remember to pass the buck at the end of the week. Let's talk about holidays at some point. We'll figure out what people have for a holiday and see if we can avoid overlapping holidays during the winter period. # Q4 roadmap review We did a quick review of the [quarterly roadmap][] to see if we're still on track to close our year! [quarterly roadmap]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/roadmap/2021#q4 We are clearly in a crunch: * Lavamind is prioritizing the blog launch because that's mid-november * Anarcat would love to finish the Jenkins retirement as well * Kez has been real busy with the year end campaign but hopes to complete the bridges rewrite by EOY as well There's also a lot of pressure on the GitLab infrastructure. So far we're throwing hardware at the problem but it will need a redesign at some point. See the [gitlab scaling ticket][] and [storage brainstorm][]. [storage brainstorm]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/40478 [gitlab scaling ticket]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/40479 # Dashboard triage We reviewed only this team dashboard, in a few minutes at the end of our meeting: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/boards/117 We didn't have time to process those: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/web/-/boards (still overflowing) * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/tpa/-/boards (if time permits) # Other discussions The holidays discussion came up and should be addressed in the next meeting. # Next meeting First monday of the month in December is December 6th. Warning: 17:00UTC might mean a different time for you then, it then is equivalent to: 09:00 US/Pacific, 14:00 America/Montevideo, 12:00 US/Eastern, 18:00 Europe/Paris. # Metrics of the month * hosts in Puppet: 89, LDAP: 92, Prometheus exporters: 140 * number of Apache servers monitored: 27, hits per second: 161 * number of Nginx servers: 2, hits per second: 2, hit ratio: 0.81 * number of self-hosted nameservers: 6, mail servers: 8 * pending upgrades: 15, reboots: 0 * average load: 1.40, memory available: 3.52 TiB/4.47 TiB, running processes: 745 * bytes sent: 293.16 MB/s, received: 183.02 MB/s * [GitLab tickets][]: ? tickets including... * open: 0 * icebox: 133 * backlog: 22 * next: 5 * doing: 3 * needs information: 8 * (closed: 2484) [Gitlab tickets]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/boards Our backlog and `needs information` queues are at a record high since April, which confirms the crunch. -- Antoine Beaupré torproject.org system administration

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emergency migration of all websites from Jenkins to GitLab CI
by Antoine Beaupré 03 Nov '21

03 Nov '21

Hi! TL;DR: all websites hosted in Gitolite and built under Jenkins have been (or will shortly be) migrated to GitLab and GitLab CI. This was necessary to work around a difficult Jenkins issue and is in line with our Jenkins retirement roadmap. You may need to update Git remote URLs. # Why? This week we had some big problems with Jenkins which stopped building sites (#40495). In an optimistic mood, anarcat deployed a fix to jenkins that made the builds pass, but revealed another, more serious, issue: translation metadata showed up in the HTML output, garbling most of the lektor sites (#40501). We tried to fix the underlying issue (tpo/web/team#12) but so far failed and @hiro figured the "just right" combination of Python, Debian, And lektor to make the sites build. Major caveat: it worked only in GitLab CI. Because we had planned to move those sites to GitLab CI anyways, we embarked on a rush migration of all the sites. The goal of rushing this transition is to make sure the web folks can still push updates to websites, which was particularly sensitive during this time (year end campaign!) so it was prioritized over other work. Hopefully that goal should have been filled. The other goal, of course, was to continue the Jenkins retirement and we have now pushed past a major landmark in that larger milestone. # What? This is the current status of that migration: 1. 2021.www.torproject.org (tpo/web/team#13), to archive permanently 2. community.torproject.org (tpo/web/community#238), migrated 3. dev.torproject.org (tpo/web/dev#13), not migrated yet, not in production 4. donate.torproject.org (tpo/web/donate-static#54), migrated 5. gettor.torproject.org (tpo/web/gettor-web#2), migrated 6. newsletter.torproject.org (tpo/web/newsletter#22), next to migrate 7. styleguide.torproject.org (tpo/web/styleguide#17), migrated 8. support.torproject.org (tpo/web/support#272), migrated 9. tb-manual.torproject.org (tpo/web/manual#111), migrated 10. www.torproject.org (tpo/web/tpo#254), in progress, needs testing For those keeping count, that's 6 sites migrated out of 10, with only two "production" websites remaining to migrate. Also, because of access control restrictions, we have decided to also migrate the repositories from gitolite to GitLab. This was done mostly because not everyone in the incident team had access to the gitolite repo, and granting access to those repos would have taken too much time. All those repositories (except the translation repo, which still needs to be migrated, see tpo/tpa/team#40497) we already mirrored. If you are blocked on access, file a ticket with TPA and we'll make sure to expedite your request. You will get an error when trying to push to gitolite that tells you what the correct, new URL should be. # When? This happened between last night and today, and will hopefully complete by tomorrow, when the last websites will be migrated to GitLab CI. # Who? This was an awesome team effort: we collaborated over Big Blue Button for a few hours and accomplished a lot, with @anarcat, @hiro, @emmapeel, @lavamind, and @kez all contributing in an awesome team effort. # How? We hope this change won't be too disruptive and would be happy to hear your thoughts. -- Antoine Beaupré torproject.org system administration

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UX team meeting next Tuesday, November 9th
by Duncan Larsen-Russell 02 Nov '21

02 Nov '21

Hi everyone! The User Experience team meeting has been postponed this week, and will be happening on Tuesday November 9th at 1400 UTC in #tor-meeting instead.* https://pad.riseup.net/p/1D8sK8Zy74b_0qclC97I-ux-team-monthly-2020-keep <https://pad.riseup.net/p/1D8sK8Zy74b_0qclC97I-ux-team-monthly-2020-keep> Remember, User Experience team meetings are an open space for discussion around ethical user research, user interface design and the user experience of privacy-enhancing products. See you soon! Duncan [*] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/ux/team/-/wikis/home <https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/ux/team/-/wikis/home> *** Duncan Larsen-Russell Product Manager & UX Team Lead duncan(a)torproject.org <mailto:duncan@torproject.org>

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Community Team meeting notes - 2021 November 1
by gus 01 Nov '21

01 Nov '21

Hello, Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2021/tor-meeting.2021-11-01-13.59.log… and our meeting pad: ## Tor Community Team meeting pad Next meeting: Monday, November 8, 2021 - 1400 UTC Weekly meetings, every Monday at 14:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC (channel is logged while meetings are in progress) ## Goal of this meeting Weekly checkin about the status of Community team work at Tor. ## Links to Useful documents - 'Run a bridge' campaign plan: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/relays/-/issues/24 - Tor Forum: https://forum.torproject.net/ ## Discussion * Forum official release pending tasks: - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40046 * End of Outreachy contribution period: - Note: Nov. 5, 2021 4pm UTC is the deadline for applicants to record contributions and create a final application. ## Updates Name: This week: - What you worked on this week. Help with: - Something you need help with. Gus: This week: - Tor training in Brazil (3-5). I'll be offline: November 3 - 5. - Preparing next Tor training at the end of November. - Work with outreachies their project timeline Joydeep This week: 1. Forum related tasks - moderation and user support 2. User support work on RT and social media 3. Main ticket I will be working on: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40046 Help with: Shreya: This week: - Completed second and third task from project contribution page. - Created a draft internship schedule. - Working on this issue- https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/ux/design/-/issues/12 Help with: - Need feedback on second and third task. - Need feedback on proposed schedule. Should I paste the links here or share them in IRC? - Do I need to answer any community questions in final application? emmapeel: This week: - Been doing more tests with gitlabCI for l10n. - added 2 more tests and links for easy fixes to https://tpo.pages.torproject.net/community/l10n/ - now the lektors say how much translations from enabled languages: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/community/-/jobs/48057 Help with: - Many merges on lego from me and hackerncoder -- The Tor Project Community Team Lead

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