January 2022 - tor-project - lists.torproject.org

Changes to UX Team meetings in 2022
by Duncan Russell 10 Jan '22

10 Jan '22

Happy new year everyone! As the User Experience Team here at the Tor Project grows, our team meetings will be changing as follows: UX Team meetings will be moving back to a weekly frequency with a new meeting being held each Tuesday, starting tomorrow. The time for our meetings is changing from 1400 UTC to 1700 UTC to better accommodate the timezones the team is distributed across. A new pad for our meetings can be found here: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-ux-team-2022-keep <https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-ux-team-2022-keep> That means our next UX Team meeting will be held on Tuesday January 11th at 1700 UTC in #tor-meeting, and will repeat weekly thereafter. Due to the increased frequency I won’t be sending individual reminders for each meeting any longer, however the minutes and logs will continue to be emailed round post-meeting like usual. 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 *** Duncan Larsen-Russell Product Manager & UX Team Lead duncan(a)torproject.org <mailto:duncan@torproject.org>

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Joydeep's Monthly Status Report for December 2021
by Joydeep Sen Gupta 06 Jan '22

06 Jan '22

Hello and a very happy new year everyone! This is my monthly status report for December, 2021. Helping Tor users in Russia circumvent censorship has been one of the top priorities for last month. On 1st December we began receiving reports from users that some ISPs in Russia have started to block access to Tor [1]. Since then we have received an unprecedented number of help request tickets on frontdesk and I am happy to report that we have been successful in dealing with a vast majority of them (thanks to Gus and Nina as well!) Just to give an idea, we had resolved a total of 1456 tickets between January and November 2021 but 1784 tickets were resolved in the month of December alone. Apart from this, I have also been active on the Tor forum for moderation and answering support queries and on #tor (IRC) and social media. # Frontdesk stats Timeline : 01 Dec 2021 - 31 Dec 2021 Tickets: new: 158 open: 29 resolved: 1784 Breakdown of most frequent tickets (at least 5 RT tickets): 1. 1521 RT Tickets - How to use Tor Bridges in Russia. [2] 2. 41 RT Tickets - Submissions for 'Help Censored Users, Run a Tor Bridge' campaign. [3] 3. 26 RT Tickets - Private Bridge requests. This is not related to the .ru censorship but requests from Tor users in China, Iran, etc. [4] 4. 7 RT Tickets - Tor Browser incompatible with older versions of macOS.[5] 5. 5 RT Tickets - Issues with Tor Browser 11. Most of these issues have been fixed by the latest (11.0.3) update! # Tor Forum Most popular topics (in terms of views) after December 2021: 1. Tor blocked in Russia: how to circumvent censorship. [2] 2. Relays running an unsupported (EOL) Tor version. [6] 3. UI broke after updating [7]. Issues with Tor Browser 11 which have now been resolved by the latest update! If you have any suggestions, questions or want to discuss anything in detail please feel free to get in touch. Thanks, -- Joydeep [1]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/responding-to-tor-censorship-in-russia/1057 [2]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-blocked-in-russia-how-to-circumvent-cens… [3]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/help-censored-users-run-a-tor-bridge/704 [4]: https://support.torproject.org/censorship/connecting-from-china/ [5]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/version-of-tor-browser-compatible-with-macos… [6]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/relays-running-an-unsupported-eol-tor-versio… [7]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/ui-broke-after-updating/535/

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Monthly status report for Nina
by nina13＠riseup.net 06 Jan '22

06 Jan '22

Hi, My role is to support Tor users in Russian. This is my status report for December 2021. I've joined 21 December 2021. Here are the tasks I have accomplished over this period. 1. Introduction to the team. 2. Accounts registration and familiarization with the software and application used. 3. Reading instructions, additional information and tickets closed by the colleagues for better understanding of the problems users may face. 4. Responding to user requests. In total around 600 tickets were closed for the period. 5. Communication with the team on dealing with user issues. 6. Adding three new RT articles in Russian: - How can I help you? - Seven-point basic troubleshooting - How to share your Tor Browser logs 7. Translated the new version of 'How to circumvent Tor censorship in Russia' guide: https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-blocked-in-russia-how-to-circumvent-cens… Kind regards, Nina

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PieroV's monthly status report
by Pier Angelo Vendrame 06 Jan '22

06 Jan '22

Hi everyone! This is my status report for December 2021. I started on December 1st as a developer on the Applications team. Initially, I spent some time learning how the projects are organized and how to build Tor Browser. Then, I started looking at a crash of Tor Browser on Windows (tor-browser#40721). To do so, I found a workaround to add xul.pdb to the installer (see tor-browser-build#31546) and added what I found on the wiki page about debugging Tor Browser on Windows. We can now debug on Windows with source code rather than relying on the disassembly. Eventually, reverting one of Mozilla's patches solved this issue, tor-browser#40698, tor-browser#40706, and we could roll tor-browser-build#40389 back. Mozilla is investigating this problem further. I also had a look at font problems on Ubuntu and Fedora. It was a regression of Firefox bug #1661532, combined with a new Firefox anti-tracking feature added between versions 78 and 91. We worked on a patch with Mozilla (Bugzilla#1745715), which solved tor-browser#40685 and tor-browser-build#40387. My next task was reorganizing the Tor Browser patch set (tor-browser#40562). We wanted to reorganize patches to make Tor Browser work after a small number of patches and make git bisect easier. I proposed some changes and discussed them with GeKo and Richard. I am pushing a reorganized branch either later today or in the next few days. Finally, my last task was looking at the automatic tests, which have been broken for a while. They work with a manual setup of a Python 2 virtual env (as described in my comments on tor-browser-bundle-testsuite#40033). Tor Browser 11 passes most of them. Some others need to be updated, and some just fail. Before the holidays, I was investigating the latter ones. Thanks, and I wish you a happy new year! Pier

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Monthly status report for irl
by Iain Learmonth 05 Jan '22

05 Jan '22

Hi, This is my monthly status report for work completed in December 2021. I am developing a framework for deploying obfs4 bridges in public and private clouds using orchestration tools, with the specific use case being that bridges must be easily destroyable and creatable such that if they are blocked in target networks they can be quickly deployed to a new unblocked location. Between Sponsor 96 and Sponsor 125, there are currently 39 dynamic bridges running. These bridges are distributed either by moat (Sponsor 96) or by Telegram (Sponsor 125). In next month’s update I hope to have some real numbers on the number of users per-country these bridges are supporting though currently there is no easy way to get this information. Some of these bridges are seeing more than 300 average connected users and load balancing may need to be considered once there is more data available. The initial development focussed on two modules for deploying bridges with Terraform on two cloud providers, one using an Openstack API: * https://github.com/sr2c/terraform-hcloud-tor-bridge * https://github.com/sr2c/terraform-openstack-tor-bridge Two new modules have since been added to support the creation of a torrc configuration file natively within Terraform and to generate a ContactInfo string that is compliant with ContactInfo Information Sharing Specification version 2: * https://github.com/sr2c/terraform-null-torrc * https://github.com/sr2c/terraform-null-contactinfo Over the winter holiday, we worked to keep our pool of Telegram bridges updated with accessible bridges, deploying new bridges as required and decommissioning old bridges as they are no longer used. Thanks to others I worked with in the Tor team that gave up some of their holiday time to keep the free and open Internet accessible to those that wouldn’t otherwise have access! This month I plan to generate metrics on the use of these dynamic bridges to inform how many we should be running and provide insight into country-level blocking. The Terraform modules will also continue to see improvements as I move away from the “provisioner” hack and instead use cloud-init to provision the bridges more reliably. Thanks, Iain. -- Iain Learmonth (he/him) SR2 Communications Limited Phone: +44 (0)1224 900 202 | Email: irl(a)sr2.uk<mailto:irl@sr2.uk>

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