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

Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2022-10-06
by Shelikhoo 07 Oct '22

07 Oct '22

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2022/tor-meeting.2022-10-06-15.58.html And our meeting pad: Anti-censorship work meeting pad -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday Oct 13 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 check-in about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor. Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at the Tor Project and Tor community. == Links to Useful documents == * Our anti-censorship roadmap: * Roadmap: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/boards * The anti-censorship team's wiki page: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/home * Past meeting notes can be found at: * https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/ * Tickets that need reviews: from sponsors we are working on: * All needs review tickets: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/merge_requests?s… * Sponsor 28 * must-do tickets: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/10 * possible tickets: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&… * Sponsor 96 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/24 == Announcements == * == Discussion == * loss of bandwidth at snowflake-01 bridge * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… * the cause is unknown, but it may be something outside our immediate control, like a network issue at the hosting center. operators are investigating it. * will try a reboot later today * low bandwidth at the broker could be the cause of connection failures from Iran * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/96#note_284… * (but there are still users from Iran, still the largest single contingent) * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… * Snowflake Enable Distributed Snowflake Support at broker src shell * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/95 * old proxies were rejected starting monday of this week * everything seems smooth, we saw a drop in polls as expected, but we still seem to be mostly in capacity and it looks worth it to move forward. * plan to make a community announcement about the rejection of old proxies * Iran: * Anything (resources, work, support) that may be needed to help circumvent censorship in Iran right now? * There are multiple reports of snowflake not working in Iran in some ISPs, but so far we didn't receive a more detailed report. * Should we try out new PTs? dnstt, etc? * Get snowflake in Tor Browser updated to support utls * meskio will explore if orbot has support for uTLS in snowflake or if that could be added to be able to see if uTLS solves the problem of snowflake * telegram download bot * apart from a minor issue that needed a one-line fix, launch went well * external contributors have also participated * heavy focus on building new features (especially android builds without downloads.json), which in turn either requires a lot of refactoring * lots of issues concerning third-party libraries again, most bug reports/feature requests have been made to upstream developers * logging has been replaced with aiologger to protect the bot from "hugs of death" * aiologger does not show dates in files. hacky solution: obtain the date when methods of the logger are called, maintainers are not very active * we depend on undocumented behavior. after doing research, it seems OK here * are new versions with regressions OK? * translations * a recent change in how exceptions are communicated to the user has pushed the readiness of translations back * will be expanded once development (mostly) stagnates * existing translations will not be touched until that happens * comments are still a TODO * new experimental gettor backend * authored in go, could potentially be merged together with rdsys * makes sharing large files through platforms with download limits under 100 MB (unless if you pay, or not) possible (by splitting them and providing the users with an app to put it back together) * relies on commands like the other gettor implementations * uses mongodb as a backend * android versions work too * currently private * built-in bridgdes vs 'settings' pool: do we need more built-in obfs4 bridges? == Actions == == Interesting links == * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/onion-support/-/issues/155… * Draft campaign to download Tor in Kazakhstan (preparing for elections) * https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/128 * The Great Firewall of China has blocked google.com and all its subdomains * https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/129 * Large scale blocking of TLS-based censorship circumvention tools in China == Reading group == * We will discuss "" on * * 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 2022-10-06 Last week: - Published an update to the web extension that will cause unrestricted proxies to poll more often (snowflake-webext#58) - Fixed translations for snowflake.torproject.org and the extension (snowflake-webext#61) - responded to a few other issues - talked with UX and applications teams about reputation-based bridge distribution This week: - continue monitoring snowflake proxy pool and implement some improvements - resume Conjure work - wrap up manifest v3 candidate Needs help with: dcf: 2022-10-06 Last week: - more performance optimization and debugging on snowflake-01 bridge https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2022-October/00… - investigated as-yet unexplained drop in bandwidth at snowflake-01 bridge https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - archived snowflake-webext-0.6.2 https://archive.org/details/snowflake-webextension-0.6.2 Next week: - upgrade memory capacity of broker VPS https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - disable non-WireGuard SSH access to snowflake-02 - migrate goptlib to gitlab https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/86#note_282… - try Conjure PT development version https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-dev-introducing-a-conjure-pt-for-tor/4429 Help with: meskio: 2022-10-06 Last week: - deploy rdsys-gettor - investigate gettor misterious freezee (rdsys#129) - refresh captchas for BridgeDB (still in progress) (bridgedb#40061) - update imap libraries in rdsys (rdsys!54) - update obfs4proxy package in debian (obfs4#40008) - create 'First contribution' tickets in rdsys for Outreachy - rdsys updates now signal if they are full update (rdsys!53) - a proposal to refresh builtin bridges in TB (tor-browser-build#40630) Next week: - get uTLS back on obfs4proxy meek (obfs4#40008) Shelikhoo: 2022-10-06 Last Week: - [Merge Request Awaiting] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support to snowflake (snowflake!64) - [Discussion & Deployment] Rollout of Distributed Snowflake Support - [Coding & Deployment] Proposal: Centralized Probe Result Collector (anti-censorship/team#54) - [Research] HTTPT Planning https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/http… - [Research] Generate Charts for presention: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/92#note_283… - [Research] Investigate Distributed Snowflake Rollout Issue (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/95) - [Merge Request] Add upload connection info to rdsys in WebTunnel(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-trans… https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/40920#note_2840555) - [Deployment] Setup Webtunnel at njalla VPS(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/97) - [Deployment] Distributed Snowflake Rollout (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…) Next Week: - [Research] WebTunnel Planning (Continue) - Generate Charts for presention: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/92#note_283… (Continue) - [Research] Add upload connection info to rdsys in WebTunnel - [Research] Fix vantage point summary upload in China Itchy Onion: 2022-10-06 Last week: - continue debuging message dropping issue - study why Tor's use of snowflake doesn't exhibit similar problems and tried to do something similar) This week: - continue debugging the message dropping issue -learning about how to properly trace a connection with the tools provided by RACE) - testing caching connections

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Joydeep's Monthly Status Report for September 2022
by Joydeep Sen Gupta 06 Oct '22

06 Oct '22

Hello everyone! These are my updates from September. In the past month our support channels have received a unprecedented number of user support requests from Iran. Across our official support channels - email, Telegram and Signal - we have resolved more than 4000 support tickets! With help and inputs from my fellow community team members and the localization team, I drafted a user guide on how to circumvent censorship with Tor in Iran[1]. This is very much ongoing work and we are actively monitoring the situation and will keep updating the user guide. With such large volume of support requests there have been some challenges as well. Our cdr.link (Telegram and Signal support channel) has been running into some issues with message reception and delivery through the @TorProjectSupportBot on Telegram and I have been in touch with the cdr.link support team about this (massive shout-out to them for the prompt response to this!) More details in the ticket[2]. While the questions have been mostly around using pluggable transports with Tor Browser, Orbot and Onion Browser in Iran, I have helped a number of users with instructions to verify their Tor Browser install, setting up F-Droid to download Tor Browser for Android (as a result of our main website and mirrors being blocked) and as part of our campaign[3] to run more snowflake proxies, to setup snowflake proxies for folks where internet is not censored. Apart from this, with two Tor Browser Alpha releases I have been involved with testing and overall quality assurance and added documentation about the Telegram GetTor bot to the Tor Browser Manual[4]. That pretty much sums up the highlights from last month and following are some quick stats and highlights from our official support channels. Timeline: 01 - 30 September 2022 # Frontdesk Tickets: open: 58 resolved: 1273 Breakdown of number of RT tickets received with respect to operating system: Breakdown of most frequent tickets by numbers: 1. 1059 RT Tickets - Circumventing Censorship with Tor in Iran. 2. 172 RT Tickets - Private Bridge requests from China[5] 3. 69 RT Tickets - How to use a Tor Bridge in Russia[6] # Telegram and Signal Support channel (cdr.link) tickets resolved: 2925 Most of these tickets have been about circumventing censorship in Iran. The other most frequent ticket we received have been about: 101 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Russia 9 tickets - Using unlisted obfs4 bridges in China 9 tickets - Help with setting up snowflake and other general questions about the pluggable transport # Tor Forum Most popular topics in the Support category (in terms of no. of views): 1. "Iran: Circumventing Censorship with Tor"[1] 2. "Snowflake Chrome extension doesn’t seem to be working for me"[7] 3. "Two-layered access"[8] 4. "Snowflake standalone proxy: NAT behaviour"[9] 5. "Your server has not managed to confirm reachability for its ORPort(s)"[10] Thanks, -- Joydeep [1]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/iran-circumventing-censorship-with-tor/4590 [2]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40092 [3]: https://twitter.com/torproject/status/1573670895696183303 [4]: https://tb-manual.torproject.org/downloading/ [5]: https://support.torproject.org/censorship/connecting-from-china/ [6]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-blocked-in-russia-how-to-circumvent-cens… [7]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/snowflake-chrome-extension-doesnt-seem-to-be… [8]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/two-layered-access/4783 [9]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/snowflake-standalone-proxy-nat-behaviour/4885 [10]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/your-server-has-not-managed-to-confirm-reach…

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Rhatto's Monthly Status Report, September 2022
by rhatto 06 Oct '22

06 Oct '22

Hi all :) This is my monthly status report for September 2022. Main activities during the period: 0. The Onion Plan: * Research on existing proposals for enhancing the Onion Service experience. * Results were presented during the Tor Meeting: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/team/-/wikis/202209MeetingOnionPlan https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/team/-/wikis/202209MeetingOnionPlan/intro… * Collected feedback and started the next iteration, hopefully towards a concrete roadmap :) 1. Deployments for Sponsor 123 (Onion Launchpad landing pages and Onion Services). I would also like to thank @luciole for the work towards an Onionprobe Arch Linux package: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/onionprobe/-/issues/16 -- Silvio Rhatto pronouns he/him

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Marco's Status Report September 2022
by msim 06 Oct '22

06 Oct '22

Hi o/ This month I continued the WebRTC work for Sponsor 131. To recap, S131 is base browser (tor browser, without tor), and as part of base browser, S131 wants WebRTC enabled. This month I continued debugging issues with WebRTC at runtime. Most of this testing was done with WebRTC Samples[1], and some more was done with Mozilla's test page[2]. Various weird issues were encountered, and trying to figure out what Mingw is doing that's breaking it is, well, a challenge :). Ticketed issues are visible on my fork of Tor Browser[3], and after some testing, PieroV also investigated (thanks!) and provided some super helpful information. Unfortunately, due to being busy with some other commitments, I won't be able to continue working on this until the last week of November. At some point in the near future, I will try to write some more comprehensive notes on what's breaking in case anyone wishes to have a look between now and the end of November :) All the best! -Marco [1]: https://webrtc.github.io/samples/ [2]: https://mozilla.github.io/webrtc-landing/ [3]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/msimonelli/tor-browser

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Cecylia's monthly status report, September 2022
by Cecylia Bocovich 06 Oct '22

06 Oct '22

Hi everyone, This is my status report for contract work done in September 2022 1. Help with snowflake development * worked on updating the snowflake webextension for manifest v3 * answering questions on the forum * code reviews * fixed a bug in the snowflake badge where the icon doesn't turn green * worked on tuning the proxy pool for clients with restrictive NATs Cecylia

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[l10n] Updates - moving to Weblate
by emma peel 05 Oct '22

05 Oct '22

ey there friends: We have started the move to weblate. As Tor Project maintains lots of translations, we will take a bit on moving all the projects. For the moment you can already translate some resources in weblate, our project is: https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/tor/ Slowly I will remove the projects in transifex. The repository at https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/translation/ will still be holding the translations for your branches, although there is going to be only one branch for each project. Please make sure you are using that repository, and NOT https://gitweb.torproject.org/translation.git/ - https://git.torproject.org/translation.git/ which is being moved. There were some issues with the way weblate deals with the translation formats, especially JSON files. Let me know if you have any trouble, as I may be able to configure weblate better to suit your needs. You can report any problems by using the 'Weblate Migration' label in gitlab, or you can also contact me. If you want to follow the saga of the move you can see our bugtracker: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/boards?label_name[]=Weblate%20Mi… And of course let me know if you have any issues in weblate. With your comments I mean to improve https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/l10n/-/wikis/Localization-for-d… while I update it for weblate as well. Thanks! emmapeel P/S: if you are a reviewer in transifex, let me know when you open an account in weblate so i can give you reviewer status.

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minutes from the sysadmin meeting
by Antoine Beaupré 05 Oct '22

05 Oct '22

A short and sweet meeting, not much to see here I am afraid. # Roll call: who's there and emergencies anarcat, kez, lavamind, no emergencies. # Dashboard review We did our normal per-user check-in: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/boards?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&… * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/boards?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&… * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/boards?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&… And reviewed the general dashboards: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/boards/117 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/web/-/boards * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/tpa/-/boards # Estimates workshop We worked on what essentially became [TPA-RFC-40][]. Some notes were taken in a private issue, but most of the work should be visible in the above. [TPA-RFC-40]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/policy/tpa-rfc-40-cymru-… # Next meeting We should look at OKRs in November to see if we use them for 2023. A bunch of TPA-RFC (especially TPA-RFC-33) should be discussed eventually as well. Possibly make another meeting next week. # Metrics of the month * hosts in Puppet: 98, LDAP: 98, Prometheus exporters: 168 * number of Apache servers monitored: 31, hits per second: 704 * number of self-hosted nameservers: 6, mail servers: 10 * pending upgrades: 59, reboots: 1 * average load: 1.21, memory available: 4.55 TiB/5.88 TiB, running processes: 737 * disk free/total: 35.19 TiB/93.28 TiB * bytes sent: 405.23 MB/s, received: 264.06 MB/s * planned bullseye upgrades completion date: 2022-10-15 * [GitLab tickets][]: 186 tickets including... * open: 0 * icebox: 144 * backlog: 23 * next: 8 * doing: 4 * needs information: 6 * needs review: 1 * (closed: 2882) [Gitlab tickets]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/boards Upgrade prediction graph lives at https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/howto/upgrades/bullseye/ 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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Nina’s Monthly Status Report, September, 2022
by Nina 04 Oct '22

04 Oct '22

Hi, this is my status report for September. This month was challenging due to the unprecedented amount of user requests from Iran. With my colleagues, I took part in dealing with censorship in this country, keeping up with the Russian-speaking users' requests. So in September, I resolved 2341 tickets: On Telegram (@TorProjectSupportBot) - 2020 On RT (frontdesk@tpo) - 321 It is almost four times more than in August. These requests were mostly from users in Iran - the country which faces the huge unrest and severe internet censorship restrictions. Users mostly requested about using Tor Browser and Orbot, the web-sites where they can download the apps, and asked for bridges and settings for censorship circumvention. However, I was still in contact with users in Turkmenistan, where the censorship situation was worsening. I also collected feedback on possible upcoming censorship events in Kazakhstan [1]. I also helped users in Russian with troubleshooting, mostly related to Android issues. Thanks to our users - I've managed to gather some info on the bug that sometimes happens with Tor Browser for Android[2] and found some issues with bridgeDB email distributor (bridges@tpo) not replying to users with Gmail account[3]. [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/onion-support/-/issues/155… [2] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41289#n… [3] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgedb/-/issues/40060

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PieroV's Monthly Status Report, September 2022
by Pier Angelo Vendrame 03 Oct '22

03 Oct '22

Hi everyone! Here is my status report for September 2022. This month I have worked on refactoring tor-launcher and moving it to the main Tor Browser patchset [0]. It took me a long time, but I am sure it will help the Arti transition, too. Apart from that, I added a patch to mitigate a font fingerprinting vector [1] and managed to get another patch upstreamed to Firefox [2]. Finally, last week I started to unify the GeckoView patch set that we use for Android with the patch set we use for the desktop version of Tor Browser [3]. Best, Pier [0] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests… [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41116 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1768907 [3] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41308

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