tor-project January 2023

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Joydeep's Monthly Status Report for December 2022
by Joydeep Sen Gupta 07 Jan '23

07 Jan '23

Hello everyone! :) Here are my updates from December. I resolved 1120 tickets via email and 203 tickets on our telegram/signal user support channel. With Tor Browser 12 release, I, along with @nina13, finished reviewing and updating[1] all of our internal support documentation, including all articles and templates we have on our Request Tracker and cdr.link support channels. I was also involved with some testing before the release. Post-release we got a few reports about false positives with anti-virus software[2] on updating to Tor Browser 12 and issue with rearranging bookmarks in Tor Browser with drag and drop not working[3]. All of these issues have been resolved with the 12.0.1 Tor Browser update. We discovered a issue[4] regarding sending emails from our email ticketing system (Request Tracker) but a big shout-out to anarcat and TPA for resolving the issue and also writing a script to resend all the emails from the affected time span. Continuing my work supporting users in Iran[5], I resolved around 180 tickets across our support channels. Now, a quick overview of our user support channels: Timeline: 01 - 31 December 2022 # Frontdesk tickets created: 936 tickets resolved: 1442 Most frequent tickets by numbers: 1. 45 RT Tickets - Private Bridge requests from China[6] 2. 40 RT Tickets - How to use a Tor Bridge in Russia[7] 3. 12 RT Tickets - Anti-virus false positives with Tor Browser 12[2] # Telegram and Signal Support channel (cdr.link) tickets resolved: 751 The most frequent tickets we received have been about: 1. 272 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Russia 2. 173 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Iran 3. 85 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Turkmenistan 4. 16 tickets - Using unlisted obfs4 bridges in China # Tor Forum Most popular topics in the Support category (in terms of number of views): 1. "Image load error (HTTP/2 403 Forbidden) on some websites (with Tor Browser)" [8] 2. "Newbie: snowflake abuse by local government?"[9] 3. "Websites blocking Tor"[10] 4. "Unable to run Tor Browser 12 for Linux after updating"[11] 5. "Problems with mega.nz (post Tor Browser 12 update)"[12] Thanks, -- Joydeep [1]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40096#note_286… [2]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/norton-360-antivirus-now-considers-tor-brows… [3]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41520 [4]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41016 [5]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/iran-circumventing-censorship-with-tor/4590 [6]: https://support.torproject.org/censorship/connecting-from-china/ [7]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-blocked-in-russia-how-to-circumvent-cens… [8]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/image-load-error-http-2-403-forbidden-on-som… [9]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/newbie-snowflake-abuse-by-local-government/5… [10]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/websites-blocking-tor/6095/ [11]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/unable-to-run-tor-browser-12-for-linux-after… [12]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/problems-with-mega-nz/5961/

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Marcos monthly status report, December 2022
by msim 07 Jan '23

07 Jan '23

Hi all :) Here's my monthly status report for December 2022 This month was effectively purely focused on Windows WebRTC things. Since Mozilla doesn't support building with mingw on a windows host, this turned out to be a very deep rabbit hole of many different possible approaches. At the beginning of the month, I did some work on my build merge request [1], but then I decided to focus on getting windows builds working, since that was my goal for this month, and also no major releases were happening that would've included the WebRTC build MR. I first tried testing out of a linux host using wine, but that very quickly fell apart, and I have little experience with wine so I decided to not pursue that any further. The first part of getting Windows host builds working was setting up a development environment. I first tried building on a linux host, copying the artefacts to a windows machine, and trying to test from there, but this didn't work, for reasons which I cant remember. However since then, I've done a lot of dev environment set up, so this may potentially be a viable approach again. The next approach I tried was building in WSL, and testing straight out of a WSL shell. I decided to do this as I was most familiar with linux environments, and WSL allows windows executables to run, which wouldn't run under wine when I tested from linux. This again failed, but this time it was because certutil.exe would fail first due to missing dlls, which was fixed very quickly, but then with `CKR_GENERAL_ERROR`, which is incredibly vague. After trying to investigate this, I deemed this approach non viable, as there were hundreds of potential code paths that could trigger this error. WSL failing, I tried to build the recommended way from firefox (except using MinGW instead of MSVC), which as I suspected before, failed again. Numerous weird issues were encountered here, such as the build system not being able to find simple tools that would normally be found when I would build with MSVC, but didn't belong to MSVC or MinGW (such as rm, tar, awk, etc) That being said, while this approach currently is far behind the WSL approach (WSL can build it, but fails to test. This approach doesn't build, yet), I'm hoping it will work out better since there won't be any cross platform weirdness that might be breaking anything. Currently this approach is failing due to various weird errors that seem to be from mach assuming I'm building from a unix like host, and not windows, but as far as I can tell these assumptions should be OK since the build happens in an MSys2 environment. The near future is focussed on getting windows builds happening, which I was hoping to have finished by the end of December but couldn't due to numerous unexpected issues. The plan for next steps as discussed with Richard is to try and get a build running with MSVC and then swap out the toolchain, and if that fails, I'll try the first approach again, but using artefacts out of tor browser build. Best, Marco [1]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests…

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Nina's Monthly status report for December'22
by Nina 05 Jan '23

05 Jan '23

Hi! This is my status report for December 2022. This month, I successfully resolved 799 tickets. On Telegram (@TorProjectSupportBot) - 544 On RT (frontdesk@tpo) - 235 In December 2022, most of the requests (more than 300) came from Russia; however, there is a growing number of tickets from Turkmenistan (around 50) where Tor Browser and Orbot are the popular ways of censorship circumvention. And I also helped users from Iran and China. My focus was as usual on censorship circumvention; however, there are more questions about Tor Expert Bundle[1], I also help to navigate through the various tor-based apps and help choose the best fit for the user. In December, the Tor Project Applications team released a new version - Tor Browser 12[2], so I took part in testing it and communicating with users about its features. Before TB 12 was released, @championquizzer and I finished reviewing all the Tor user support templates. We fixed outdated information and edited templates according to the new TB release. I also helped in resolving an issue with RT [3]. [1] https://www.torproject.org/download/tor/ [2] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-120/ [3] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41016#note_2865428

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HackerNCoder's Monthly Status Report, December 2022
by HackerNCoder 05 Jan '23

05 Jan '23

Hello! Here is what I have been working on for December 2022. Pretty much all of my time has been spent working on ooni-exporter[1], which takes data from ooni and exports it for prometheus. With some time spent looking into making an arti-based program for testing obfs4 reachability. [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/hackerncoder/ooni-exporter -- HackerNCoder https://www.encryptionin.space Translating queer games at https://queerscriptors.org

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PieroV's Monthly Status Report, December 2022
by Pier Angelo Vendrame 04 Jan '23

04 Jan '23

Hi everyone! Here is my status report for December 2022. At the beginning of the month, we of the application team released Tor Browser 12.0 stable. So, in the first week, I worked on some last-minute changes (such as some migration code to remove old language packs [0]), and I helped to release the 12.0. Then, I started migrating the remaining torbutton code from its dedicated repository to tor-browser.git [1]. We plan to refactor all this code and to better integrate it with the rest of the patch set. And we started with the localization files: previously, we kept them in torbutton.git, and we ran a script to update them at each release. Now, we keep only English in tor-browser.git, and the rest of the files are injected during the build. As a result, nightly builds will always have the latest and most updated translations [2]. While doing these changes, we also cleaned unused strings [3] and migrated the localization files from Transifex to Weblate, and I helped emmapeel with this. Another task I worked on was improving the patch that makes Tor Browser portable. In particular, my previous refactor of this patch still deleted some code that could be helpful when the standalone mode was not enabled. Some users asked us to improve this patch long ago [4]. Then, I wrote a patch for our toolchain to make it able to build the WASI sandbox and include it in Tor Browser [5]. The patch is still under review, so it was not included in 12.5a1. Finally, I helped prepare and build the first alpha from the 12.5 series. Best, Pier [0] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41435 [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41478 [2] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/4… [3] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41375 [4] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/20497 [5] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/4…

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Rhatto's Monthly Status Report, December 2022
by rhatto 04 Jan '23

04 Jan '23

Hi all :) This is my monthly status report for December 2022 with the main activities I have done during the period. ## 0. Planning Helped with team planning regarding upcoming Onion Service work. Part of this is already available at The Onion Plan: https://tpo.pages.torproject.net/onion-services/onionplan ## 1. Onion MkDocs Created Onion MkDocs, a template for Tor documentation: * https://rhatto.pages.torproject.net/onion-mkdocs * https://gitlab.torproject.org/rhatto/onion-mkdocs ## 2. EOTK Log Parser Improved scripts to fetch logs from S3 buckets at the EOTK Log Parser, a tool/library to parse anonymized NGINX access logs from EOTK instances: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/eotk-log-parser ## 3. Sponsor 123 I've also done the regular Sponsor 123 deployments, monitoring, maintenance and development. -- Silvio Rhatto pronouns he/him

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Cecylia's monthly status report, December 2022
by Cecylia Bocovich 02 Jan '23

02 Jan '23

Hi everyone, This is my status report for contract work done in December 2022. # Conjure Development * debugged issues with domain front * tested out desktop and debugged android builds of the Tor Browser integration # Snowflake web extension * review and merge volunteer contributions Cecylia

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tor-project January 2023