January 2023 - tor-project - lists.torproject.org

OONI Monthly Report: October 2022
by Maria Xynou 11 Jan '23

11 Jan '23

Hello, Happy New Year! We'd like to share updates from the OONI team over the last 3 months. Below I share our October 2022 report, and I'll follow-up to share our November and December 2022 reports. *# OONI Monthly Report: October 2022* Throughout October 2022, the OONI team worked on the following sprints: * Sprint 75 (1st-9th October 2022) * Sprint 76 (10th-23rd October 2022) * Sprint 77 (24th-31st October 2022) Our work can be tracked through the various OONI GitHub repositories: https://github.com/ooni Highlights are shared in this report below. *## New OONI Team member* In October 2022, Kathrin Elmenhorst joined the OONI team! Kathrin will work on improving the data quality of OONI measurements and adding support to OONI Probe for new experiments. *## Launch of Advocacy Assembly OONI training course* On 30th September 2022, Small Media’s Advocacy Assembly launched our online OONI training course ( https://advocacyassembly.org/en/courses/63/#/chapter/1/lesson/1) Following the launch, we published a blog post to share the course with our community: https://ooni.org/post/2022-ooni-training-course-advocacy-assembly/ This 90-minute free, online training course provides a deep-dive into measuring internet censorship with OONI Probe, and using OONI Explorer to access and interpret real-time OONI data collected from around the world. Designed for human rights defenders, activists, journalists, and researchers, the course includes a mix of videos, screencasts, slides, quizzes and hands-on exercises. It also features case study videos from OONI community members, and the course is available in English, Arabic, Spanish, and Farsi. *## OONI Probe Desktop* In October 2022, we released OONI Probe Desktop 3.8.1 ( https://github.com/ooni/probe-desktop/releases/tag/v3.8.1) which was supported by OONI Probe CLI 3.16.4, and which fixed an issue affecting the OONI Probe Signal test. Specifically, Signal changed their root CA, resulting in our Signal test leading to false positives globally. We documented this issue and the fix we implemented in the following ticket: https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/2344 *## Farsi translation of OONI Probe Mobile and Desktop User Guides* Thanks to our community’s localization efforts, we published a Farsi translation of: * OONI Probe Mobile User Guide: https://ooni.org/fa/support/ooni-probe-mobile * OONI Probe Desktop User Guide: https://ooni.org/fa/support/ooni-probe-desktop *## OONI Run* As part of our work to release an improved version of OONI Run (“OONI Run v2”), we have written a specification describing the new functionality. In October 2022, we updated the specification to include more details about the descriptor format ( https://github.com/ooni/spec/pull/249#issuecomment-1286974194) *## Expanding censorship measurement methodologies* We started moving traffic generated by OONI Probe to a remote host at the TCP/IP level to flexibly implement integration testing in a censored environment. The overall idea has been documented in the following ticket: https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/2340 The main pull request (https://github.com/ooni/probe-cli/pull/969) includes a fully working prototype. We also merged pull requests that re-introduce the TProxy functionality (https://github.com/ooni/probe-cli/pull/975) and other functionalities (https://github.com/ooni/probe-cli/pull/976) *## OONI Explorer* In October 2022, we continued working on OONI Explorer localization efforts, which involved moving hardcoded text to translation files and uploading them to Transifex in order for translators to fill in missing strings (https://github.com/ooni/explorer/pull/805) We also fixed the text alignment for languages that require RTL support ( https://github.com/ooni/ooni.org/issues/1264, https://github.com/ooni/ooni.org/pull/1269) We continued working on OONI Explorer user accounts and on the user feedback reporting mechanism, which will enable users to login and contribute feedback about each measurement ( https://github.com/ooni/explorer/pull/790) We also worked on the following OONI Explorer improvements: * Build process optimisations that result in smaller Docker image ( https://github.com/ooni/explorer/pull/807) * Replaced Babel with SWC for faster code transpilation ( https://github.com/ooni/explorer/pull/804) * Refactored the MAT filters to virtualize rows which improves the performance and memory usage when we’re showing a big list of rows ( https://github.com/ooni/explorer/pull/809) * Removed unused environment variables to reduce ambiguity ( https://github.com/ooni/explorer/pull/807) * Refactored the OONI Explorer Search page to move the API request from server side to client and improve rendering speed ( https://github.com/ooni/explorer/pull/799) Moreover, we contracted a designer to help us improve the user interface of OONI Explorer pages over the next months. *## OONI Test Lists Editor* Due to the API changes on the backend, code was refactored to only use one endpoint instead of three to retrieve data. These changes contribute to simpler code and improved performance of the Test Lists Editor: https://github.com/ooni/test-lists-ui/pull/67/ *## OONI backend* In October 2022, we worked on the following backend activities: * Made backend adjustments to annotate OONI Probe Signal measurements as “failed” as a temporary solution to an issue ( https://github.com/ooni/pipeline/pull/400) and updated the measurements in the database; * Looking into legacy-probe entry points and worked towards disabling the onion service; * Disabled the MySQL and PostgreSQL interfaces ( https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/40994) * Test list API: Added measurement summary statistics in the test list UI/API to enable review (https://github.com/ooni/api/pull/309) and added statistics from measurement feedback; * Backend changes to handle unsupported countries in test lists ( https://github.com/ooni/api/pull/310) * Wrote an internal design document to look into moving away from orchestrate for login/registration and documented the next steps; * Added a probe login metric and implemented other fixes ( https://github.com/ooni/api/pull/311) * Fixed the API aggregation time range (https://github.com/ooni/api/pull/309 ). *# Advancing OONI data analysis* We made progress on our new data analysis tool (https://github.com/ooni/data) through which we aim to automate the detection and characterization of more forms of internet censorship. Specifically, we added support for generating blocking events based on OONI Probe Signal measurements ( https://github.com/ooni/data/pull/10) we introduced a shared data directory for storing assets needed for performing analysis tasks (eg. GeoIP databases and blockpage fingerprints) ( https://github.com/ooni/data/pull/8) and we improved testing and the CLI ( https://github.com/ooni/data/pull/9) *## Published new OONI Code of Conduct* In October 2022, we published a new version of the OONI Code of Conduct (CoC): https://ooni.org/get-involved/code-of-conduct/ To help ensure a safe and inclusive environment for the global OONI community, we created a new Incident Response Committee with the goal of improving OONI’s Code of Conduct (CoC) and addressing any CoC violations when they occur. In collaboration with the Committee and based on community feedback collected from several meetings, we re-wrote and published a new version of OONI’s Code of Conduct (CoC). *## Published a survey to collect community feedback on OONI’s strategic priorities* Leading up to OONI’s 10th Anniversary (5th December 2022), we wanted to collect community feedback to help inform the development of our strategic priorities for the future. As the OONI community has always been at the heart of our work, we consider it essential that community needs continue to inform OONI’s future goals and priorities. We therefore circulated a survey to collect community feedback that can help shape OONI’s strategic priorities for the future. On 20th October 2022, we published a blog post which links to the survey: https://ooni.org/post/2022-survey-ooni-strategic-priorities/ We thank all community members for their valuable feedback! *## Test list updates* In October 2022, we discussed with Netalitica how we can improve our policies for updating test lists, with the goal of improving the quality of measurements and simplifying the workflow of researchers. Specifically, we discussed cases that involve updating URLs to HTTPS, how to handle parked domains or domains that otherwise no longer exist, and about involving researchers in the process of determining which URLs to configure for automated prioritized testing. We reviewed and merged multiple pull requests that involve updates to the Thai test list, contributed by our partner, Thai Netizen Network ( https://ooni.org/partners/thai-netizen-network/) These pull requests are the following: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/1152, https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/1169, https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/1168, https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/1167, https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/1166, https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/1165. We also reviewed the pull requests contributed (via our Test Lists Editor) by community members for the test lists of France ( https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/1125) the Global test list ( https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/1162, https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/1163) and several other test lists (https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/1159) *## OONI citations### Freedom on the Net Report 2022* OONI data (and OONI research reports) are cited in the following Freedom on the Net 2022 ( https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2022/countering-authoritarian-o…) country reports: * Iran: https://freedomhouse.org/country/iran/freedom-net/2022 * Myanmar: https://freedomhouse.org/country/myanmar/freedom-net/2022 * Malaysia: https://freedomhouse.org/country/malaysia/freedom-net/2022 * Cuba: https://freedomhouse.org/country/cuba/freedom-net/2022 * Azerbaijan: https://freedomhouse.org/country/azerbaijan/freedom-net/2022 * Colombia: https://freedomhouse.org/country/colombia/freedom-net/2022 * Ethiopia: https://freedomhouse.org/country/ethiopia/freedom-net/2022 * Italy: https://freedomhouse.org/country/italy/freedom-net/2022 * Jordan: https://freedomhouse.org/country/jordan/freedom-net/2022 * Kenya: https://freedomhouse.org/country/kenya/freedom-net/2022 * Saudi Arabia: https://freedomhouse.org/country/saudi-arabia/freedom-net/2022 * Tunisia: https://freedomhouse.org/country/tunisia/freedom-net/2022 * UAE: https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-arab-emirates/freedom-net/2022 * Uzbekistan: https://freedomhouse.org/country/uzbekistan/freedom-net/2022 * Zambia: https://freedomhouse.org/country/zambia/freedom-net/2022 *### Ranking Digital Rights Research Lab* Ranking Digital Rights (RDR) launched a new Research Lab which discusses how researchers can make use of OONI tools and data (among other resources). The RDR Research Lab is available here: https://rankingdigitalrights.org/research-lab/preparing-your-research/ *### Team CommUNITY’s publication* Team CommUNITY published a blog post (“Internet Freedom Tools, Resources & Actions to Support Iran’s Feminist Uprising”) which cites our research report on new blocks that emerged in Iran amid protests ( https://ooni.org/post/2022-iran-blocks-social-media-mahsa-amini-protests/) Team CommUNITY’s blog post is available here: https://www.digitalrights.community/blog/tools-resources-actions-to-support… *## Community activities### OTF Shutdown Getdown Event* Between 12th-14th October 2022, OONI’s Maria and Arturo traveled to Oxford to attend the OTF Shutdown Getdown event. This 3-day event brought internet measurement projects together to share skills and knowledge around measuring internet censorship and shutdowns. As part of our participation at this event, we: * Presented OONI as part of a lightning talk; * Facilitated a workshop to collect community feedback on OONI’s Measurement Aggregation Toolkit (MAT); * Facilitated a workshop to brainstorm on methods for measuring throttling; * Co-facilitated a workshop with M-Lab which aimed to introduce participants to the various measurement datasets available for investigating different aspects of internet shutdowns. *### OONI Community Meeting* On 25th October 2022, we hosted the monthly OONI Community Meeting on our Slack channel (https://slack.ooni.org/) during which we discussed the following topics: 1) Feature request: Adding support to the MAT for filtering measurements based on multiple domains 2) Upcoming 10th OONI Anniversary: Community survey and feedback for related activities 3) Test lists updates and re-thinking the test lists *### RIPE85* On 27th October 2022, OONI’s Arturo presented our research on measuring the blocking of encrypted DNS services (and how this experiment is now part of OONI Probe) at RIPE85: https://ripe85.ripe.net/ *## Userbase* In October 2022, 66,272,107 OONI Probe measurements were collected from 2,797 AS networks in 169 countries around the world. This information can also be found through our measurement stats on OONI Explorer (see chart on “monthly coverage worldwide”): https://explorer.ooni.org/ ~ OONI team.

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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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