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

Marco's Monthly Status Report, January 2023
by msim 07 Feb '23

07 Feb '23

Hi everyone, This month I focussed on WebRTC build things for S131. I managed to get a successful build under MSVC reasonably early on, however swapping out the toolchain for MinGW didn't work as I'd hoped. I then focussed on just resolving build errors locally under MinGW on a Windows host. This displayed multiple weird errors, such as a MinGW C++ header included a Firefox STL wrapper, which included other STL files which assumed there was no `extern "C"` block around it, but the original MinGW C++ header had an `extern "C" {` before including the Firefox STL wrapper. Alongside weird errors like this was multiple cases of `mach` not liking the MSys2 environment that `mozilla-build` creates (failure to find tools such as touch, rm, same as last month - this issue is scattered across multiple makefile templates). That's about it for this month, mainly just weird build bugs :-) Best, Marco

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minutes from the sysadmin meeting
by Antoine Beaupré 07 Feb '23

07 Feb '23

Hi! The moment you have all been waiting for: the first sysadmin minutes of 2023! Whoohoo! # Roll call: who's there and emergencies There was a failed drive in fsn-node-03, handled before the meeting, see [tpo/tpa/team#41060][]. [tpo/tpa/team#41060]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/incident/41060 # Dashboard review 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&… General dashboards, were not reviewed: * 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 # Q1 prioritisation We discussed the priorities for the coming two months, which will be, in order: 1. new gnt-dal cluster setup, see [milestone 2][] 2. self-hosting the forum (@lavamind? march? project ends in July, needs to be setup and tested before! created issue [tpo/tpa/team#41063][]) 3. donate page overhaul (meeting this week, @kez, could be Q1, may overflow into Q2 - download page in Q2 will need kez as well) 5. email changes and proposals ([TPA-RFC-45][], [TPA-RFC-47][]) 6. bullseye upgrades ([milestone 5][]) 7. considered lektor-18n update for Google Summer of Code but instead we will try to figure out if we keep Lektor at all ([TPA-RFC-37][]), then maybe next year depending on the timeline 8. developer portal people might need help, gaba will put anarcat in touch [milestone 2]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/tpa/-/milestones/2#actual-timeline [tpo/tpa/team#41063]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41063 [TPA-RFC-45]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/policy/tpa-rfc-45-mail-a… [TPA-RFC-47]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/policy/tpa-rfc-47-email-… [milestone 5]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/tpa/-/milestones/5#tab-issues [TPA-RFC-37]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/policy/tpa-rfc-37-lektor… # OOB / jumpstart Approved a ~200$USD budget for a jumphost, see [tpo/tpa/team#41058][]. [tpo/tpa/team#41058]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41058 # Next meeting March 6th 1900UTC (no change) # Metrics of the month * hosts in Puppet: 95, LDAP: 95, Prometheus exporters: 163 * number of Apache servers monitored: 31, hits per second: 675 * number of self-hosted nameservers: 6, mail servers: 9 * pending upgrades: 13, reboots: 59 * average load: 0.79, memory available: 4.50 TiB/5.74 TiB, running processes: 722 * disk free/total: 33.42 TiB/92.30 TiB * bytes sent: 513.16 MB/s, received: 266.79 MB/s * planned bullseye upgrades completion date: 2022-12-08 (!!) * [GitLab tickets][]: 192 tickets including... * open: 0 * icebox: 148 * backlog: 20 * next: 9 * doing: 11 * needs information: 5 * (closed: 3024) [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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Tor Browser Meeting moved to 2023-02-07
by Richard Pospesel 06 Feb '23

06 Feb '23

Hey All, Since most of us are unavailable today, let's move the Tor Browser weekly meeting to tomorrow (Tuesday 2023-02-07) in #tor-meeting on OFTC IRC. best, -Richard

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major outage at Hetzner
by Antoine Beaupré 04 Feb '23

04 Feb '23

Hi, We are witnessing a large outage at our main service provider, Hetzner. According to the information we have gathered so far, four switches (4!) have failed and that affects four (yes, again, 4!) of the servers in the 8-node cluster. Many services are down. We have not made a full inventory yet, but the mail server is currently up so I'm using this time to send this notification while we decide on short-term mitigations. We hope this outage to be resolved shortly, but we do not have an ETA. Stay tuned. a. PS: and yes, that affects the mechanics behind status.torproject.org so we don't have an update on that site just yet. We have a backup plan for that, but we never drilled for it, so it could take a while to setup. -- Antoine Beaupré torproject.org system administration

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Joydeep's Monthly Status Report for January 2023
by Joydeep Sen Gupta 04 Feb '23

04 Feb '23

Hello everyone! Here are my updates from January 2023. In total, I resolved 1275 tickets across our email, telegram and signal user support channels. Most of my work last month has been around helping users in regions where Tor is censored. There has been another massive uptick in user requests from China. I have been working with users to get feedback, help them use pluggable transports and troubleshoot Tor. On Tor Browser front, we had one major stable release and with that some post-release user support work. I received a few reports of users on Apple Silicon-based Macs unable to fetch Tor Browser updates[1] since Tor Browser 12. The issue is resolved in the latest update i.e. 12.0.2. I also made a small update to the documentation about our GetTor distributor in the Tor Browser Manual[2]. Now, a quick overview of our user support channels: Timeline: 01 - 31 January 2023 # Frontdesk tickets created: 816 tickets resolved: 1461 Most frequent tickets by numbers: 1. 308 RT Tickets - Private Bridge requests from China 2. 96 RT Tickets - How to use a Tor Bridge in Russia 3. 59 RT Tickets - Circumventing censorship with Tor in Iran 4. 9 RT Tickets - Unable to update to 12.0.1 on Apple Silicon-based Mac[1] # Telegram and Signal Support channel (cdr.link) tickets resolved: 650 The most frequent tickets we received have been about: 1. 195 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Russia 2. 166 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Iran 3. 92 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Turkmenistan 4. 19 tickets - Circumventing censorship in China # Tor Forum Most popular topics in the Support category (in terms of number of views): 1. "Changing operating system changes browser fingerprints?" [3] 2. "Wanted to run something like tor network in china"[4] 3. "Road from restricted to unrestircted!"[5] 4. "Do Snowflake Proxies Reveal Tor Traffic to ISP?"[6] 5. "Snowflake standalone proxy in Docker: How to make NAT unrestricted?"[7] Thanks, -- Joydeep [1]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/4… [2]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/manual/-/issues/138 [3]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/changing-operating-system-changes-browser-fi… [4]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/wanted-to-run-something-like-tor-network-in-… [5]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/road-from-restricted-to-unrestircted/6409/ [6]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/do-snowflake-proxies-reveal-tor-traffic-to-i… [7]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/snowflake-standalone-proxy-in-docker-how-to-…

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Nina’s Monthly status report for January’23
by Nina 03 Feb '23

03 Feb '23

Hi! This is my report for January, 2023. In that month, I resolved 770 tickets: On Telegram (@TorProjectSupportBot) - 464 On RT (frontdesk@tpo) - 306 On January'23, I worked on user support, mostly but not exclusively focusing on Russian-speaking users. The main directions of my communication with users were: - Sharing bridges and troubleshooting around bridges; - Gathering user feedback regarding the new TB versions 12.0.1 and 12.0.2; - Finding the working ways of censorship circumvention and getting feedback on working and not working solutions. @raya and I also started to work on the educational campaign to expand the understanding of the Tor Browser features and use it for censorship circumvention and avoidance of surveillance. In January, I got several complaints from OPPO/Realme phone users [1] with a "Proxy Server Refused Connection" error. I've spotted a Mac-related bug [2], which fortunately does not persist after 12.0.2 release. [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41289 [2] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41336#n…

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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2023-02-02
by meskio 03 Feb '23

03 Feb '23

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-02-02-15.58.html And our meeting pad: Anti-censorship team meeting pad -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday, February 9 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 * Sponsor 139 <-- hackerncoder, irl, joydeep, meskio, emmapeel working on it * https://pad.riseup.net/p/sponsor139-meeting-pad == Announcements == * == Discussion == * is there any proposal to encode bridges into human-memorable form? like a list of words? * people have trouble pasting in the bridge lines (fail to get the entire line for example), and support wants either: * something that is easier to copy and paste, or * and easy way to verify that the line was pasted correctly (visual checksum or similar) * bridgemoji are meant to serve this role * gus will open an issue for user research of different options (QR code, sequence of words, others) * snowflake fallback from domain fronting to amp cache, how/whether/when/etc to implement (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…) * arma is going to check how hard would be to change c-tor to only connect to two bridges instead of all of them at once. So maybe we can duplicate bridges with domain fronting and amp cache. There is a patch which implements this idea: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40578 But see also the caveats on https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… * we need to check the consecquences of using amp cache, and if we are ok having half of our users using it * Three possible options: * multiple bridge lines with different configurations, having multiple bridges with different fingerprint or fixing tor to allow multipe bridgelines with one fingerprint * different definitions in TB for domain-front and amp-cache so users can pick * snowflake client does control the fallback, maybe by passing flags with what to fall back to * use ampcache for snowflake in IR? * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/115 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys-admin/-/merge_reque… * our domain front for both snowflake and circumvention settings was blocked in Iran for 9 days * Packet loss resulted in performance issue for snowflake in China * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… * snowflake fails to bootstrap in the vantage point due to packet lost * shellikhoo is investigating it * (from ahf): do we have an idea about how many C tor modifications that needs to be reviewed before s28 is wrapped up? Purely so we can plan this for take-in. for next week: * Conjure is in nightly versions of Tor Browser now, an update on how it's going and the roll out plan == Actions == * We should make a ticket for pion to cache its stun answers when possible, because right now it surprises us by asking way more stun questions than it actually needs to. * We might want to be able to spin up our own stun servers, on our own ip/port, for debugging. We should talk to TPA about that goal at some point (not urgent). * Roger will look more at https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40578 ("only contact the first few working bridges on your bridge list") and plan to have a sense of whether it will be an easy hack or a hard one, for next week. == Interesting links == * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_(software) == 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 2023-02-02 Last week: - found and fixed bug in rdsys where pruned resources weren't propagating (rdsys#151) - finished writing a rust library for rdsys backend distributors https://gitlab.torproject.org/cohosh/rdsys-backend-api - wrote up Jack's documentation for the wireguard setup between stations and bridge in Gitlab https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/conj… - partially debugged issue with conjure hanging from some stations (conjure#22) - reviewed snowflake!35 - FOCI workshop prep This week: - FOCI workshop prep - debug potential issue with some stations hanging (conjure#22) - debug wireguard setup (conjure#15) - detect and recover from conjure hangs better (conjure#23) - more work on lox integration Needs help with: dcf: 2023-02-02 Last week: - recast the Snowflake fundraising 2022 update into a form for the Tor blog https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/blog/-/merge_requests/154 - documented the roughly one-week blocking of cdn.sstatic.net in Iran https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/115 Next week: - 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: 2023-02-02 Last week: - clean up gettor locale support code - distribute android apk's in gettor (rdsys#42) - use the new tor browser pt_config.json builtin bridges in moat (rdsys#146) - give support to bridgesanner (rdsys#143) - review rdsys fix to pruned resources bug (rdsys!70) - review whatsapp gettor integration (rdsys!69) Next week: - support internationalization in rdsys (rdsys#11) Shelikhoo: 2023-02-02 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… - [Merge Request Done] Automated Container Image Building in Continuous integration (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/connectivity-measurement/…) - research snowflake's performance issue in China(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transport… - push the chunked upload raw data upload change to vantage points Next Week: - [Research] WebTunnel planning (Continue) - Have a download link for raw vantage point packet capture files Itchy Onion: 2023-1-26 Last week: - Investigate whether stun over TLS is beneficial to us (issues#40240) - Looking at options for standalone proxy runners to specify an interface (issue#40108) This week: - Lunar New Year break - Continue working on issue #40108 (standalone proxy bind specific IP) - Review MRs hackerncoder: 2023-02-02 last week: Next week: - getting ooni-exporter to work with torsf (snowflake) - work on monitoring bridges health - work on "bridgetester"? - setting up snowflakes? cece: 2022-12-22 This week: - working on creating a dummy WhatsApp bot Next week: - My bot is not yet working as expected s still trying to figure that out Help with: - resources -- meskio | https://meskio.net/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- My contact info: https://meskio.net/crypto.txt -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Nos vamos a Croatan.

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Cecylia's monthly status report, January 2023
by Cecylia Bocovich 02 Feb '23

02 Feb '23

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Rhatto's Monthly Status Report, January 2023
by rhatto 02 Feb '23

02 Feb '23

Hi all :) This is my monthly status report for January 2023 with the main activities I have done during the period. ## 0. Onion Launchpad, a landing page helper for accessing Onion Services * Semi-automated GitHub deployments: Onion Launchpad now comes with a handy script to configure a repository and build a landing page on GitHub. More information at https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/onion-launchpad#github-dep… * Analytics gathering using the Matomo API: * This is disabled by default. * Basic analytics can be sent to a backend Matomo or Clean Insights endpoint. * Gathering is opt-in through a consent UX. * Upcoming changes will include a customizable Privacy Policy URL. More information at https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/onion-launchpad/-/blob/mai… * Misc fixes and enhancements. ## 2. Sponsor 123 I've also done the regular Sponsor 123 deployments, monitoring, maintenance and development. -- Silvio Rhatto pronouns he/him

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PieroV's Monthly Status Report, January 2023
by Pier Angelo Vendrame 01 Feb '23

01 Feb '23

Hi everyone! Here is my status report for January 2023. This month I worked on several small tasks to polish many small details, especially on the tor-browser-build repository. For example, I removed a shim used to launch tor on Tor Browser for macOS. It was used to declare some Python 2.x compatibility variables for obfs3, so it has not been needed for a long time [0]. Another macOS task was switching our DMG installers from ISO images to HFS filesystems to show a custom volume image [1]. This was quite involved because it introduced reproducibility issues, for which I had to patch the HFS creation to use a deterministic volume UUID [2]. All were part of a parent ticket about cleaning up the "Bundle-Data" directory of Tor Browser [3]. In a somehow related topic, I reviewed how we ship extensions [4]. Moving them to the distribution directory might allow us to enable some profile repair tools if needed, or multiple profiles. On the Tor Browser side, I fixed a problem when running the browser for a long time [5]. I did not handle stdout correctly when switching from nsIProcess to Subprocess. Shoutout to the members of our community for finding the cause, and apologies for any inconvenience it caused! Then, I investigated and tried to remove some calls to home that we inherited from Firefox [6]. Finally, I went back to improving our portable profile directory patch. I feel we are reaching its final form. Best, Pier [0] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41569 [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/2… [2] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/4… [3] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/4… [4] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/4… [5] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41549 [6] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40788

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