Hi everyone,
Due to scheduling conflicts, we will be moving our weekly Tor Browser
meeting to Tuesday February 6th at 1500 UTC in #tor-meeting on OFTC IRC.
best,
-richard
Hey everyone!
Here are our meeting logs:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2024/tor-meeting.2024-01-18-15.57.html
And our meeting pad:
Anti-censorship work meeting pad
--------------------------------
Anti-censorship
--------------------------------
Next meeting: Thursday, January 25 16:00 UTC
Facilitator: cohosh
Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC
(channel is logged while meetings are in progress)
This week's Facilitator: shelikhoo
== 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 96 <-- meskio, shell, onyinyang, cohosh
* https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/24
* Sponsor 150 <-- meskio working on it
*
https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/issues/?label_na…
== Announcements ==
*
== Discussion ==
* DTLS anti-fingerprinting library similar to uTLS
* Useful for snowflake:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
* Sean DuBois (from pion) has been interested in this and may
have ideas on what this library could look like
* SQS rendezvous deployment
*
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
* almost ready for final merge, any objections to doing so?
* can announce the new rendezvous method on forum and bbs as
before with ampcache
* will have a look at possible attack by flooding the service
to generate significant bill
* AWS may or may not support setting billing limits. Can at
least set billing alerts.
* Possibly use prepaid card with limited funds.
* Future plan is to componentize the broker and make rendezvous
methods more modular, not part of the SQS work though
*
https://bugs.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowfl…
* Also encrypt rendezvous messages separately from the
rendezvous channel,
https://bugs.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowfl…
* Our docker containers are out of date for snowflake and obfs4
* Have a version of tor that soon will be EOL
* shelikhoo will update them from
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/docker-obfs4-bridge
and https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/docker-snowflake-proxy
== Actions ==
== Interesting links ==
*
== 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): 2024-01-18
Last week:
- Lox + Tor Browser integration
- Found a fix for snowflake shadow simulations
- https://github.com/shadow/shadow/pull/3279
- Contributed to discussion on missing shadow feature policy
- https://github.com/shadow/shadow/issues/3280
This week:
- Review of final SQS rendezvous changes
- Lox + Tor Browser integration
- rebase and try out manifest v3 patch
- Conjure bridge maintenance
Needs help with:
dcf: 2024-01-18
Last week:
- started to review draft MR for unreliable data channels,
merged cosmetic changes to main
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
- posted summary of snowflake bridge users in 2023
https://forum.torproject.org/t/snowflake-bridge-metrics-2023-year-in-review…
Next week:
- review draft MR for unreliable data channels
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
- open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors
is nonzero
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
- parent:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
- open issue to disable /debug endpoint on snowflake broker
- move snowflake-02 to new VM
Help with:
meskio: 2023-12-21
Last week:
- grant writing
Next week:
Shelikhoo: 2024-01-18
Last Week:
- HTTPS distributors in rdsys:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/191
- Merge request reviews
Next Week/TODO:
- HTTPS distributors in rdsys:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/191
- update container image for snowflake-proxy and
obfs4-proxy
onyinyang: 2023-01-11
Last week(s):
- Finished Telegram bot dev
- Continue to support Lox wasm stubs as needed
- Holiday!
This week:
- Bug fixing and other things that come up as lox integration
is rolled out
- document API for lox client/server requests
- Other Lox bug fixes/improvements
- attempt hyper upgrade again
theodorsm: 2023-01-11
Last weeks:
- Currently in the start phase of writing my master thesis
(to be finished late june 2024) in communication technology on reducing
distinguishability of DTLS. The goal is to implement a validated DTLS
anti-fingerprinting library similar to uTLS (useful for Snowflake).
Next weeks:
- Talk with Sean DuBois about contributing to adding
anti-fingerprinting capabilities to the pion library
Help with:
- Find recent data set of captured DTLS traffic
(long term things were discussed at the meeting!):
https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-ac-community-azaleas-room-keep
- brainstorming grouping strategies for Lox
buckets (of bridges) and gathering context on how types of bridges are
distributed/use in practice
Question: What makes a bridge usable for a
given user, and how can we encode that to best ensure we're getting the
most appropriate resources to people?
1. Are there some obvious grouping
strategies that we can already consider?
e.g., by PT, by bandwidth (lower
bandwidth bridges sacrificed to open-invitation buckets?), by locale (to
be matched with a requesting user's geoip or something?)
2. Does it make sense to group 3
bridges/bucket, so trusted users have access to 3 bridges (and untrusted
users have access to 1)? More? Less?
Tails report for December 2023 <https://tails.net/news/report_2023_12/>
Happy 2024, Tails-y folks! We wish you a year full of nourishing
energies, forceful resistance, and great health ✊🏽
Highlights
*
2023 was an eventful year at Tails. We kicked off the 1st year of
our 3-year strategic plan with 16 releases of Tails, significant
improvements to core Tails features like the new Persistent Storage,
and researched cool, new features we want to bring to you. In
parallel, we started moving into a new home <https://tails.net/> and
made investments to become a more sustainable project and a
healthier workplace. Read more about 2023 at Tails here
<https://tails.net/news/achievements_in_2023/index.en.html>. If
you'd rather listen, check out our presentation
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtgTwho1wfQ&t=784s> at State of the
Onion 2023!
*
We are raising funds for our work in 2024 but our annual fundraising
campaign has fallen short of our goal. So, we've extended our
fundraiser till January 20, 2024. If you find our work useful and
can contribute, we'd appreciate your help. Every contribution, no
matter the size, makes a big difference. Donate now!
<https://tails.net/donate/>
*
Talking about contributions that make a difference, we remain ever
so grateful to our sponsors! Last month, wordsolver.co
<https://wordsolver.co/> renewed their sponsorship of Tails. This is
the 3rd year of their support for Tails' mission! Thank you 💜
Releases
We released Tails 5.21
<https://tails.net/news/version_5.21/index.en.html>. In 5.21:
*
/Tor client/ and /Tor Browser/ are up-to-date
*
we improved Tails's handling of date and time: you'll find localised
dates in the top navigation, and separately, we replaced the
unpunctual web servers in our htpdate pool
*
the backup feature of /Tails Cloner/ is friendlier to use. Thanks
@BenWestgate <https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/BenWestgate>!
And lots more
<https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/blob/master/debian/changelog>.
Metrics
Tails was started more than 815,559 times this month. That's a daily
average of over 26,300 boots.
--
bokonon
Fundraising Director
Tails —https://tails.boum.org/
Hello everyone!
Like the past few months, much of my focus in December was to help users
in regions where Tor is censored which includes but is not limited to
using pluggable transports which are likely to work in their region,
help with troubleshooting and answering other common Tor Browser related
questions.
With four Tor Browser stable releases I also worked on post-release user
support work. We received numerous reports of PTs crashing for users on
Windows 7 after the Tor Browser 13.0.7 update. Although the issue is
resolved now (with Tor Browser 13.0.8) we expect to see more tickets
from Windows 7 as Tor Browser will neccessarily have to drop support for
Windows 7 and 8 after the Firefox ESR 128 transition this year. For any
Windows 7 tickets we receive, we are encouraging Tor Browser users to
either upgrade their systems to a modern Linux distribution, or at least
to a supported version of Windows (10 or higher).
Following is a thorough breakdown of tickets our user support team
handled in December:
# Frontdesk (email support channel)
* 537(↓) RT tickets created
* 474(↓) RT tickets resolved
Tickets by numbers:
1. 199(↓) RT tickets: private bridge requests from Chinese speaking
users.
2. 150(↓) RT tickets: circumventing censorship in Russian
speaking countries.
3. 5 RT tickets: PTs on Tor Browser 13 do not work
with Windows 7 (issue is resolved with Tor Browser 13.0.8)[0]
4. 2 RT tickets: "Proxy Server Refused Connection" on Tor Browser for Android
specific to Oppo/Realme devices[1]
Highlighting some other topics we received questions and feedback:
5. Circumventing censorship with Tor in Farsi.
6. Help with setting up onion service
7. Explaination about the "New Identity" and "New Tor Circuit" in Tor Browser[2]
8. How to import bookmarks in Tor Browser from other browsers[3]
9. Adding a search engine to Tor Browser
10. One report of an app masquerading as official Tor Browser app on iOS AppStore.
11. Tor Browser binary disappeared on Windows (this was likely because of anti-virus
software installed on the user's system)
12. Contributing and volunteering to Tor
13. Tor Browser crashes when extensions popups are opened with Wayland enabled[4]
14. Images unable to render on some sites due to HTML5 Canvas fingerprinting
being blocked in Tor Browser
# Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal Support channel
* 550(↓) tickets resolved
Breakdown:
* 521(↓) tickets on Telegram
* 16(↓) tickets on WhatsApp
* 13(↑) tickets on Signal
Tickets by numbers:
1. 349(↑) tickets: circumventing censorship in Russian speaking countries.
2. 23(↓) tickets: private bridge requests from Chinese speaking users.
3. 42(-) tickets: circumventing censorship with Tor in Farsi.
4. 8 tickets: PTs on Tor Browser 13 do not work with Windows 7
(issue is resolved with Tor Browser 13.0.8)
Highlighting some other topics we received questions about:
5. 2 tickets: user feedback about WebTunnel from regions where Tor is censored
6. 2 tickets: Configuring little-t-tor to use Pluggable Transports
7. 2 tickets: Unable to reach some onion site (these particular onion sites were offline)
8. "Proxy Server Refused Connection" on Tor Browser for Android specific to Oppo/Realme devices
9. Question about letterboxing on Tor Browser
# Highlights from the Tor Forum
1. Tor Browser freezes/lags after update[5]
2. Tor Browser locking up on Windows 10 with all the latest patches[6]
3. Onion sites unreachable[7] (These are all v2 onion sites, which have been
deprecated way back in 2021)[8]
Thanks!
e.
Note: (↑), (↓) and (-) are indicating if the number of tickets we
received for these topics have been increasing, decreasing or have been
the same from the previous month respectively.
[0]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42179
[1]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41289
[2]: https://tb-manual.torproject.org/managing-identities/
[3]: https://support.torproject.org/tbb/export-and-import-bookmarks/
[4]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42306
[5]: https://forum.torproject.org/t/problem-tor-freezes-lags-after-update-to-v13…
[6]: https://forum.torproject.org/t/tor-browser-locking-up-on-windows-10-with-al…
[7]: https://forum.torproject.org/t/impossible-dafficher-le-contenu-des-pages/10…
[8]: https://support.torproject.org/onionservices/v2-deprecation/