June 2024 - tor-project - lists.torproject.org

Are there countries where using Tor is illegal?
by Cristian Consonni 11 May '25

11 May '25

Hi, (Sorry if this question has already been asked in the past, feel free to point me to the relevant resources.) I know that the legal FAQs by the EFF state that: «we believe that running a Tor relay — including an exit relay that allows people to anonymously send and receive traffic — is legal under U.S. law.»[1] I also know there is a list of countries for which there is legislation that exclude communication service providers from liability. They are indicated in the Legal of the Tor Exit Guidelines page[2], they are USA, Germany, Netherlands, Austria, France, and Sweden. >From some articles in the press[3a][3b] it may be illegal - depending on how you interpret the wording[*] - to use Tor (and other technologies such as VPNs or proxies) in the UAE, with fines ranging in the millions of dirhams (hundreds of thousand of dollars). A couple of weeks ago it was discussed - on this list as well - that a law was introduced to the state parliament to ban Tor[4a][4b]. This follows a case of some months ago of a Russian Tor exit node operator being arrested for inciting mass riots and terrorism[4c][4d]. The idea of blocking VPNs or Tor seems to have already been considered in the past[4e]. This infographic about pluggable transports[5] suggests access to the Tor network is censored or limited in China, Uzbekistan, Iran, and Kazakhstan. Tor being censored orblocked may be different from it being illegal. What about other countries? Is there a place where I can find more about this topic? Cristian [1]: https://www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq.html.en [2]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorExitGuidelines [3a]: http://www.emirates247.com/news/emirates/dh500-000-fine-if-you-use-fraud-ip… [3b]: http://news.softpedia.com/news/people-caught-using-vpns-tor-or-proxies-in-t… [*]: «Whoever uses a fraudulent computer network protocol address (IP address) by using a false address or a third-party address by any other means for the purpose of committing a crime or preventing its discovery» [4a]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2017-June/043293.html [4b]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/22055 [4c]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2017-April/043109.html [4d]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/24/dmitry-bogatov-tor-russia/ [4e]; https://torrentfreak.com/vpn-and-tor-ban-looming-on-the-horizon-for-russia-… [5]: https://www.torproject.org/images/PT/2016-07-how-to-use-PT.png

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PSA: GitLab tokens expiring
by Antoine Beaupré 19 Sep '24

19 Sep '24

Hi, GitLab recently introduced a maximum lifetime for *all* access tokens. The change is discussed in a [blog post][1] from last October. Most importantly: > As of the 16.0 milestone (May 2023), we applied an expiration date of > May 14, 2024, to any personal, group, or project access token that > previously didn't have one. We first noticed this issue in [January][2] and have looked at mitigations, but ultimately, there's no good workaround short of "service accounts" which is some Open Core thing they are pushing onto us. There's some work upstream to make it easier to rotate tokens (which make the entire security measure moot in the first place, fun). So anyways. Your things might break now. And when you recreate the tokens, they will still have an upper time limit (one year, IIRC), so you will need to fix this again and again. I'm sorry. Further discussion in [2]. For now our approach is wait and see what gitlab.com is going to do, because this is breaking a *lot* of things in a lot of places, and I can't imagine they will just let the thing burn for that long. The actual recommended workaround from upstream now is to have a *pair* of tokens that renew each other but we have found that to be really impractical. So for now, we're just trying to document the tokens we have and how to refresh them, as an immediate mitigation. I encourage you to pay attention to the "your token has expired" notification as well. Good luck! [1]: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2023/10/25/access-token-lifetime-limits/ [2]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41510 -- Antoine Beaupré torproject.org system administration

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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2024-06-27
by Shelikhoo 27 Jun '24

27 Jun '24

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2024/tor-meeting.2024-06-27-16.00.html And our meeting pad: Anti-censorship work meeting pad -------------------------------- Anti-censorship -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday, July 11 16:00 UTC Facilitator: onyinyang ^^^(See Facilitator Queue at tail) 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 == * No meeting July 4 (Tor's midyear break) == Discussion == * Snowflake WebExtension for Manifest version 3 is almost done, only lacking user info consent support. (shelikhoo) * Ongoing censorship events: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/iss… (Myanmar) * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/iss… (Algeria) * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/iss… (Uzbekistan) == 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): 2024-06-27 Last week: - snowflake-webext updates - reviewed mv3 prototype - helped onyinyang on rebasing and debugging wasm-bindgen - worked on squashing Conjure PT into lyrebird - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/lyre… - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/conj… This week: - take a look at snowflake web and webext translations and best practices - make changes to Lox encrypted bridge table - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/merge_requests/147 Needs help with: dcf: 2024-06-27 Last week: - archived snowflake-webextension-0.8.3 https://archive.org/details/snowflake-webextension-0.8.3 Next week: - review snowflake unreliable+unordered data channels rev2 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: - tell me when to restart the brokers for https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… meskio: 2023-06-27 Last week: - fix a parsing problem for cache-extrainfo when there is transport-info, don't reject the PT part of bridges (rdsys#205) - sponsor 96 final report - debug moat domain front failures - add transport-info to the cached-extrainfo spec (torspec!63) - report lyrebird version to tor (lyrebird!51) Next week: - investigate what builtin bridges are offline (team#141) - report other PT versions to tor (snowflake, webtunnel) Shelikhoo: 2024-06-27 Last Week: - Chrome Manifest V3 transition: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - Merge request reviews Next Week/TODO: - Merge request reviews - Chrome Manifest V3 transition: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… onyinyang: 2023-06-20 Last week(s): - MSR talk - Working toward building tor-browser with lox-wasm binary to help out with integration work as needed: ran into many issues trying to do this with Fedora Next week: - Global Gathering Application - Fix Key Rotation MR for hyper v1 - Working toward building tor-browser with lox-wasm binary to help out with integration work as needed: resolve build issues on Fedora - Work on outstanding milestone issues: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/milestones/1#tab-is… - prepare for end to end testing of the Lox system with browser integration Later: - begin implementing some preliminary user feedback mechanism to identify bridge blocking based on Vecna's work - improve metrics collection/think about how to show Lox is working/valuable - sketch out Lox blog post/usage notes for forum (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? theodorsm: 2023-06-20 Last weeks: - Writing my thesis - Add randomized ClientHello fingerprints to library Next weeks: - Wait for pion upstream releases - Test Snowflake fork with covert-dtls - Taking time off (AFK) Help with: - Test Snowflake fork with covert-dtls Facilitator Queue: onyinyang meskio shelikhoo 1. First available staff in the Facilitator Queue will be the facilitator for the meeting 2. After facilitating the meeting, the facilitator will be moved to the tail of the queue

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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2024-06-20
by onyinyang 20 Jun '24

20 Jun '24

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2024/tor-meeting.2024-06-20-16.00.html And our meeting pad: Anti-censorship work meeting pad -------------------------------- Anti-censorship -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday, June 27 16:00 UTC Facilitator: shelikhoo ^^^(See Facilitator Queue at tail) 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: onyinyang == 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 == * No meeting July 4 (Tor's midyear break) == Discussion == * theodorsm's thesis and DTLS library * https://github.com/theodorsm/covert-dtls * trouble integrating it into snowflake - dependency/version issues * breaking changes with the version of pion/stun used in snowflake * but snowflake is already using the latest pion/stun? * theodorsm forked the older version of pion/dtls used by snowflake and re-applied the covert-dtls changes * snowflake is using pion/dtls v2.2.7 while latest is v2.2.11, but unreleased code is needed (should come with v2.2.12) * as specified by current pion/webrtc v3.2.42 https://github.com/pion/webrtc/blob/v3.2.42/go.mod#L7 == 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): 2024-06-20 Last week: - wrote up a forum post to guide users through snowflake browser extension consent prompt - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - found and fixed a bug with the consent prompt flow - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - deployed version 0.8.3 of the snowflake extension - showed onyinyang how to test and debug the Lox module in Tor Browser - reproduced reported SQS rendezvous bug with two bridges - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - followed up on idea to set SQS anonymous access policies - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - reviewed merge requests and updated dependencies This week: - followup on snowflake extension UX fixes - take a look at shell's mv3 changes - take a look at snowflake web and webext translations and best practices - make changes to Lox encrypted bridge table - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/merge_requests/147 - update wasm-bindgen fork to fix some bugs and hopefully upstream changes Needs help with: dcf: 2024-06-20 Last week: Next week: - review snowflake unreliable+unordered data channels rev2 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: - tell me when to restart the brokers for https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… meskio: 2023-06-20 Last week: - clean up bridgestrap logs to make them more readable (bridgestrap#43) - investigate why bridgestrap is filling polyanthum disk - look into the builtin bridges being offline and figure more problems with bridgestrap to look into (tpa/team##41651) - review and merge refactor on lyrebird copyLoop (lyrebird!50) Next week: - investigate what builtin bridges are offline (team#141) - why is the status page mentioning vanilla part of obfs4 bridges? (rdsys#205) Shelikhoo: 2024-06-06 Last Week: - [Merge Request Waiting] Add Container Image Mirroring from Tor Gitlab to Docker Hub(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/… - [Merge Request Waiting] Snowflake Performance Improvement rev2 (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…) - Chrome Manifest V3 transition: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - Upgrade snowflake broker machine from Debian 10 (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…) - Address TTP-03-001 WP1: Snowflake broker vulnerability(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-t… - Vantage point maintaince - merge request processing - Merge request reviews Next Week/TODO: - Merge request reviews onyinyang: 2023-06-20 Last week(s): - MSR talk - Working toward building tor-browser with lox-wasm binary to help out with integration work as needed: ran into many issues trying to do this with Fedora Next week: - Global Gathering Application - Fix Key Rotation MR for hyper v1 - Working toward building tor-browser with lox-wasm binary to help out with integration work as needed: resolve build issues on Fedora - Work on outstanding milestone issues: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/milestones/1#tab-is… - prepare for end to end testing of the Lox system with browser integration Later: - begin implementing some preliminary user feedback mechanism to identify bridge blocking based on Vecna's work - improve metrics collection/think about how to show Lox is working/valuable - sketch out Lox blog post/usage notes for forum (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? theodorsm: 2023-06-20 Last weeks: - Writing my thesis - Add randomized ClientHello fingerprints to library Next weeks: - Wait for pion upstream releases - Test Snowflake fork with covert-dtls - Taking time off (AFK) Help with: - Test Snowflake fork with covert-dtls Facilitator Queue: onyinyang shelikhoo meskio 1. First available staff in the Facilitator Queue will be the facilitator for the meeting 2. After facilitating the meeting, the facilitator will be moved to the tail of the queue -- --- onyinyang GPG Fingerprint 3CC3 F8CC E9D0 A92F A108 38EF 156A 6435 430C 2036

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cohosh's monthly status report, December 2023
by Cecylia Bocovich 17 Jun '24

17 Jun '24

Hi! This is my status report for contract work done in December 2023. # Reputation-based bridge distribution - Continued Tor Browser integration work https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/116 - Debugged some issues with the lox distributor deployment https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41406 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/issues/40 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/issues/42 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/issues/43 # Snowflake - Fixed excessive logs of closed connections at the Snowflake proxy https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - Released version 2.8.1 of Snowflake - Provided further review of the SQS rendezvous method https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… # Domain Fronting Alternatives - Looked for cloud providers that offer domain fronting - Looked for good potential front domains for working cloud providers

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UX Team Meeting postponed until tomorrow
by Duncan R. 17 Jun '24

17 Jun '24

Hey everyone, Since Nico and I are both AFK today, we’re postponing this week’s UX team meeting until the same time tomorrow – i.e. 1600 UTC on Tuesday the 18th. Thanks, D

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ebanam's monthly status report and user support report for May 2024
by ebanam 13 Jun '24

13 Jun '24

Hello all, This is my monthly report for the month of May. In preparation for the upcoming Tor Browser 13.5 release I worked on a number of documentation related tickets both in the Tor Browser User Manual[0] and the Support Portal[1]. Aside from which much of my focus was helping users in regions where is Tor is censored, which involves helping users to install Tor Browser through GetTor or our official mirrors, helping with using bridges and snowflake, troubleshoot errors and collecting user feedback, in general. Number of tickets via email from Russian speaking regions are still low albeit investigating this drop we haven't yet found the main issue. We plan to run a deeper investigation in June. That said, we have seen a surge in tickets on our Telegram support channel from the region, which remains the most popular user support platform for users in Russian speaking countries. Following is a thorough breakdown of tickets our user support team handled in May: # Frontdesk (email support channel) * 497(↑) RT tickets created * 467(↓) RT tickets resolved Tickets by numbers: 1. 262(↓) RT tickets: private bridge requests from Chinese speaking users. 2. 79(↓) RT tickets: circumventing censorship in Russian speaking countries. 3. 6 RT tickets: help with installing and troubleshooting Tor Browser on Windows. 4. 4 (↓) RT tickets: circumventing censorship with Tor in Farsi. Highlighting some other topics we received questions and feedback: 5. 4 RT tickets: Reports of issues with an onion service. This particular onion service was down and we asked the users to report this to the onion service operator. 6. 1 RT ticket: Report of website blocking Tor traffic. 7. 1 RT ticket: Report of a fake app on iOS App Store masquerading as Tor Browser. # Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal Support channel * 631(↑) tickets resolved Breakdown: * 607 (↑) tickets on Telegram * 23 (-) tickets on WhatsApp * 1 (↓) ticket on Signal Tickets by numbers: 1. 378 (↑) tickets: circumventing censorship in Russian speaking countries. 2. 51 (↓) tickets: circumventing censorship with Tor in Farsi. 3. 43 (↓) tickets: private bridge requests from Chinese speaking users. Highlighting some other topics we received questions about: 4. 4 tickets: instructions on how to fetch Tor Browser binaries from GetTor. 5. 3 tickets: help with installing and using bridges with little-t-tor. 6. 3 tickets: questions about setting up onion services. 7. 2 tickets: instructions on how to use bridges and snowflake with Orbot. 8. 2 tickets: help with troubleshooting Tor Browser on Windows. # Highlights from the Tor Forum 1. Troubleshooting little-t-tor[2] 2. How I can get obfs4 bridges?[3] 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/web/manual/-/commits/main?author=ebanam [1]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/support/-/commits/main?author=ebanam [2]: https://forum.torproject.org/t/little-t-tor-package-linux-not-working-with-… [3]: https://forum.torproject.org/t/how-can-i-get-new-bridges/12635

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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2024-06-13
by meskio 13 Jun '24

13 Jun '24

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2024/tor-meeting.2024-06-13-16.02.html And our meeting pad: Anti-censorship -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday, June 20 16:00 UTC Facilitator: onyinyang ^^^(See Facilitator Queue at tail) 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: meskio == 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 == * bridges running 0.4.7.x (EOL) were rejected by Serge: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2024-June/021678.html == Discussion == * what's the plan for: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/142 * we've lost a lot of webextension snowblake proxies, proably due to people not noticing the new consent page * luckily the rise in orbot proxies (probably from the v17 rollout) makes this not as urgent as it otherwise might be * cohosh is working on this issue == Actions == == Interesting links == * https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/the-censorship-circumvention-extension-has-… * https://ntc.party/t/several-proxy-firefox-extensions-are-blocked-in-russia-… * Myanmar: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/iss… == 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): 2024-06-13 Last week: - looked into sharp decline of browser extension proxies - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/142 - started experimenting with some fixes for the web extension consent prompt UX - FOCI stuff This week: - snowflake webextension consent prompt UX fixes - take a look at shell's mv3 changes - take a look at snowflake web and webext translations and best practices - make changes to Lox encrypted bridge table - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/merge_requests/147 - follow up on reported SQS errors - update wasm-bindgen fork to fix some bugs and hopefully upstream changes Needs help with: dcf: 2024-06-13 Last week: - azure CDN bookkeeping https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/Snowflake-co… Next week: - review snowflake unreliable+unordered data channels rev2 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: - tell me when to restart the brokers for https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… meskio: 2023-06-13 Last week: - create an rdsys requests metrics puller that produces metrics for collector (rdsys#188) - plan with TPA the BridgeDB deprecation (tpa/team#41613) - add the new prometheus exporters (tpa/prometheus-alerts!42) - in progress of investigate what builtin bridges are offline (team#141) - test tor implementation to the STATUS type=version command for PTs (tor!820) - fix a bug in ptutil/safeprom registering the metric (ptutil!2) Next week: - deploy https, moat and email distributors in rdsys - investigate what builtin bridges are offline (team#141) Shelikhoo: 2024-06-06 Last Week: - [Merge Request Waiting] Add Container Image Mirroring from Tor Gitlab to Docker Hub(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/… - [Merge Request Waiting] Snowflake Performance Improvement rev2 (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…) - Chrome Manifest V3 transition: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - Upgrade snowflake broker machine from Debian 10 (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…) - Address TTP-03-001 WP1: Snowflake broker vulnerability(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-t… - Vantage point maintaince - merge request processing - Merge request reviews Next Week/TODO: - Merge request reviews onyinyang: 2023-06-06 Last week(s): - Finished key rotation implementation - Working toward building tor-browser with lox-wasm binary to help out with integration work as needed - Preparation for MSR talk Next week: - MSR talk - Work on outstanding milestone issues: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/milestones/1#tab-is… - prepare for end to end testing of the Lox system with browser integration Later: - begin implementing some preliminary user feedback mechanism to identify bridge blocking based on Vecna's work - improve metrics collection/think about how to show Lox is working/valuable - sketch out Lox blog post/usage notes for forum (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? theodorsm: 2023-06-13 Last weeks: - Writing on my thesis Next weeks: - Add hook to pion/webrtc so it can be used in snowflake, currently waiting on new pion/dtls release - Add randomized fingerprints - Writing my thesis Help with: Facilitator Queue: onyinyang shelikhoo meskio 1. First available staff in the Facilitator Queue will be the facilitator for the meeting 2. After facilitating the meeting, the facilitator will be moved to the tail of the queue -- meskio | https://meskio.net/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- My contact info: https://meskio.net/crypto.txt -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Nos vamos a Croatan.

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sysadmin meeting minutes
by Antoine Beaupré 10 Jun '24

10 Jun '24

(Editor's note: the minutes don't say so, but we've welcomed a new team member! It wasn't his first meeting, so we didn't formally say welcome here again, but be sure we're happy to have a new member onboard!) # Roll call: who's there and emergencies anarcat, gaba, lavamind, lelutin # Dashboard cleanup 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: * 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 We dispatched more to lelutin! # Holidays plan and roadmapping https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/policy/tpa-rfc-61-roadma… We organized the rotation and meetings until September, shifts are documented in the "TPA team" Nextcloud calendar. This was our last roadmap meeting until September 9th. # metrics of the month * hosts in Puppet: 89, LDAP: 89, Prometheus exporters: 184 * number of Apache servers monitored: 34, hits per second: 687 * number of self-hosted nameservers: 6, mail servers: 10 * pending upgrades: 0, reboots: 0 * average load: 0.63, memory available: 3.57 TiB/4.96 TiB, running processes: 303 * disk free/total: 67.82 TiB/134.27 TiB * bytes sent: 416.70 MB/s, received: 278.77 MB/s * planned bookworm upgrades completion date: 2024-07-18 * [GitLab tickets][]: 205 tickets including... * open: 0 * icebox: 149 * future: 14 * backlog: 24 * next: 9 * doing: 4 * needs review: 5 * needs info: 4 * (closed: 3572) [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/bookworm/ 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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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2024-06-06
by Shelikhoo 06 Jun '24

06 Jun '24

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2024/tor-meeting.2024-06-06-16.00.html And our meeting pad: Anti-censorship work meeting pad -------------------------------- Anti-censorship -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday, June 13 16:00 UTC Facilitator: onyinyang ^^^(See Facilitator Queue at tail) 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 == * can we retire monit in favor of prometheus? * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/prometheus-alerts/-/merge_requests/41 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/monit-configuration/-/com… * we agree it makes sense to retire the monit service * once the alerts are in place meskio will coordinate with philip to retire it * this work is making me notice that some builtin bridges are not reachable since a while, looks like the monit service was down * meskio will investigate the reachability of builtin bridges * do we wish to include snowflake into lyrebrid? * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/lyre… * cohosh will start that work with the integration of conjure into lyrebird * snowflake will have two challenges * lyrebird is keeping an old version of uTLS to maintain a go version supported by windows 7 (the plan is to drop that mid-september) * udp proxy support might be triky to do in lyrebird * we decide that we are ok with adding snowflake client support to lyrebird, but we'll need to see when and how complex will be * lyrebird supports a bunch of PTs that are deprecated (obfs2-3 and scramblesuit) should we remove those to gain space? * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/lyre… * once in a while there are reports of users still using those * meskio will explore if removing them will gain any space and if not will drop the idea == Actions == == Interesting links == * https://opencollective.com/censorship-circumvention/projects/snowflake-dail… == 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): 2024-06-06 Last week: - opened MR for lox db test fixup - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/merge_requests/188 - reviewed Lox MRs - onboarded onyinyang on how to do reproducible builds and update the Lox module in Tor Browser This week: - take a look at shell's mv3 changes - take a look at snowflake web and webext translations and best practices - make changes to Lox encrypted bridge table - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/merge_requests/147 - follow up on reported SQS errors - update wasm-bindgen fork to fix some bugs and hopefully upstream changes Needs help with: dcf: 2024-06-06 Last week: Next week: - review snowflake unreliable+unordered data channels rev2 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: - tell me when to restart the brokers for https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… meskio: 2023-06-06 Last week: - use safeprom in rdsys (rdsys#203) - use safelog in rdsys - add prometheus metrics to replace bridgedb metrics in rdsys (rdsys#188) - add prometheus blackbox targets to replace monit targets (prometheus-alerts!41) - add webtunnel bridges to the settings distributor (rdsys-admin!31) - review lox key rotation MR (lox!183) - review STATUS version support in tor (tor!820) Next week: - create an rdsys requests metrics puller that produces metrics for collector (rdsys#188) Shelikhoo: 2024-06-06 Last Week: - [Merge Request Waiting] Add Container Image Mirroring from Tor Gitlab to Docker Hub(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/… - [Merge Request Waiting] Snowflake Performance Improvement rev2 (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…) - Chrome Manifest V3 transition: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - Upgrade snowflake broker machine from Debian 10 (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…) - Address TTP-03-001 WP1: Snowflake broker vulnerability(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-t… - Vantage point maintaince - merge request processing - Merge request reviews Next Week/TODO: - Merge request reviews onyinyang: 2023-06-06 Last week(s): - Finished key rotation implementation - Working toward building tor-browser with lox-wasm binary to help out with integration work as needed - Preparation for MSR talk Next week: - MSR talk - Work on outstanding milestone issues: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/milestones/1#tab-is… - prepare for end to end testing of the Lox system with browser integration Later: - begin implementing some preliminary user feedback mechanism to identify bridge blocking based on Vecna's work - improve metrics collection/think about how to show Lox is working/valuable - sketch out Lox blog post/usage notes for forum (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? theodorsm: 2023-06-06 Last weeks: - Writing for my thesis Next weeks: - Add hook to pion/webrtc so it can be used in snowflake, currently waiting on new pion/dtls release - Add randomized fingerprints - Writing my thesis Help with: - Finding conferences that are relevant for submitting paper on my work. (unfortunately too late for FOCI24) Facilitator Queue: onyinyang meskio shelikhoo 1. First available staff in the Facilitator Queue will be the facilitator for the meeting 2. After facilitating the meeting, the facilitator will be moved to the tail of the queue

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