Hello! Below is my July’24 report!
In July, I resolved 587 tickets:
On Telegram (@TorProjectSupportBot) - 427
On RT (frontdesk@tpo) - 145
On WhatsApp (+447421000612) - 13
and on Signal (+17787431312) - 2.
My main focus is to help Russian-speaking users get access to Tor. To do
that I:
1. Share bridges and instructions.
2. Collect feedback.
3. Help with troubleshooting.
4. Monitor censorship events in the Central Asiacountries [1].
The increased internet censorship in Russia, in particular, the
throttling of YouTube [2], led to an increase in the number of tickets
at the end of the month.
I continue to collect information on the bug with Tor Browser for
Android (TBA) not working on Samsung devices [3].
In July'2024, Apple fulfilled the Roskomnadzor request to ban some VPN
apps from the AppStore[4]. To prepare for their further actions, I
checked the alternative ways to get and install Tor Browser for Android
using F-Droid. I wrote updated instructions on how to do that. That
helped to find an issue with Tor Browser for Android marked as an
"anti-feature" app on the F-Droid app catalog[5] and how this make
censored users life more difficult to get TBA. Also, I checked the
sideloading options for iOS and Onion Browser, which are very difficult
for regular users to follow.
Also, I continue to reviewRussian translationsin weblate, which often
helps to improve our user documentation[6].
[1]
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/iss…
[2]
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-25/youtube-throttled-in-rus…
[3]https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42714
[4] https://therecord.media/apple-app-store-russia-vpns
[5]
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41161#n…
[6] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/manual/-/issues/173
Thanks!
Hi everyone!
Here is my status report for July 2024.
I worked almost exclusively on the ESR transition also this month.
I reviewed the rebased patchset more deeply to find potential runtime
and logic errors caused by upstream changes or similar problems [0].
For example, upstream worked a lot on search engines, and the patch we
had for providing our custom default selection broke as a result, and we
had to re-implement it.
Then, before the 14.0a1 release, I rebased Tor Browser and Mullvad
Browser onto 128.0.
After that, I switched to audits. During every ESR transition, we check
all the bugs Mozilla closed to see if some need particular attention [1].
Until last year, this work was carried out only by a person. This year,
we decided to spread it to all the team and have multiple persons review
each Firefox version. I was assigned Firefox 116 to 119, and so far,
I've reviewed 119+118 and started 117.
Apart from that, I worked on the usual maintenance tasks: I rebased the
13.5 series onto 115.13.0esr for 13.5.1 at the beginning of the month,
and yesterday, I rebased onto 115.14.0esr and 128.1.0esr for 13.5.2 and
14.0a2, respectively.
Finally, I worked on sunsetting Windows 7 support on 14.0 [2], and I
updated our pipeline to fetch Firefox's translations after they were
moved to GitHub [3], as this blocked 13.5.1.
Cheers,
Pier
[0]
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42616
[1]
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42757
[2]
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/4…
[3]
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/4…
