February 2025 - tor-project - lists.torproject.org

Are there countries where using Tor is illegal?
by Cristian Consonni 12 May '25

12 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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TPA-RFC-71: Emergency email deployments, phase B
by Antoine Beaupré 27 Mar '25

27 Mar '25

Hi, So TPA has adopted this proposal, internally, to make yet another set of emergency changes to our mail system, to respond to critical issues affecting delivery and sustainability of our infrastructure. I encourage you to read the "Affected users" section and "Timeline" below. In particular, we will be experimenting with "sender rewriting" soon, which will involve mangling emails we forward around to try and fix deliverability on those. The schleuder mailing list will also move servers. Maintenance windows for those changes will be communicated separately. Thank you for your attention! PS: and no, we didn't submit this for adoption to everyone, because it was felt it was mostly technical changes that didn't warrant outside approval, let me know if that doesn't make sense, of course. -- Antoine Beaupré torproject.org system administration --- title: TPA-RFC-71: Emergency email deployments, phase B costs: staff approval: TPA affected users: all torproject.org email users deadline: 5 days, 2024-10-01 status: draft discussion: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41778 --- Summary: deploy a new sender-rewriting mail forwarder ASAP, migrate mailing lists off the legacy server to a new machine, migrate the remaining Schleuder list to the Tails server, upgrade `eugeni`. Table of contents: - Background - Proposal - Actual changes - Mailman 3 upgrade - New sender-rewriting mail exchanger - Schleuder migration - Upgrade legacy mail server - Goals - Must have - Nice to have - Non-Goals - Scope - Affected users - Personas - Timeline - Optimistic timeline - Worst case scenario - Alternatives considered - References - History - Personas descriptions - Ariel, the fundraiser - Blipblop, the bot - Gary, the support guy - John, the contractor - Mallory, the director - Nancy, the fancy sysadmin - Orpheus, the developer # Background In [#41773][], we had yet another report of issues with mail delivery, particularly with email forwards, that are plaguing Gmail-backed aliases like grants@ and travel@. [#41773]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41773 This is becoming critical. It has been impeding people's capacity of using their email at work for a while, but it's been more acute since google's recent changes in email validation (see [#41399][]) as now hosts that have adopted the SPF/DKIM rules are bouncing. [#41399]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41399 On top of that, we're way behind on our buster upgrade schedule. We still have to upgrade our primary mail server, `eugeni`. The plan for that ([TPA-RFC-45][], [#41009][]) was to basically re-architecture everything. That won't happen fast enough for the LTS retirement which we have crossed two months ago (in July 2024) already. [TPA-RFC-45]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/policy/tpa-rfc-45-mail-a… [#41009]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41009 So, in essence, our main mail server is unsupported now, and we need to fix this as soon as possible Finally, we also have problems with certain servers (e.g. `state.gov`) that seem to dislike our bespoke certificate authority (CA) which makes *receiving* mails difficult for us. # Proposal So those are the main problems to fix: - Email forwarding is broken - Email reception is unreliable over TLS for some servers - Mail server is out of date and hard to upgrade (mostly because of Mailman) ## Actual changes The proposed solution is: - **Mailman 3 upgrade** ([#40471][]) - **New sender-rewriting mail exchanger** ([#40987][]) - **Schleuder migration** - **Upgrade legacy mail server** ([#40694][]) [#40471]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/40471 [#40987]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/40987 [#40694]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/40694 ### Mailman 3 upgrade Build a new mailing list server to host the upgraded Mailman 3 service. Move old lists over and convert them while retaining the old archives available for posterity. This includes lots of URL changes and user-visible disruption, little can be done to work around that necessary change. We'll do our best to come up with redirections and rewrite rules, but ultimately this is a disruptive change. This involves yet another authentication system being rolled out, as Mailman 3 has its own user database, just like Mailman 2. At least it's one user per site, instead of per list, so it's a slight improvement. This is issue [#40471][]. ### New sender-rewriting mail exchanger This step is carried over from [TPA-RFC-45][], mostly unchanged. [Sender Rewriting Scheme]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Rewriting_Scheme [postsrsd]: https://github.com/roehling/postsrsd [postforward]: https://github.com/zoni/postforward Configure a new "mail exchanger" (MX) server with TLS certificates signed by our normal public CA (Let's Encrypt). This replaces that part of `eugeni`, will hopefully resolve issues with `state.gov` and others ([#41073][], [#41287][], [#40202][], [#33413][]). [#33413]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/33413 [#40202]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/40202 [#41287]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41287 [#41073]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41073 This would handle forwarding mail to other services (e.g. mailing lists) but also end-users. To work around reputation problems with forwards ([#40632][], [#41524][], [#41773][]), deploy a [Sender Rewriting Scheme][] (SRS) with [postsrsd][] (packaged in Debian, but [not in the best shape][]) and [postforward][] (not packaged in Debian, but zero-dependency Golang program). It's possible deploying [ARC][] headers with [OpenARC][], Fastmail's [authentication milter][] (which [apparently works better][]), or [rspamd's arc module][] might be sufficient as well, to be tested. [OpenARC]: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/openarc [not in the best shape]: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1017361 Having it on a separate mail exchanger will make it easier to swap in and out of the infrastructure if problems would occur. The mail exchangers should also sign outgoing mail with DKIM, and *may* start doing better validation of incoming mail. [authentication milter]: https://github.com/fastmail/authentication_milter [apparently works better]: https://old.reddit.com/r/postfix/comments/17bbhd2/about_arc/k5iluvn/ [rspamd's arc module]: https://rspamd.com/doc/modules/arc.html [#41524]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41524 [#40632]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/40632 [ARC]: http://arc-spec.org/ ### Schleuder migration Migrate the remaining mailing list left (the Community Council) to the Tails Shleuder server, retiring our Schleuder server entirely. This requires configuring the Tails server to accept mail for `(a)torproject.org`. Note that this may require changing the addresses of the existing Tails list to `(a)torproject.org` if Schleuder doesn't support virtual hosting (which is likely). ### Upgrade legacy mail server Once Mailman has been safely moved aside and is shown to be working correctly, upgrade Eugeni using the normal procedures. This should be a less disruptive upgrade, but is still risky because it's such an old box with lots of legacy. One key idea of this proposal is to keep the legacy mail server, `eugeni`, in place. It will continue handling the "MTA" (Mail Transfer Agent) work, which is to relay mail for other hosts, as a legacy system. The full eugeni replacement is seen as too complicated and unnecessary at this stage. The legacy server will be isolated from the rewriting forwarder so that outgoing mail is mostly unaffected by the forwarding changes. ## Goals This is not an exhaustive solution to all our email problems, [TPA-RFC-45][] is that longer-term project. ### Must have - Up to date, supported infrastructure. - Functional legacy email forwarding. ### Nice to have - Improve email forward deliverability to Gmail. ### Non-Goals - **Clean email forwarding**: email forwards *may* be mangled and rewritten to appear as coming from `(a)torproject.org` instead of the original address. This will be figured out at the implementation stage. - **Mailbox storage**: out of scope, see [TPA-RFC-45][]. It is hoped, however, that we *eventually* are able to provide such a service, as the sender-rewriting stuff might be too disruptive in the long run. - **Technical debt**: we keep the legacy mail server, `eugeni`. - **Improved monitoring**: we won't have a better view in how well we can deliver email. - **High availability**: the new servers will not add additional "single point of failures", but will not improve our availability situation (issue [#40604][]) [#40604]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/40604 ## Scope This proposal affects the all inbound and outbound email services hosted under `torproject.org`. Services hosted under `torproject.net` are *not* affected. It also does *not* address directly phishing and scamming attacks ([#40596][]), but it is hoped the new mail exchanger will provide a place where it is easier to make such improvements in the future. [#40596]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/40596 ## Affected users This affects all users which interact with `torproject.org` and its subdomains over email. It particularly affects all "tor-internal" users, users with LDAP accounts, or forwards under `(a)torproject.org`, as their mails will get rewritten on the way out. ### Personas Here we collect a few "personas" and try to see how the changes will affect them, largely derived from [TPA-RFC-45][], but without the alpha/beta/prod test groups. For *all* users, a common impact is that emails will be rewritten by the sender rewriting system. As mentioned above, the impact of this still remains to be clarified, but at least the hidden `Return-Path` header will be changed for bounces to go to our servers. Actual personas are in the Reference section, see [Personas descriptions][]. | Persona | Task | Impact | |---------|-------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------| | Ariel | Fundraising | Improved incoming delivery | | Blipbot | Bot | No change | | Gary | Support | Improved incoming delivery, new moderator account on mailing list server | | John | Contractor | Improved incoming delivery | | Mallory | Director | Same as Ariel | | Nancy | Sysadmin | No change in delivery, new moderator account on mailing list server | | Orpheus | Developer | No change in delivery | [Personas descriptions]: #personas-descriptions ## Timeline ### Optimistic timeline - Late September (W39): issue raised again, proposal drafted (now) - October: - W40: proposal approved, installing new rewriting server - W41: rewriting server deployment, new mailman 3 server - W42: mailman 3 mailing list conversion tests, users required for testing - W43: mailman 2 retirement, mailman 3 in production - W44: Schleuder mailing list migration - November: - W45: `eugeni` upgrade ### Worst case scenario - Late September (W39): issue raised again, proposal drafted (now) - October: - W40: proposal approved, installing new rewriting server - W41-44: difficult rewriting server deployment - November: - W44-W48: difficult mailman 3 mailing list conversion and testing - December: - W49: Schleuder mailing list migration vetoed, Schleuder stays on `eugeni` - W50-W51: `eugeni` upgrade postponed to 2025 - January 2025: - W3: `eugeni` upgrade # Alternatives considered We decided to not just run the sender-rewriting on the legacy mail server because too many things are tangled up in that server. It is just too risky. We have also decided to not upgrade Mailman in place for the same reason: it's seen as too risky as well, because we'd first need to upgrade the Debian base system and if that fails, rolling back is too hard. # References - [discussion issue][] [discussion issue]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41778 ## History This is the the *fifth* proposal about our email services, here are the previous ones: * [TPA-RFC-15: Email services][] (rejected, replaced with TPA-RFC-31) * [TPA-RFC-31: outsource email services][] (rejected, in favor of TPA-RFC-44 and following) * [TPA-RFC-44: Email emergency recovery, phase A][] (standard, and mostly implemented except the sender-rewriting) * [TPA-RFC-45: Mail architecture][] (still draft) [TPA-RFC-15: Email services]: policy/tpa-rfc-15-email-services [TPA-RFC-31: outsource email services]: policy/tpa-rfc-31-outsource-email [TPA-RFC-44: Email emergency recovery, phase A]: policy/tpa-rfc-44-email-emergency-recovery [TPA-RFC-45: Mail architecture]: policy/tpa-rfc-45-mail-architecture ## Personas descriptions ### Ariel, the fundraiser Ariel does a lot of mailing. From talking to fundraisers through their normal inbox to doing mass newsletters to thousands of people on CiviCRM, they get a lot done and make sure we have bread on the table at the end of the month. They're awesome and we want to make them happy. Email is absolutely mission critical for them. Sometimes email gets lost and that's a major problem. They frequently tell partners their personal Gmail account address to work around those problems. Sometimes they send individual emails through CiviCRM because it doesn't work through Gmail! Their email forwards to Google Mail and they now have an LDAP account to do email delivery. ### Blipblop, the bot Blipblop is not a real human being, it's a program that receives mails and acts on them. It can send you a list of bridges (bridgedb), or a copy of the Tor program (gettor), when requested. It has a brother bot called Nagios/Icinga who also sends unsolicited mail when things fail. There are also bots that sends email when commits get pushed to some secret git repositories. ### Gary, the support guy Gary is the ticket overlord. He eats tickets for breakfast, then files 10 more before coffee. A hundred tickets is just a normal day at the office. Tickets come in through email, RT, Discourse, Telegram, Snapchat and soon, TikTok dances. Email is absolutely mission critical, but some days he wishes there could be slightly less of it. He deals with a lot of spam, and surely something could be done about that. His mail forwards to Riseup and he reads his mail over Thunderbird and sometimes webmail. Some time after TPA-RFC_44, Gary managed to finally get an OpenPGP key setup and TPA made him a LDAP account so he can use the submission server. He has already abandoned the Riseup webmail for TPO-related email, since it cannot relay mail through the submission server. ### John, the contractor John is a freelance contractor that's really into privacy. He runs his own relays with some cools hacks on Amazon, automatically deployed with Terraform. He typically run his own infra in the cloud, but for email he just got tired of fighting and moved his stuff to Microsoft's Office 365 and Outlook. Email is important, but not absolutely mission critical. The submission server doesn't currently work because Outlook doesn't allow you to add just an SMTP server. John does have an LDAP account, however. ### Mallory, the director Mallory also does a lot of mailing. She's on about a dozen aliases and mailing lists from accounting to HR and other unfathomable things. She also deals with funders, job applicants, contractors, volunteers, and staff. Email is absolutely mission critical for her. She often fails to contact funders and critical partners because `state.gov` blocks our email -- or we block theirs! Sometimes, she gets told through LinkedIn that a job application failed, because mail bounced at Gmail. She has an LDAP account and it forwards to Gmail. She uses Apple Mail to read their mail. ### Nancy, the fancy sysadmin Nancy has all the elite skills in the world. She can configure a Postfix server with her left hand while her right hand writes the Puppet manifest for the Dovecot authentication backend. She browses her mail through a UUCP over SSH tunnel using mutt. She runs her own mail server in her basement since 1996. Email is a pain in the back and she kind of hates it, but she still believes entitled to run their own mail server. Her email is, of course, hosted on her own mail server, and she has an LDAP account. She has already reconfigured her Postfix server to relay mail through the submission servers. ### Orpheus, the developer Orpheus doesn't particular like or dislike email, but sometimes has to use it to talk to people instead of compilers. They sometimes have to talk to funders (`#grantlyfe`), external researchers, teammates or other teams, and that often happens over email. Sometimes email is used to get important things like ticket updates from GitLab or security disclosures from third parties. They have an LDAP account and it forwards to their self-hosted mail server on a OVH virtual machine. They have already reconfigured their mail server to relay mail over SSH through the jump host, to the surprise of the TPA team. Email is not mission critical, and it's kind of nice when it goes down because they can get in the zone, but it should really be working eventually. -- Antoine Beaupré torproject.org system administration -- tpa-team mailing list tpa-team(a)lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tpa-team

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sajolida's report, September 2024
by sajolida 28 Feb '25

28 Feb '25

Hi, September was again more busy than average to respect the timeline of Project 101 (Tor VPN) and Tails releases. Tor VPN ======= - I analyzed the usability test of Tor VPN 0.6.2 that I did in August. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/ux/research/-/issues/69 In short, the usability of Tor VPN 0.6.2 is decent when people don't need to use a bridge, but very bad when Tor is blocked. None of the participant managed to use a bridge on their own. The main issues are unclear system status and confusing network model. Quotes: “Tor is like a bridge.“ — P5 “I'm looking for bridges that make it like if I were in Switzerland.“ — P4 “It should say: You are being blocked! With Tor you can bypass this censorship using a bridge.“ — P6 Summary of findings: https://gitlab.torproject.org/-/project/92/uploads/1fba8220a110622d852bf448… List of all issues: https://nc.torproject.net/s/fXbRYw76pTXJZym Video clips: https://nc.torproject.net/f/645757 - I created GitLab issues to document the most severe issues: Improve feedback while "Connecting" https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/vpn/-/issues/181 Clarify connection status on all screens https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/vpn/-/issues/182 Allow changing exit location from Configure menu https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/vpn/-/issues/185 Improve discoverability of the list of countries https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/vpn/-/issues/186 Clarify what can be tapped in the Bridges screen https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/vpn/-/issues/187 Remove the need to press Enter when entering a bridge line https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/vpn/-/issues/188 Clarify which bridge is being used (eg. after Bridge Bot) https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/vpn/-/issues/189 Improve discoverability of the circuit view https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/vpn/-/issues/190 Allow configuring only a single bridge https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/vpn/-/issues/193 Rethink how the different relays are named https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/vpn/-/issues/194 Clarify just enough about the network model https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/vpn/-/issues/195 Don't allow changing exit location unless already connected https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/vpn/-/issues/196 Report loss of connectivity to the Tor network https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/onionmasq/-/issues/110 - I started brainstorming solutions to all of these issues with Duncan and the rest of the UX team. Tails ===== I wrote some documentation to help users with recent issues: - Shim SBAT verification error (#20471) https://tails.net/news/version_6.7/#sbat - Provide fsck from Welcome Screen when the file system of the Persistent Storage is corrupted (#15451) https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/merge_requests/1586 This one was a LOT of work to figure out which data forensics path we should recommend to users and document the main ones step-by-step. -- sajolida

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cve's monthly status report
by Clara Engler 28 Feb '25

28 Feb '25

# Introduction Dear tor-project@, my work in February 2025 has been centered around two small but powerful tools that I have authored during this time period. # oniux In the beginning of the month, I started the *oniux* project[1], which utilizes `namespaces(7)` and onionmasq in order to securely isolate an arbitrary application through Tor. It basically serves as a replacement for torsocks but in a way that is less hacky and sounds more correct. My work centered around studying the inner workings of Linux namespaces and capabilities, writing an initial prototype and finally the real implementation. I have also given a German-language presentation about this at my local hackspace and can give you the slides on request. Please read the projects README for further information about this, including the inner workings on which I have spent a huge effort to document those. # TorVault During the other half the month, I started the *TorVault* project[2], which makes it possible to use the `OfflineMasterKey` feature for relays in combination with a Yubikey. It provides a guide on how to generate and import a long-term Ed25519 identity key onto a Yubikey (recommended) or on how to generate a long-term Ed25519 identity key on the Yubikey itself. The program itself then provides an interactive dialogue that prompts the user for the relevant information (device name, expiration date, paths, ...). In the end, the program generates and exports the relevant keys and certificate(s) which are then ready to be deployed into the relays `keys/` folder. I have announced the project onto the tor-relays@ mailing list and I am already using it in production for my own relay. Right now, I have plans to port this tool into Rust in order to eventually integrate it into Arti. Unfortunately, the Rust ecosystem is – at the moment – not far enough to support this, because Curve25519 support in Yubikeys is a rather new feature not supported by the most popular Rust Yubikey crate. This is also an area I am working on at the moment. Thank You, Clara --- [1]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/cve/oniux [2]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/TorVault

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Rhatto's Monthly Status Report, February 2025
by rhatto 25 Feb '25

25 Feb '25

Hi all :) This is my monthly status report for February 2025 with the main relevant activities I have done, was involved or are related to my work during the period. Sending this early on as I'll be AFK in the next days/week. For other Onion Services news, check this post: https://forum.torproject.org/t/some-news-from-the-onion-space-february-2025… ## Ansible This month was focused in fixing and improving CI for the Ansible codebase, which resulted in three new small projects: * AnCIble - opinionated CI templates for Ansible roles and playbooks: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/ansible/ancible * Example role: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/ansible/example-role * Example playbook: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/ansible/example-playbook ## Other * Improved Onionprobe installation docs: * Page: https://onionservices.torproject.org/apps/web/onionprobe/installation/ * Ticket: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/onionprobe/-/issues/101 * Improved the Onion Services research references: * Page: https://onionservices.torproject.org/research/references/ * Ticket: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/onionplan/-/issues/33 * Ongoing sponsored work with deployment, maintenance and monitoring of Onion Services. -- Silvio Rhatto pronouns he/him

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UX Team meeting moved to Monday 24th
by Duncan R. 14 Feb '25

14 Feb '25

Hello friends, As Monday 17th is a US holiday, and I’ll be AFK on Tuesday, the UX Team meeting has been postponed until the following Monday instead. Thanks, D

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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2025-02-13
by onyinyang 14 Feb '25

14 Feb '25

1 Hey everyone! 1 2 Here are our meeting logs: 3 http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2025/tor-meeting.2025-02-13-16.00.html 4 5 And our meeting pad: 6 7 Anti-censorship work meeting pad 8 -------------------------------- 9 Anti-censorship 10 -------------------------------- 11 12 Next meeting: Thursday,Feb 27 16:00 UTC 13 Facilitator: shelikhoo 14 ^^^(See Facilitator Queue at tail) 15 16 Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC 17 (channel is logged while meetings are in progress) 18 19 This week's Facilitator: onyinyang 20 21 == Goal of this meeting == 22 23 Weekly check-in about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor. 24 Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at the Tor Project and Tor community. 25 26 27 == Links to Useful documents == 28 * Our anti-censorship roadmap: 29 * Roadmap:https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/boards 30 * The anti-censorship team's wiki page: 31 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/home 32 * Past meeting notes can be found at: 33 * https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/ 34 * Tickets that need reviews: from projects, we are working on: 35 * All needs review tickets: 36 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/merge_requests?s… 37 * Project 158 <-- meskio working on it 38 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/issues/?label_na… 39 40 41 == Announcements == 42 43 * No meeting February 20th. There is FOCI at the same time 44 * https://foci.community/ 45 * snowflake-graphs proxy CSV files (client-match.csv, proxy-country.csv, proxy-nat-type.csv, proxy-type.csv) are available again. (Working around a bad descriptor that had prevented updates since 2024-08.) 46 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/dcf/snowflake-graphs/-/commit/089e0af01aa6383… 47 48 == Discussion == 49 50 * moderation of mailing lists to prevent spam 51 * https://lists.torproject.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/anti-censorship-team@… 52 * we agree to moderate new subscribers and remove the moderation flag on first post if is not spam 53 * Whether to switch to debian fork of golang for CI 54 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/42014#note_3159983 55 * The problem is sporadic CI failures due to container rate limits. 56 * The rate limit problem has been fixed, for the anti-censorship team at least, by maintaining our own mirror of container images: 57 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/duplicatedcontainerimages/ 58 * tpo/tpa/team#42014 is a request to have the admin team take on the responsibility of mirroring those container images. 59 * The admin team prefers that we use their existing Debian images that contain golang, rather than take on a new set of container mirrors. 60 * shelikhoo has a distaste for Debian-based images, stemming from past experience with excessive patching and slow updates. shelikhoo prefers either to build our own golang from source (possibly on a Debian-based image), or else use a binary release of golang. 61 * Debian patches to golang: https://sources.debian.org/patches/golang-1.19/1.19.13-1~bpo11%2B1/ 62 * So the trilemma is: 1. extra maintenance for the anti-censorship team (duplicatedcontainerimages), 2. extra maintenance for the admin team, or 3. using the admin team–maintained images which shelikhoo does not want to use. 63 * The resolution is #1: keep using our own mirror at our own maintenance expense. 64 * TPA provides golang containers based on oldstable, stable, testing and sid versions of golang 65 * golang version in debian might be different than the official one 66 * we'll keep using our mirrors of containers 67 * Would we like to support WASM version of proxy? 68 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/WofWca/snowflake/-/compare/main...wasm?from_p… 69 * we could replace the javascript logic of the webextension with the WASM version of the standalone proxy. Removing the need to duplicate functionallity in two languages 70 * When compiled to WASM, Pion acts as a wrapper around the browser's own WebRTC API (i.e. Pion doesn't craft its own DTLS records etc.). So it may be possible to keep browser protocol fingerprints the way they are already. 71 * https://github.com/pion/webrtc/blob/v4.0.9/examples/README.md#webassembly "Pion WebRTC can be used when compiled to WebAssembly, also known as WASM. In this case the library will act as a wrapper around the JavaScript WebRTC API." 72 73 for Feb 27: 74 * Should we user test snowflake with covert-dtls? It is difficult to force Snowflake client to become the DTLS client: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… 75 * "After some debugging, reading the pion webrtc source code, and referencing RFC 5763 (DTLS-SRTP framework) I realized why hook was never triggered. The Snowflake client will almost always become the server in the DTLS handshake as sends the SDP Offer every time. According to the RFC, only the offer can decide who becomes the client or server." 76 77 == Actions == 78 79 == Interesting links == 80 81 * https://opencollective.com/censorship-circumvention/projects/snowflake-dail… 82 * https://opencollective.com/censorship-circumvention/projects/snowflake-dail… 83 * €3,917.57 snowflake-01 bandwidth expenses in 2024 84 85 == Reading group == 86 87 * We will discuss "Identifying VPN Servers through Graph-Represented Behaviors" on February 27 88 * https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589334.3645552 89 * https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3589334.3645552 90 * https://github.com/chenxuStep/VPNChecker 91 * Questions to ask and goals to have: 92 * What aspects of the paper are questionable? 93 * Are there immediate actions we can take based on this work? 94 * Are there long-term actions we can take based on this work? 95 * Is there future work that we want to call out in hopes that others will pick it up? 96 97 == Updates == 98 Name: 99 This week: 100 - What you worked on this week. 101 Next week: 102 - What you are planning to work on next week. 103 Help with: 104 - Something you need help with. 105 106 cecylia (cohosh): 2025-02-13 107 Last week: 108 - supported conjure work 109 - reviewed snowflake!315 110 - helped debug and and give feedback on snowflake website 111 - updated our jasmine tests for snowflake-webext CI (snowflake-webext#112) 112 - responded to emails on SQS rendezvous 113 - commented on onionperf + python3.13 issue (onionperf#40051) 114 - finally closed out the meek bridge handover issue (team#133) 115 - updated team#142 with recent proxy count graphs and closed it 116 - other random reviews and todos 117 This week: 118 - support conjure work 119 - debug SQS rendezvous 400 errors 120 - take a look at potential snowflake orbot bug 121 - https://github.com/guardianproject/orbot-android/issues/1183 122 - maybe do some lox work 123 124 dcf: 2025-02-13 125 Last week: 126 - snowflake azure CDN bookkeeping https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/Snowflake-co… 127 - decommissioned the snowflake-broker.azureedge.net CDN profile https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… 128 - decommissioned the old snowflake broker VPS instance https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… 129 - verified documentation fix for snowflake-broker journalctl command https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… 130 Next week: 131 - open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors is nonzero https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… 132 - parent: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… 133 - open issue to disable /debug endpoint on snowflake broker 134 Help with: 135 136 meskio: 2024-02-13 137 Last week: 138 - long discussions around rdsys in containers (rdsys#219) 139 - debug why webtunnel in lyrebird is not accepting https proxy (lyrebird#40024) 140 - fix moat so it will distribute webtunnel bridges in russia (rdsys#256) 141 - bring backward compatibility on the moat captcha API (rdsys!480) 142 Next week: 143 - steps towards a rdsys in containers (rdsys#219) 144 145 Shelikhoo: 2024-02-13 146 Last Week: 147 - [Refine] Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (cont.)( https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… ) improvements 148 - [Invesgate]Add support for using a proxy to connect to the PTs(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/… 149 - Merge request reviews 150 Next Week/TODO: 151 - Merge request reviews 152 - [Refine] Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (cont.)( https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… ) improvements 153 - [Deploy] Remove domain snowflake-broker.bamsoftware.com from snowflake broker's ACME tool 154 - [Fix] Add support for using a proxy to connect to the PTs(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/… 155 156 onyinyang: 2025-02-13 157 Last week(s): 158 - continued work on ampcache registration method for conjure 159 - WIP MR: https://github.com/cohosh/conjure/pull/1 160 Next week: 161 - finish up ampcache registration method (sqs on hold for now) 162 - Begin work on either obfs4 transport or decoy registration option 163 - FOCI 164 - add TTL cache to lox MR for duplicate responses: 165 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/merge_requests/305 166 As time allows: 167 - Continue work on implementing issuer efficiency for check-blockage and trust-promotion protocols 168 - Work on outstanding milestone issues: 169 - key rotation automation 170 171 Later: 172 pending decision on abandoning lox wasm in favour of some kind of FFI? https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/43096) 173 - add pref to handle timing for pubkey checks in Tor browser 174 - add trusted invitation logic to tor browser integration: 175 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42974 176 - improve metrics collection/think about how to show Lox is working/valuable 177 - sketch out Lox blog post/usage notes for forum 178 179 (long term things were discussed at the meeting!): 180 - brainstorming grouping strategies for Lox buckets (of bridges) and gathering context on how types of bridges are distributed/use in practice 181 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? 182 1. Are there some obvious grouping strategies that we can already consider? 183 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?) 184 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? 185 186 theodorsm: 2025-02-13 187 Last weeks: 188 - Debugging Tor Build with covert-dtls: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… 189 Next weeks: 190 - Update covert-dtls to handle new DTLS extensions in recent browsers 191 - Write instructions on how to configure covert-dtls with snowflake client 192 - Fix merge conflicts in MR (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…) 193 - Condensing thesis into paper (on hold) 194 Help with: 195 - Test stability of covert-dtls in snowflake 196 197 198 199 Facilitator Queue: 200 onyinyang shelikhoo meskio 201 1. First available staff in the Facilitator Queue will be the facilitator for the meeting 202 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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Applications Team Meeting Cancelled Next Week
by Morgan 13 Feb '25

13 Feb '25

Hi everyone, Next Monday is a US holiday, so we will cancel our weekly IRC meeting. The next one will be Monday February 24 (2025-02-24) at 1600 UTC in #tor-meeting. best, -morgan

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minutes from the sysadmins
by Antoine Beaupré 11 Feb '25

11 Feb '25

Hi! We had our monthly meeting today, and here are the minutes. # Roll call: who's there and emergencies anarcat, groente, lavamind, lelutin and zen # 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&…> - <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> # FYI: tpo/tpa/tails/sysadmin moved to tpo/tpa/tails-sysadmin Just that. # February capacity review We reviewed the "everything everwhere all the time" capacity spreadsheet and confirmed the various people's allocations for February: - anarcat: coordination, security policy, pgBackRest, MinIO backups - groente: email wrap up, start work on a plan for merging authentication services - lavamind: Puppet packaging and deployments, rdsys contenainerization, GitLab MinIO migration - lelutin: Prometheus phase B, MinIO backups - zen: Tails' Bitcoin retirement, LimeSurvey merge, Icinga retirement plan, Puppet merge plan proposal # g10k decision we're going to go ahead with the original g10k control repo plan (no git modules, no monorepo, yes Puppetfile, yes git/package hashes), this will require replacing the current environments deployment hook provided by the puppet module and investigating how to deploy the environments with g10k directly. # Next meeting March 3rd, as per regular scheduling. # Metrics of the month * hosts in Puppet: 90, LDAP: 90, Prometheus exporters: 584 * number of Apache servers monitored: 33, hits per second: 609 * number of self-hosted nameservers: 6, mail servers: 90 * pending upgrades: 0, reboots: 84 * average load: 1.17, memory available: 3.26 TiB/5.11 TiB, running processes: 238 * disk free/total: 58.89 TiB/142.92 TiB * bytes sent: 475.80 MB/s, received: 304.62 MB/s * [GitLab tickets][]: 257 tickets including... * open: 1 * icebox: 156 * needs information: 4 * backlog: 21 * next: 16 * doing: 6 * needs review: 11 * (closed: 3919) [Gitlab tickets]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/boards We do not have an upgrade prediction graph as there are no major upgrades in progress. -- Antoine Beaupré torproject.org system administration

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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2025-02-06
by meskio 07 Feb '25

07 Feb '25

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2025/tor-meeting.2025-02-06-16.00.html And our meeting pad: Anti-censorship -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday,Feb 13 16:00 UTC Facilitator: meskio ^^^(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 projects, we are working on: * All needs review tickets: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/merge_requests?s… * Project 158 <-- meskio working on it * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/issues/?label_na… == Announcements == * snowflake-broker.azureedge.net and meek-reflect.azureedge.net have stopped resolving as of 2025-02-04. https://lists.torproject.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/anti-censorship-team@… https://lists.torproject.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/anti-censorship-team@… dcf will take care of decomissioning the instance == Discussion == * snowflake with covertdtls builds - ask for testing (on Tor Forum)? * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… * https://people.torproject.org/~cohosh/snowflake_covertdtls/ * theodorsm is debugging a possible issue where the snowflake client is rarely a DTLS client * we'll wait for it to ask others to test it * Old Debian broker 10 has been turned off. Any problems? * https://lists.torproject.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/anti-censorship-team@… * meskio reports no change in grafana * dcf will need to reduce the resource allocation of the new broker in order to get it under the 50 EUR/month credit. * happened 2025-02-04 17:42:52 https://lists.torproject.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/anti-censorship-team@… * only thing we might want to save are the snowflake-broker logs, as in previous * https://archive.org/details/snowflake-broker-logs-20190416 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… * shelikhoo has additional logs from a before a disk-full event once * decision: * dcf will delete the old broker VPS without saving anything from the disk image * shelikhoo will delete the local copy of the logs from before the disk-full event * Now that the broker resource allocation has been reduced for cost reasons, do we have monitoring in place to monitor the load and see how it is behaving? * https://lists.torproject.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/anti-censorship-team@… * ram usage is about 3258.7 of 8K * cpu is about 200% of 400% * There are small spikes in network bandwidth aligned to the start of every hour * meskio doesn't see any similar thing in grafana, like client polls are not happening hourly * on closer inspection, yes there are some spikes in client polls, per your, not as big as in the traffic graph * nginx is restarted every hour, on the hour, to check for new certificates. but that would be unlikely to affect the network. == Actions == == Interesting links == * "Identifying VPN Servers through Graph-Represented Behaviors" * https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589334.3645552 * https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3589334.3645552 * https://github.com/chenxuStep/VPNChecker == Reading group == * We will discuss "Identifying VPN Servers through Graph-Represented Behaviors" on February 27 * https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589334.3645552 * https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3589334.3645552 * https://github.com/chenxuStep/VPNChecker * 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): 2025-02-06 (away during meeting) Last week: - followed up on let's encrypt + meek email and review - changed broker's ClientTimeout (snowflake#40446) - tested meek-azure reachability and updated some bridge lines - reviewed lox!305 - debugged and helped plan conjure work This week: - review snowflake!315 - support conjure work - take a look at potential snowflake orbot bug - https://github.com/guardianproject/orbot-android/issues/1183 - maybe do some lox work dcf: 2025-02-06 Last week: - tracked status of snowflake-broker.azureedge.net after announced date of Edgio shutdown https://lists.torproject.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/anti-censorship-team@… - helped debug reported "AMP cache rendezvous doesn't work in China" https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - commented on adding country to snowflake prometheus metrics https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - suggested color-scheme CSS for snowflake embed (rather than a query parameter or somesuch) https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - turned off the old Debian 10 broker, VPS still exists https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - restarted new broker with a lower-cost configuration https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - snowflake broker VPS bookkeeping https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/Snowflake-co… Next week: - 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 Help with: meskio: 2024-02-06 Last week: - map rdsys containers (rdsys#219) - fix the snowflake proxy prometheus coutry metrics MR (snowflake!482) - fixes for collector on bridgedb metrics (collector#40049) - remove meek azure (team#155) Next week: - steps towards a rdsys in containers (rdsys#219) - why is lyrebird not accepting https proxy (lyrebird#40024) Shelikhoo: 2024-02-06 Last Week: - [Refine] Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (cont.)( https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… ) improvements - [Review] covert-dtls - Merge request reviews Next Week/TODO: - Merge request reviews - [Refine] Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (cont.)( https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… ) improvements onyinyang: 2025-02-06 Last week(s): - continued work on ampcache registration method for conjure Next week: - finish up ampcache registration method (sqs on hold for now) - Begin work on either obfs4 transport or decoy registration option - add TTL cache to lox MR for duplicate responses: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/merge_requests/305 As time allows: - Continue work on implementing issuer efficiency for check-blockage and trust-promotion protocols - Work on outstanding milestone issues: - key rotation automation Later: pending decision on abandoning lox wasm in favour of some kind of FFI? https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/43096) - add pref to handle timing for pubkey checks in Tor browser - add trusted invitation logic to tor browser integration: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42974 - 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!): - 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: 2025-02-06 Last weeks: - Testing Tor Build with covert-dtls (troubleshooting becoming DTLS client and not seeing manipulated messages). Next weeks: - Update covert-dtls to handle new DTLS extensions in recent browsers - Write instructions on how to configure covert-dtls with snowflake client - Fix merge conflicts in MR (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…) - Condensing thesis into paper (on hold) Help with: - Test stability of covert-dtls in snowflake Facilitator Queue: meskio onyinyang 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 -- meskio | https://meskio.net/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- My contact info: https://meskio.net/crypto.txt -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Nos vamos a Croatan.

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