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Tor Browser Release meeting this week: Wednesday 18th December @ 19UTC
by Pili Guerra 17 Dec '19

17 Dec '19

Hi everyone, This is your reminder of the Tor Browser release meeting this week. This will be our last meeting of the year ahead of our next release on January 7th 2020. It will be the last opportunity to discuss what will make it into this release. See you all then! Thanks, Pili — Project Manager: Tor Browser, UX and Community teams pili at torproject dot org gpg 3E7F A89E 2459 B6CC A62F 56B8 C6CB 772E F096 9C45

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Next Global South Meeting
by cy63113 16 Dec '19

16 Dec '19

[EN] Hi Tor friends, just a quick reminder of our last Global South meeting of 2019 will be Wednesday, Dec 18th, 16UTC[1] at #tor-south[2][3] ----- [ES] Hola amigos de Tor, un recordatorio rápido de nuestra últimar reunión de Global South de 2019, será en miércoles, 18 de diciembre, 16UTC[1] en #tor-south[2][3] ----- [PT-BR] Olá amigos do Tor, lembrete rapidão de nossa última reunião do Global South de 2019 será na 4f, 18 de dezembro, 16UTC[1] (13h no Brasil), no #tor-south[2][3] See y'all there! Cheers, [1] https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ [2] https://webchat.oftc.net/ [3] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/onboarding/IRC -- Cybelle DC8F 1F4C 9167 049F 7AA1 0BD6 2FB3 B0C9 F369 34C5 https://keybase.io/cy63113 @cyb3113

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Tails report for November 2019
by sajolida 16 Dec '19

16 Dec '19

Documentation and website ========================= - We improved our explanation of the enhanced privacy of *Thunderbird* in Tails. (#17270) https://tails.boum.org/doc/anonymous_internet/thunderbird#torbirdy - We instructed people facing recurring errors when upgrading to do a manual upgrade. (#12492) https://tails.boum.org/doc/upgrade/error/check - We improved the layout of the manual upgrade documentation. (#12492) https://tails.boum.org/doc/upgrade/#manual User experience =============== - We finished processing the feedback on our mission and values. https://tails.boum.org/contribute/mission Our work on this document was explained in "Open source & branding – a contradiction?, by Simply Secure. https://simplysecure.org/blog/branding-tails - Update *Etcher* to 1.5.61 to fix installing from macOS Catalina. Hot topics on our help desk =========================== 1. Multiple users reported having trouble importing keys in Seahorse. (#17183) 1. We also had some reports about issues with Nvidia graphics cards. (#17184, #17155) 1. macOS users were affected by a bug in Etcher. (#17185) Infrastructure ============== - We finished updating the list of members in our signing key revocation mechanism. (#16665) https://tails.boum.org/doc/about/openpgp_keys/signing_key_revocation We lost 5 members and added 8 new members. So the resiliency of the scheme was increased overall. Thanks again to all the new members :) Funding ======= - Received a very generous donation of 6 bitcoins from PrivCoin. - We blogged about our plans for 2020. https://tails.boum.org/news/plans_for_2020 - Our fundraising campaign is doing pretty well. Compared to the same period in 2017 and 2018 (first 41 days): 2016 2017 2018 2019 ---- ---- ---- ---- Amount 54 925 € 54 873 € 28 854 € 48 710 € 69% Count 1124 717 1182 1084 -16% Final amount 76 055 € 101 644 € 74 480 € We are doing pretty good in terms of both amount and number of donations thought we're not set any record in either metrics. This is not due to the lack of counter this year because the first 2 weeks of this year were much worse than last year (when they was no counter yet) and weeks 3-5 were better (when we had a counter already). We cannot really explain these 16% less donations but it's not a big deal either. Outreach ======== Past events ----------- - Damaris Mendoza (@damriv) presented Tails to 20 digital security trainers at the Encuentro Centroamericano de Seguridad Digital in Guatemala City. On-going discussions ==================== - Technical writers sent a proposal to improve and simplify the terminology around "Persistence": <https://lists.autistici.org/message/20191108.153500.fbbf3592.en.html> - We are discussing what kind of password strength meter we should have in the Persistence creation assistant. (#7002) - We started discussion whether we should say "*freedom fighters*" or "*human-rights defenders*" in our mission and values: <https://lists.autistici.org/message/20191126.113700.b936d424.en.html> Translations ============ ## All the website - fr: 89% (5302) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy - es: 52% (3120) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy - de: 36% (2139) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy - it: 31% (1854) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy - fa: 28% (1690) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy - pt: 22% (1361) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy ## Core pages of the website - fr: 93% (1697) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy - es: 89% (1619) strings translated, 3% strings fuzzy - de: 64% (1169) strings translated, 16% strings fuzzy - it: 60% (1095) strings translated, 18% strings fuzzy - pt: 43% (792) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy - fa: 32% (596) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy Metrics ======= * Tails has been started more than 767 400 times this month. This makes 25 580 boots a day on average. -- sajolida Tails — https://tails.boum.org/ UX · Fundraising · Technical Writing

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Notes from Vegas Meeting DECEMBER 12 2019
by Erin Wyatt 13 Dec '19

13 Dec '19

Vegas Team Meeting Notes DECEMBER 12 2019 + OLD BUSINESS - Summarized the blog situation in https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32090#comment:6, when do we decide what's next for the blog? -anarcat We will discuss the future of blog in january - isabela - Any progress on putting together Costa Rica initial invite list? Time is passing. Isa is working on this, will start the invite list process soon; wants to make sure we have secured funds for meeting. + NEW BUSINESS Sarah - Planning for event in San Francisco March 26th. Please add San Francisco contacts who should be invited and mark those who might be willing to invite their contacts to the event. Matt - Do we have an engineering contact at DDG? We have an old ticket (#21483) for using DDG's .onion by default. I'd like to talk with them before making a change like this. Resolution: Isa have contact there and will reach out. Roger - Status on applying to otf to be an engineering team? Resolution: Gaba not aware we decided to do this; Roger will head up the process. - Are we submitting a rightscon session? Resolution: Steph will put together a list of our partner orgs that we might do joint proposals with, plus a good contact at each, and reach out to see if they want to collaborate on a proposal. this is a pattern we should be repeating for rightscon, igf, and similar meetings. isabela - Lets get the support group started for little t tor questions, onionservices, censorship, browser, mobile questions, metrics Discussion: pick name first; onion-advisers? t.b.d., including who will be on the receiving end of the list (i.e. who is an expert on each issue and is able to respond to questions in a timely manner. + GENERAL NOTES Anarcat 1. finished investigation of the onionoo performance, great team work with the metrics led to significant optimization 2. summarized the blog situation in https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32090#comment:6, when do we decide what's next for the blog? 3. misc stuff (sponsor Lektor debian package for Hiro, PGP key refreshes, metrics.tpo server mystery crash #32692, messing around with openstack/linaro,...) Steph 1) EOY campaign items: blog writing and reviewing, social media promotions 2) working with annalee_ on first outreachy items 3) talking with someone interested in putting Tor into a game 4) will not be on IRC reliably next week but reachable by email and signal 5) submitted to OTF Learning Lab for onion services Sarah 1. EOY campaign 2. Planning for event in San Francisco March 26th. Please add San Francisco contacts who should be invited and mark those who might be willing to invite their contacts to the event. Matt 1. Team and feature planning Mike 1. Finalized circpad tor documentation; merge is/was blocking blog post on Website Oracles (for link 2. Fixing bugs in circpad simulator, as soon as that's done I will write the Sponsor2 report Roger 1. status on applying to otf to be an engineering team? 2. are we submitting a rightscon session? GeKo 1. pre-christmas-crunch for all my remaining Tor Browser things 2. more work on network-health planning 3. I started to think about ways to engage more with policy people as this feels important but I got dissuaded, so I won't pursue this 4. I will miss the next Vegas meeting Alex: 1. Shadow dev hire progress. 2. A lot of smaller follow ups from 1:1's with the team. 3. Network team roadmap meeting next week. 4. Working with Gaba, Hiro, and Anarcat on trying to solve the Gitlab instance issue that have been causing us troubles the last couple of weeks. Antonela 1. sent november report for the ux team 2. worked with a new /download page for user research > https://lektor-staging.torproject.org/tpo/develop/download/ 3. writing proposals for the internet freedom festival 2020 4. nah is coordinating user research sessions with communities in Tanzania, Colombia and Brazil 5. scheduled meetings for january with: SimplySecure + Metrics, Sarah from OTF Red Lab and Fiona from OTF for an s27 demo 6. reviewing and supporting Tunde's fellowship isabela 1. I have/had a few meetings this week 2. Got the presentation for hackers next door ready (event is this weekend) 3. Working with folks on blog posts for YE campaign 4. Reviewed grant posposals and reports 5. Reviewed updates to Employee handbook (based on feedback giving by folks, this is still a working in progress fyi) 6. Organizing the Membership Program for corporation and organizations to support Tor Gus 1. Working with cleopatra and reviewing RT/frontdesk questions 2. Organizing remote trainings in Colombia this week and Tanzania next week. 3. Afk this friday - traveling to Brasilia for this event: https://blog.torproject.org/events/criptobaile-brasilia 4. Answering Sponsor9 comments to our last report 5. Submitting two main activities to IFF [ State of the Onion; Tor trainings + Community portal ] this friday 6. Next CryptoRave happens May 15 and 16 2020. Gaba 1. Sponsor 31 report submitted and blogpost out of the door. https://blog.torproject.org/modularizing-key-aspects-tor-network-moss 2. Sponsor V [Roger: can you look at that pad I sent you and make any comment/feedback?] 3. Looking at gitlab migration/issues. 4. Roadmapping with network team next week. 5. 2 days afk and a lot of trac tickets to catch up with... Nick 1. New releases out. 2. Writing PETS reviews 3. Talked with MIT masters student interested in scalability/measurement issues. 4. Working on odds and ends between sponsors. Erin 1. Shadow dev recruiting. 2. Working on handbook. Looking for legal advice re: intellectual property section. 3. We're working on scheduling the next feedback cycle for 2020. Karsten 1. Deployed Onionoo patch to avoid rewriting unchanged files, which worked out pretty well (#32660). 2. Wrote tests for CollecTor's webstats module in preparation of avoiding reprocessing files. Pili 1. S9 sync 2. Started working on a Training Partner onboarding workflow for S9 3. Put Tor Project on the Github Sponsors waiting list 4. S9 replies to Phase 2 report 5. OTF Browser proposal revisions 6. Added some ESR tickets to BugSmash Fund 7. Still working on IFF and FOSDEM budgets and activity planning 8. Lots of meetings 9. Will be afk from next Friday 20th December - Monday 6th January Philipp 1. More grant writing for TTP grant 2. More sponsor 28 (snowflake blocking and understanding why it's slow on windows)... 3. ...and sponsor 30 (porting bridgedb to python 3)

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Anti-censorship meeting notes, 12 Dec 2019
by Philipp Winter 12 Dec '19

12 Dec '19

Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2019/tor-meeting.2019-12-12-17.59.html And here is our meeting pad: Anti-censorship work meeting pad -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday December 12th 18:00 UTC Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 18:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC (channel is logged while meetings are in progress). == Goal of this meeting == Weekly checkin about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor. Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at Tor. == Links to Useful documents == * Our anti-censorship roadmap: https://dip.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/roadmap/boards * Our roadmap consists of a subset of trac tickets. * The anti-censorship team's wiki page: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/AntiCensorshipTeam * GetTor's roadmap: https://dip.torproject.org/groups/torproject/anti-censorship/gettor-project… * Tickets that need reviews: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=needs_review&componen… * Projects from sponsors we are working on: * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor30 * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor28 --------------------------- --- 12th December 2019 --- --------------------------- == Announcements == * == Discussion == * What BridgeDB-internals should we export as metrics? * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/31422 * Let's talk about monitoring needs for anti-censorship: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32679 * cohosh: what logs/information from the old broker do I need to preserve before decommissioning it (#32502)? Does /home/snowflake-broker (includes metrics.log) and /var/log/snowflake-broker (includes server output) suffice? == Actions == * == Interesting links == * https://danishpraka.sh/2019/12/07/using-makefiles-for-go.html * https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/masque/NRW2wg3-xg6JZ2MVwdGyJ1LF7XI == Updates == FORMAT! Name: This week: - What you worked on this week. Next week: - What you are planning to work on next week (related to anti-censorship work). Help with: - Something you may need help with. Hiro: Started restoring Twitter Responder. When retrieving tweets I need to check for new tweets only otherwise Gettor will end up responding to old back log and already answered messages. <-- is this #27330 ? Next Week: - Work on gettor specs <-- Is this #3781? - More with review of strings and website content and translation phw: This week (2019-12-12): * Filed #32679 to get a monitoring system that the anti-censorship team can control. * Reviewed #32480, #32300, and #29259. * Discussed partially-redundant bridge authority with gman999 and updated #31878. * Will give talk in Austria at securityforum.at * Wrote monthly team report. * Made a small fix for obfs4 docker image in #32550. * Lots of work on porting BridgeDB to Python 3. * Some API issues, plenty of string-related issues. * Unit test errors down to 300 :) :( Next week: * Help with: * #30716 (took the liberty of adding cohosh as a reviewer) Gaba: (updated October 30th) Last week (): * grants writing This week (planned): * gitlab migration: look at issues and problems in gitlab. cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2019-12-12 Last week: - merged snowflake test coverage improvements (#29259, #32300) - worked on a fix for gettor update script filling up disk space (#32712) - thought about how to tackle gitlab provider for gettor (#32711) - filed a gettor ticket for keeping track of provider reachability (#32716) - reviewed #32499 and #30716 - ran some tests for #31971 - continue snowflake health checks and looked at censorship in china (#32657) - continued looking into Windows issue (#31971) - worked on grant This week: On vacation Dec 13 - Jan 1 (inclusive). Reachable by signal if it's urgent, will occassionally check email Help with: - review of #32712 arlolra: 2019-12-12 Last week: - merged #32499 Next week: - read up on turbo tunnel - pick a new task (#31902, #31201, #19026, ?) Help with: - dcf: 2019-12-12 Last week: - turbo tunnel in meek Next week: - decommission old broker (#32502) - turbo tunnel in meek - turbo tunnel in Snowflake Help with:

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November 2019 report for the UX team
by Antonela Debiasi 12 Dec '19

12 Dec '19

Hi Tor, OTF summit ========== We kicked off November in Taipei. I facilitated a session with our friends of "OK Thanks" about designing with communities and collaborative design processes. Thanks, Fiona and Tiffany for the invite and for sharing this space with me <3 We also had very insightful conversations with OTF partners and community members. Meeting such as like-minded individuals making an impact around the globe is always a huge focus drive and fuel of recharge energy to our day to day work. Onion Services ============== We've been working on Prioritizing Onions feature with acat. We want to allow users to 1. discover when a secure onion version of the website they are visiting is available and also 2. opt-in to upgrade their security. With onions becoming popular, onion secured sites may get upgraded automatically, like what HTTP to HTTPS does. But now, we want to introduce users about the benefits of onion security. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21952 mcs and brade made progress on the onion auth feature too. Onion services operators will be able to set an extra security layer. Tor Browser will also allow recurrent users to save those credentials at the first time of use. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19757 After all the work we have been doing at the UI related with onions, we may need to update our URL bar and circuit display to have a coherent and consistent UI. We are having that discussion here https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32645 Tor Browser 9.5 =============== We want to allow users to quickly recover from website breakage that could happen because the security trade-offs, so we think per-site settings are a critical part of improving that flow. pospeselr, and I have been discussing how we can implement it at the browser user interface. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30570 The last release set Letterboxing enabled, and we got some confused users by the "weird margins." We've been discussing how we can introduce the benefits of letterboxing to users and also how to allow users to disable/enable the feature via the regular preferences panel UI. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32324 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32325 WWW === We have been discussing and proposing improvements to the current download Tor Browser page. We will run user research with communities during December so it can inform our changes. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32460 The styleguide got some love. We included updated brand assets, the Tor Browser icon, and some other good peaks. https://styleguide.torproject.org/ OONI ==== As part of S30, the ooni team has been working on exposing the new Circumvention test in the Probe app UI, both in desktop and mobiles. https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/804 Localization ============ We did new rounds of tweets asking for translations for the manual and support portal. We debugged the errors with different locales on Lektor, and made it easier to add new locales. We updated the documentation - for translators https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/translation/rules - for developers https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/translation/developers Open Team ========= The UX Team roadmap kanban breathes here: https://dip.torproject.org/groups/torproject/ux/-/boards If you missed those, November weekly meetings notes are here: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/ux/2019-November/000473.html https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/ux/2019-November/000474.html Peace and love, A -- Antonela Debiasi UX Team Lead @antonela E2330A6D1EB5A0C8 https://torproject.org

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Metrics Team Meeting Notes, December 12th 2019 [include last week releases]
by Gaba 12 Dec '19

12 Dec '19

Hi! We had our meeting on Thursday December 12th. Pad for the meeting: https://nc.torproject.net/s/Znd4MkHebAznEgA Meeting Log: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2019/tor-meeting.2019-12-12-15.02.log… Agenda and Notes: * Short update on exit scanner * Roadmap (gaba) https://trello.com/b/Mu5fYg53/tor-metrics-roadmap * Update on Metrics data portal: Simply secure sent a message and we agreed to meet on February for the work they are starting soon and next steps. Releases last week: #32684: Onionoo 7.0-1.23.0 -- Project Manager: Network, Anti-Censorship and Metrics teams gaba at torproject.org she/her are my pronouns GPG Fingerprint EE3F DF5C AD91 643C 21BE 8370 180D B06C 59CA BD19

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S27 Meeting Today: Tuesday 10th December @ 15UTC
by Pili Guerra 10 Dec '19

10 Dec '19

Hi everyone, This is a reminder of our S27: Onion Services meeting happening today at 15UTC on #tor-meeting. This will be our last meeting on this project for the year. Thanks! Pili — Project Manager: Tor Browser, UX and Community teams pili at torproject dot org gpg 3E7F A89E 2459 B6CC A62F 56B8 C6CB 772E F096 9C45

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Network Team Meeting Notes, 9 December 2019
by Alexander Færøy 09 Dec '19

09 Dec '19

Hello, Here is a short summary of the network team meeting from Monday the 9th of December 2019. 1) We started out by looking at the 0.4.2 status page on Trac to see how we are doing there. As this is probably released when this email is out, we decided to skip the step for the next meetings until we begin dealing with bugs for 0.4.3.x. 2) We went over our Kanban board. 3) We went over our review queue. People are getting better at distributing tickets about between themselves during the week. 4) We shortly discussed a policy proposal by Teor about planning meetings. Discussions are going to continue on the network-team mailing list. 5) Nobody had anything else to discuss. --- end of summary --- You can read today's network team meeting log at: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2019/tor-meeting.2019-12-09-17.59.html Below are the contents of our meeting pad: gaba: (updated on December 4th) Last week (actual): s31 report (we want to send it on Friday) sV painfull report DRL implementers meeting grants proposals This week (planned): hopefully preparing roadmap activities (way behind this... sorry!) will be afk tuesday & wednesday next week sV report Help with: teor: (online first week of the month, offline at the usual meeting time) Week of 25 November (planned): Take Time for: - Check gitlab migration - Draft s31 report: relay/dirauth modules, tooling, and testing (Deadline: 30 Nov) - catching up on emails - post-0.4.2.4-rc backports Roadmap: - Sponsor 31 modularisation: - Modularisation dependency tooling (#32522) - Sponsor 31 code reviews Other: - Week of 25 November and 2 December (actual): Take Time for: - catching up on emails and IRC x2 - post-0.4.2.4-rc backports - Draft s31 report: relay/dirauth modules, tooling, and testing (Deadline: 30 Nov) - Meeting Times proposal - Check gitlab migration Roadmap: - Sponsor 31 modularisation: - Modularisation dependency tooling (#32522) - Sponsor 31 code reviews - consider clang -std=gnu99 in Travis for better C99 portability #32500 - Other small sponsor 31 reviews and merges Other: - Backports for new releases - Updating CI dependencies - Python 3 upgrades - 0.2.9 LTS end of life preparation - Chutney/Tor debugging - Reviewing external contributors - CI Fixes x 3 Week of 9 December (planned): Take Time for: - Prioritise work? Roadmap: - Sponsor 27 refactor Other: - Chutney debugging? - Bug fixes, ticket triage, and quick reviews - 0.2.9 LTS transition - Other work? Week of 9 December (actual): Take Time for: - Roadmap: - Other: - Bug fixes, ticket triage, and quick reviews - 0.2.9 LTS transition - Nick: Week of 2 December (planned): - Various documentation/fundraising writing - blog comments - PETS bidding - Fix needs_revision branches - Dirauth configuration isolation (32139) - C style work - Prep for stable releases, TBD Week of 2 December (actual): - Various documentation/fundraising writing - blog comments - PETS bidding - Fix needs_revision branches - Prepare stable releases Week of 9 December (planned): - Stable releases: 0.4.2.5, 0.4.1.7, 0.4.0.6, 0.3.5.9. - Catch up with old reviews - Meeting an MIT masters' student to help w research ideas. - Hacking TBD, not sure? Mike: Week of 2 December (planned): - Update circpad docs - File DNS cache mitigation ticket for Website Oracles paper; show it to Tobias - Clear out circpad simulator TODO and review python code Since 2 December (actual): - Updated circpad docs: Interested parties should review Sections 1.2-1.4; 4.1; 6.3; 7.5 https://github.com/mikeperry-tor/tor/blob/circuitpadding-dev-doc/doc/HACKIN… - Filed DNS cache mitigation ticket for Website Oracles paper; showed it to Tobias - https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32678 - Addressed comments from Georg+Tobias on Website Oracles blog post Week of 9 December (planned): - Finish circpad docs; get docs merged to tor.git origin/master - Get Website Oracle blog post live (needs long-term link to circpad docs) - Clear out circpad simulator TODO (most are doc items now); update its README; review python code - Write draft of Sponsor2 report Need help with/at risk of dropping this month: - Deep-thought-required research project followup - (Google masque, BGP, ECN, Dennis's Mozilla video, etc etc...) catalyst: week of 12/02 (2019-W49) (planned): - sponsor31 wrap up documentation (#32206, #32208) - reviews - more follow up about C style - GSoD stuff as needed week of 12/02 (2019-W49) (actual): - sponsor31 wrap up summaries - reviews - shadow dev hiring stuff - #30984 (key-value lines for control.c) week of 12/09 (2019-W50) (planned): - reviews - more architecture documentation (#32206, #32208) - C style follow up - GSoD stuff as needed asn: Week of 04/12 (planned): - Still lots of work to be done with onionbalance. This week will be spent in making sure that little-t-tor and onionbalance compute the same hash ring. And also starting to do descriptor rotation etc. And maybe making onionbalance work over chutney. Week of 04/12 (actual): - Lots of onionbalance work: - Fix hashring calculations for OBv3 both in chutney and realnet - Fix broken tests. - Make onionbalance work over chutney. - Publish both descriptors - Fight INTRO2 MAC bug - Reviews and merges. Week of 09/12 (planned): - Figure out solution to INTRO2 MAC bug (talk to Nick about it). - Continue work on onionbalance. - Start rotating descriptors ahf: Week of 2 December (planned): - Lots of phone interviews. - Trying to back back on track with S28. - Follow up on all the feedback we have gotten about Gitlab. - Worked a bit on a "proposal" on issues with Tor's DNS subsystem. - Got a bit involved with #32604 (Thanks Tim for the big writeup there!) Week of 2 December (actually): - Had a lot of phonecalls about Shadow hire. Good progress seems to happen there. - Started working on ordering the Gitlab issues from the feedback we have gotten: 1. Some issues are easy rewrites. 2. Some are social (dcf found an interesting case where comment ID's are not from {0, 1, ..., N} per ticket, but is rather a global identifier. - Began with the "low hanging fruits" of the Gitlab feedback: headers, code, and pre tag errors. - Talked a bit with Roger about the DNS subsystem stuff. Week of 9 December (planned): - Some followups on 1:1's from last week. - Hopefully entering the last steps of the Shadow hire process. - Will need to do a bit of research for some emails we are working on. - Build a personal todo list for finalizing s28 tasks for December and November. - Might be a bit slower on IRC this week to try to deal with the s28 backlog I've build. dgoulet: Week of 02/12 (actual): - s27: #32021 - Reviews and merges. - AFK for personal reasons. Week of 09/12 (planned): - s27 final work. swati: Week of December 9 (planned): - Plan to continue working on the ticket https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/4310. - Completed sorting alphabetically the 'General Options' category. - Whitespace changes appeared while aplhabetically sorting the 'General Options'. Unfortunately these whitespaces do not throw any errors in HTML. They appear just fine. - Since I am unable to see the man-page rendition, I need to figure how to avoid causing whistespace changes in the file. -- Alexander Færøy

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Anti-censorship team monthly report: November 2019
by Philipp Winter 09 Dec '19

09 Dec '19

Hi everyone, Here's what the anti-censorship team has been up to in November: Snowflake ========= * Moved to using the gorilla/websocket library instead of an outdated custom library for connections between the proxies and the bridge: <https://bugs.torproject.org/31028> * Expanded the coverage of Snowflake unit tests: <https://bugs.torproject.org/30867> <https://bugs.torproject.org/29259> * Updated the way proxies interact with the broker and began to collect and report metrics about how many proxies we have of each type (e.g., web extensions, badges, standalone instances): <https://bugs.torproject.org/29207> <https://bugs.torproject.org/31157> * Started more rigorously measuring Snowflake's network health: <https://bugs.torproject.org/32545> * Fixed a race condition in the Snowflake broker that was causing crashes: <https://bugs.torproject.org/32576> * Updated webextension and Snowflake badge deployments with new translations. GetTor ====== * Started working on a GetTor survivial guide: <https://dip.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/gettor-project/gettor…> * Worked on using the GitHub REST API for uploading Tor Browser binaries: <https://bugs.torproject.org/32480> BridgeDB ======== * We significantly improved bridgestrap, our REST service that takes as input a bridge line, tests the given bridge, and then returns the test result: <https://bugs.torproject.org/31874> The idea is that BridgeDB uses bridgestrap to learn if the bridges it knows about actually work. Broken bridges are not handed out to users, which will improve user experience. Outreach ======== * Several Tor developers attended the OTF Summit in Taipei. We had numerous helpful conversations about circumvention, obfs4, and censorship analysis. - Roger had a session on Tor, with an emphasis on how Tor Browser can circumvent censorship. - Philipp talked to a few people who may be able to distribute private obfs4 bridges to users who need them. - Philipp and Arturo had a chat about how BridgeDB and OONI should work together in the future: BridgeDB will provide OONI with bridges it wants measured, and OONI returns test results, which BridgeDB should take into account when handing out bridges. For example, if a bridge is blocked in Turkey, BridgeDB should no longer hand it out to users in Turkey. Bridges ======= * Added a new default bridge at Georgetown University to Tor Browser: <https://bugs.torproject.org/32606> * We're working on getting another default bridge at the University of Minnesota added to Tor Browser: <https://bugs.torproject.org/32547> * We made our obfs4 docker image more usable. The image now uses a docker volume to persist tor's data directory, which makes it possible to keep your bridge identity when upgrading to a new docker image. We also added a new script, get-bridge-line, which conveniently gives you your bridge's bridge line. Take a look at our new installation instructions to learn more: <https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/bridge/docker/> <https://bugs.torproject.org/31834> Thanks to thymbahutymba for providing us with plenty of helpful feedback! * We sent two private obfs4 bridges to somebody who further distributed them to people in China. According to some initial feedback, the bridges work well for the recipients. Miscellaneous ============= * Overhauled the DNS recommendations for exit relay operators: <https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/exit/#dns-on-exit-relays> * We tried to understand the Internet shutdown in Iran and look for circumvention opportunities. In fact, the incident was not a total shutdown. Some data centers in Iran still had connectivity, so it was possible to use VPS systems in these data centers as proxies. Besides, The DNS resolvers of many ISPs in Iran still allowed requests for domains outside of Iran. That is, people could still resolve, say, foo.com and get its correct IP address. As a result, DNS tunneling was possible. We should invest in a DNS-based pluggable transport. Even if it may not have been very useful in this particular situation (throughput would have been excruciatingly low), it will certainly come in handy again in the future. Take a look at OONI's blog post on the shutdown: <https://ooni.org/post/2019-iran-internet-blackout/> * More grant writing and planning towards a "transition to practice" research grant.

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