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[meeting] Sponsor 30: Empowering Communities in the Global South to Bypass Censorship
by Gaba 04 Oct '19

04 Oct '19

Hi! On Monday October 7th at 15UTC we will meet in #tor-meeting in irc to coordinate work on the project "Empowering Communities in the Global South to Bypass Censorship" [0] cheers, gaba [0]https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor30 -- 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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Notes from Vegas Meeting OCTOBER 3 2019
by Erin Wyatt 04 Oct '19

04 Oct '19

Notes from Vegas Meeting OCTOBER 3 2019 ITEMS DISCUSSED: + Gaba • - Topics for Tor at Mozilla All Hands are being written down in a pad to be submitted ASAP. • * Discussion: We need to strategize on who we send and what we want to accomplish to make the most of the opportunity; priorities: browser and scalability people, and someone who can tie it all together. + Georg - Blog: a) Where are we with fixing our blog comment issue? b) A gentle reminder: please deal with the comments of your respective blog post. If you think comments should not get published, please remove them as this gets them out of the approval queue and it helps others dealing with comments via https://blog.torproject.org/admin/content/comment/approval. If you think you can't handle the comments yourself, please find someone in your team or somewhere else who can or close comments on the blog post otherwise. We have established a policy regarding comments on our blog a while back which can be found at: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/community/blog-comment-po…. * Discussion: Our blog hosting company increased our bill to ~$800/month (from ~$280) because of increased traffic, people will discuss outside this meeting on how to address the issue. + Pili - What is our policy on people printing Tor swag for themselves, their friends, etc...? i.e. not to make a profit or sell. We have different opinions from different people. * Discussion: We should agree on a policy; for now Isa will talk to Jon about when to send cease/desist letters. --------------->8 --------------->8 ———————>8 GENERAL NOTES: Steph 1) Press inquiries. 2) Community portal reviews. 3) Newsletter out this week. 4) Sent initial task to prospective Outreachy interns and getting them started. 5) Preparing for EOY campaign. 6) Signed us on to a letter to end Amazon Ring-police surveillance partnerships Philipp 1) Determined ten winners for our bridge campaign. We're counting 95 new bridges so far. 2) Snowflake made it into the most recent Tor Browser alpha for Windows 3) Progress on BridgeDB (updated requirements, prototype of language switcher, updated translations 4) Progress on obfs4 (polished flow obfuscator) Georg 1) The second Tor Browser alpha version based on Firefox 68 ESR got out (including snowflake support for Windows, the latest Tor alpha, x86_64 support for Android and other neat things) 2) 20 days left to Tor Browser 9.0 and a ton of work to do :) 3) Work on the OTF proposal for ESR migration Nick 1) 0.4.2.2-alpha comes out in the next couple of working days. This should fix all the known release-blockers; remaining issues are should-fix, not must-fix. 2) Working on team policy proposals. We adopted a meta-policy for deciding whether to adopt team policies: see https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/NetworkTeam/MetaPol… in case you want to use it too. 3) Hoping to open 0.4.3.x early, if we can make enough progress on 042-should issues. Alex: 1) Had 1:1 with everybody from the network-team by now together with gaba and will continue from now on with just me and the team member. 2) Work on 0.4.2 and S29 tasks. 3) Continuing with the Gitlab migration work together with a lot of people from different teams. Erin 1) Working on handbook clarifications 2) General HR stuff Gus 1) Getting in touch with Outreachy applicants. If you see someone asking on IRC about more information, point them to this wiki page: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/Outreachy 2) Sponsor9: partners are signing the Partnership Agreement. We have some training in Global South in 2 weeks. 3) Answering Frontdesk/RT. 4) Working on Community (training resources) and Support portal content (old FAQ migration). 5) Submitted Freedom not fear travel allowance 6) Pili and brabo are organizing our activities in FOSDEM, help them. Please, update this wiki page: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2020Brussels 7) We should somehow formalize our process for now to submit people's about/people page to www folks. 8) CCC: are we going to organize activities there this year? Matt 1) Continuing dev work 2) Continuing roles/responsibility transition Mike 1) Firefox esr networking code review Roger 0) Steph, let's be sure not to drop the "connecting EFF to relay operator who might need legal advice" thread. Let me know how I can help there. [in motion -steph] 1) Pili, where are we on the trademark swag policy discussion? I saw a thread with Jon. 2) I heard a rumor we might be scheduling the next in-person dev meeting for February. We should start collecting date conflicts asap, and start a preliminary invite list, in order to send out save-the-dates asap. 3) Fyi, the network health team is bumping out a pile of obsolete relays real soon now. Pili 1) Helping out with OTF Browser proposal 2) Replying to Outreachy applicants 3) S27 report 4) Organising for FOSDEM 5) October roadmap reviews 6) Starting to think about the developer portal sitemap and information architecture with Antonela Arturo 1) Moving forward with OONI Probe Desktop and CLI apps 2) Deploying fastpath for near realtime publication of OONI measurements: https://github.com/ooni/pipeline/pull/213 & event detection engine: https://github.com/ooni/pipeline/pull/228 3) Working on Oonifying our probe services, see: https://github.com/ooni/sysadmin/issues/359 & cleaning up our infrastructure to ensure things are redeployable: https://github.com/ooni/sysadmin/issues/356 4) Published a post on blocking in media websites in Egypt: https://ooni.org/post/2019-egypt-blocks-bbc-and-alhurra/ 5) Hacktoberfest! https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/1179033711557263361 6) Working towards releasing OONI Probe mobile 2.2 and ensuring all strings are translated Antonela 1) September end of the month duties 2) TB9 Release: UX improvements: new identity, network settings, dark theme support, onboarding update. 3) EOY: Working with Alon on the art 4) WWW: some progress on the tickets with my name isabela 1) Presented at Semcomp22 at USP São Carlos/Brazil 2) Working on YE campaign stuff that Sarah needs from me 3) Editing Major Donors folder text and selecting different metrics we could use for a visualization to go w/ the folder 4) catching up w/ email backlog 5) helping out with OTF Browser proposal Sarah 1) EOY campaign planning 2) Helping with OTF proposal 3) Updating major donors with latest vision 4) Planning Boston get together 5) Sourcing new foundation/grant funding Antoine 1) continued coordination on retirement of old services and machines 2) more puppet training, brought up the idea of using puppet for hosting services too instead of forcing people to use ansible 3) announced LDAP password change 4) started experimenting with more "standard" (as in: packaged in debian) tools different things in Puppet and debian (needrestart, trocla, etc) 5) dealt with much maintenance churn (disk space issue, security upgrades, reboots, etc), trying to automate Gaba 1) Tor/Mozilla meeting is next October 8th. Topics: https://pad.riseup.net/p/DYCTCA7mcI1bqS5B9RfR 2) Sponsor 30 preparation for next weeks's meeting 3) Catching up with trac tickets 4) A few 1:1:1s this week 5) Gitlab migration (right now the blocker is how we resolve registration for users and resolve moderation and spam) 6) Other random stuff

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Network Team Meeting Notes, 2 October 2019
by Alexander Færøy 03 Oct '19

03 Oct '19

Hello, Here is a short summary of the network team meeting from yesterday: 1) We went over our Kanban board to ensure that it is up-to-date. We forgot to look at weekly review distribution. 2) We looked at 0.4.2 ticket status. It looks like most people are currently focused on 0.4.2 tickets. We should ensure in the future that we have space in our schedule for doing release tickets around the time of feature freeze. Some tickets were distributed around amongst the team members. Priority should be on the 042-must tickets for now. Once all 042-must tickets are done, Nick said he is happy to open up for the 043 merge window ahead of schedule. 3) During the network team retrospective meeting that happened Tuesday, the team agreed to move forward with a subset of the PR policy that have recently been discussed at some of the network team meetings. Alex is doing the work to turn this into a policy we can vote on. 4) Nick asked some questions about an upcoming poll about C coding style in tor.git. The poll is going to be sent out to the team soon. 5) We discussed the currently active proposal discussions that are happening on the internal network-team mailing list: The policies discussed: 1. "Opting-in to faster reviews and merges". 2. "Commit Bits For CI And Review Roles". 3. "Draft merge policy for discussion and vote". The discussion on these items will continue on the network-team mailing list and during upcoming meetings. 6) Alex asked a question on what we should do with these policies that we are now discussing in terms of announcing them to the rest of the organisation since a lot of the debate around them is happening on the internal network team mailing list. We decided that Alex puts these items onto the pad we are going to use for doing monthly network team reports to tor-project(a)lists.torproject.org. 7) Nobody had anything else to talk about so the meeting was over. Please remember that our next meeting is on Monday the 7th of October at 17:00 UTC. --- end of summary --- You can read today's network team meeting log at: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2019/tor-meeting.2019-10-02-22.59.html Below are the contents of our meeting pad: gaba: (updated on september 30th) Last week (actual): . s30 . s31 . 1:1:1s . get up to date with trac tickets This week (planned): . s30 coordination with all teams involved . roadmap update (bring october tickets) Help with: teor: (online first week of the month, offline at the usual meeting time) Week of 23 September (planned): Take Time for: - gitlab signup / config - team policies: - faster reviews - commit bit and roles? - finish add tor controller trace logging to diagnose stem hangs (#30901) - try nickm's suggested a simpler implementation - split off bugs I found while writing the control trace code Roadmap: - Sponsor 31 outstanding bugs / tasks - Sponsor 31 possible coding tasks for me - follow up email Other: - finish off bug smash logging bugs Week of 23 September (actual): Take Time for: - gitlab signup / config - team policies: - faster reviews - commit bit and roles - kept working on add tor controller trace logging to diagnose stem hangs (#30901) - split off bugs I found while writing the control trace code - did some preparation work Roadmap: - Sponsor 27 - Add IPv6 HSv3 chutney tests to CI - Sponsor 31 reviews - Sponsor 31 modularisation: disable relay mode when compiling - Initial design and strategy to move forward - Preparation work - speed up CI Other: - Finish off bug smash logging bugs - Quick bug fixes x3 Week of 30 September (planned): Take Time for: - team policy discussions - meetings x3 Roadmap: - add tor controller trace logging to diagnose stem hangs (#30901) - try nickm's suggested a simpler implementation - Sponsor 31 modularisation: disable relay mode when compiling - First cut: disable DirCache, DirPort, ORPort, and sets --disable-module-dirauth - If I stall on coding, finish sponsor 31 documentation that's assigned to me Other: - Reviews and revisions - Check CI & backports Week of 30 September (actual): Urgent: - Take Time for: - team policy discussions - meetings x3 Roadmap: - Sponsor 31 config refactor - control trace logging #30901 - preparation work - fix conflicting bugs - started work - Sponsor 31 modularisation: disable relay mode when compiling #31851 - Initial design and strategy to move forward - Preparation work - speed up CI Other: - Revisions - Check CI & backports - Quick bug fixes x2 - tor-relays moderation Nick: Week of 23 September (planned): - Keep an eye on blog comments - Finish edding circuit-padding document - Start a C style poll for the team - Meet about sponsor 31 on tuesday - attend ED tea time later Monday - Respond if needed to expected reviews on paper with Ian and Chelsea - Work on 042-must/should items - Review and merge Week of 23 September (actual): - Response to review feedback on paper with Ian and Chelsea - Handle blog spam on Tor posts - Reviews and merges - Sponsor-31 meeting - 31372: use "make -k" on CI - 31759: Improve "annotate_ifdef_directives" - 31849: move tor-guts into tor. Week of 30 September (planned): - One more PETS review. - Work on 042-must/should items - Start on another alpha, if all the -must items are done? - Kick off a C style poll - More review and feedback on pending refactoring - Review and merge stuff - Finish circuit-padding editing Mike: Week of 9/23 (planned): - Research discussion - Work with Nick to clean up final XXX's in circpad doc and merge/cite the quickstart guide - Cloudflare bot fight? - Maybe have time to start on Firefox review? <-- gaba: please or let pili know that you can't do it this week --> Week of 9/23 (actual): - Research discussion + emails - Wrapped up circpad doc (for now) - Wrote plan for circpad simulator (https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/31788#comment:2) - Attempted #31653; ran into unit test issues and also libevent perf issues - Started Firefox networking review (probably 75% done) Week of 10/02 (planned): - Finish Firefox networking review - Check in with Tobias re circpad perf issues and simulator plan - Perhaps update circpad doc with perf notes Need help with/at risk of dropping this month: <-- do you still need help with this? - Not doing any code reviews this month, unless on circpad patches. Got enough for Tor Browser - Deep-thought-required research project followup - (Google masque, BGP, ECN, Rob's bw experiments, Dennis's Mozilla video, etc etc...) - Relay community drive/mgmt (and related LTS herding) catalyst: week of 09/23 (2019-W39) (planned): - reviews - provide feedback about C style - more feedback to review guidelines thread as needed - more feedback re gitlab migration as needed - check in with swati on Summer of Docs project - #30984 week of 09/23 (2019-W39) (actual): - reviews - chatted with some people re PR review guidelines - reviewed some policy proposals - wrote some feedback about C style week of 09/30 (2019-W40) (planned): - reviews - #30984 - review policy proposals asn: Week of 23/09 (planned): - Figure out how to do key blinding in onionbalance. - Forward progress in #31369 now that atagar has given me feedback Week of 23/09 (actual): - Significant progress on OB key blinding (#31777). - Continue work on stem descriptor encoding (#31823). - Started thread to discuss onion service errors and how they should be handled: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2019-September/014046.html - Wrote documentation for client auth: #28966 Week of 02/10 (planned): - Bring OB hsv3 descriptor encoding closer to completion. - Attend s27 meeting about error passing over SOCKS vs HTTP vs control port - Handle remaining 042 bugfixes. ahf: Week of 23rd of September (planned): - Do first round of 1:1:1 with Gaba and other people on the team. - Work on #31810 - Continue to work on #28930 - Friday is Gitlab day where I will continue with the migration project. Week of 23rd of September (actually): - Did first rounds of 1:1:1 with Gaba. - Productive Gitlab meeting with people from different teams. - Proposed patches for #31091 and #31810 Week of 30. September (planned): - Finish 0.4.2 tickets - Get back to S29 tickets - Work on migration scripts for Gitlab transition. - Take the good parts of our PR policy discussion and turn into a policy. - Network team retrospective. dgoulet (offline): Week of 02/10 (planned): - Go through my 042 tickets. - Assess s27 situation and timeline and prioritize work that need to happen soon. - Attend s27 meeting about the SOCKS error situation. - Bad relay world. swati (offline): Week of 02/10: - Registered and created an account for myself on trac. - Created a ticket https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/31943 for reviewing changes in the tor Manual. - Forked the tor repository and cloned the copy of the repository to my local filesystem - Pushed changes to the local repository and created a pull request. - The pull request is https://github.com/torproject/tor/pull/1391. - Can someone assign reviewers for this pull request? I don't seem to have write access for this repository. All the best, Alex. -- Alexander Færøy

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Metrics team meeting notes, 3 Oct 2019
by Gaba 03 Oct '19

03 Oct '19

Meeting Log: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2019/tor-meeting.2019-10-03-15.01.html Meeting pad's content: Next meeting is on October 14th at 15UTC * Debian Buster and Java 11 (irl) karsten looks into #31953 and #31952 on Friday, and if he doesn't succeed, irl takes over next week * AWS + CloudFormation (irl) karsten tries out lightsail next time he creates an EC2 instance * Roadmap - how are we doing? (gaba) https://trello.com/b/Mu5fYg53/tor-metrics-roadmap -- 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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Anti-censorship meeting notes, 3 Oct 2019
by Philipp Winter 03 Oct '19

03 Oct '19

Here's our meeting log: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2019/tor-meeting.2019-10-03-17.00.html And here's our meeting pad: Anti-censorship work meeting pad -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday October 3rd 17:00 UTC Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 17:00 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/torproject/anti-censorship/gettor/boards * 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 --------------------------- --- 3rd October 2019 --- --------------------------- == Announcements == * Looks like our new default bridge (just started shipping in the new Tor Browser alpha) is already blocked by the GFW * Do we know whether it happened before or after the release? Before = source code inspection (and they know about the moved tor-browser-build.git repo); after could be source code inspection or package inspection or black-box testing. * Unfortunately not; I only tested it just now * Add the date and time you tested to MetricsTimeline, if you would. * I will! * Also most of our new bridgeDB bridges seem to be blocked: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/raw-attachment/ticket/31701/obfs4-… * Tor Browser files are appearing now at https://archive.org/details/@gettor for gettor purposes. * And also at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13CADQTsCwrGsIID09YQbNz2DfRMUoxUU == Discussion == * What research questions can we think of that we should pitch to students? * Study BridgeDB crawling by setting up a variety of bridges (use tor's BridgeDistribution option) and check if they end up getting blocked. * Understand how and whether benign third parties are using/scraping Tor bridges. Research project sketch here: https://bugs.torproject.org/30636#comment:33 * Measure reachability of our snowflake broker (and bridge?) * Reverse-engineer/study a DPI system https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/15 * Understand what's happening with reported Shadowsocks blocking in China since mid September. Active probing? Large-scale flow analysis? * Understand the WebRTC fingerprint of pion-webrtc, in the style of https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/Snowflake/Fingerprinting. * Evaluate effectiveness of obfs4's simplistic "slap some padding onto application data" approach * How does sharknado's packet-burst-breaking approach compare? * What is the the "right" packet sending schedule (assuming no restrictions on efficiency)? Where a schedule is an algorithm that outputs a sequence like "wait 50 ms, send 200 bytes, wait 4100 ms, send 1460 bytes, ..." Start by proposing a strawman schedule to give us something to work with. Ideally I would like to see an adversarial analysis: let one team develop a scheduler (using their own collected traffic), and a different team evaluate it (using their own collected traffic). * torproject.org mirrors - what is the right strategy for accepting them? (conversation will continue in a ticket) == Actions == * == Interesting links == * == 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: (2019-09-09)(gettor days are Thursday - snippets https://dip.torproject.org/snippets) - gettor was down due to a VM reboot. Phw added a systemd script to reboot the service. - add archive.org - add gdrive - edit ansible scripts - edit scripts to upload files to various distribution endpoints Next week - reach out to irl about sending gettor stats to metrics - include reviews from code and website changes - review specs: are specs up-to-date? should we change something in the specs? - review docs: write documentation for web site and ansible playbooks. Help with: - probably more reviews. hiro: (2019-09-02)(gettor days are Thursday - snippets https://dip.torproject.org/snippets) - Coded ansible recipes for gettor so that the service can be easily maintained by more people: https://dip.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/gettor-project/gettor… - Fixing some issues about git history taking too much space quota on gitlab and github Next week - use archive.org as new distribution endpoint: upload files to archive.org - reach out to irl about sending gettor stats to metrics - review specs: are specs up-to-date? should we change something in the specs? - review docs: write documentation for web site and ansible playbooks. Help with: - waiting to be told that's fine to upload files to archive.org? Can we start? - review new website. New website should be reviewed. https://dip.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/gettor-project/gettor… phw: This week (2019-10-03): * Created missing tickets for sponsor 30 tasks * Took 10 random bridges from all three BridgeDB pools and sent them to cohosh for testing * More work on obfs4 improvements * Made obfs4 save client state (i.e., random value), and derive probability distributions from it * Interacted with new obfs4 bridge operators * Finished updating BridgeDB's requirements.txt and documented a process for keeping it up-to-date. * Wrote monthly anti-censorship team report. * Filed and implemented https://bugs.torproject.org/31903 to request new BridgeDB translations * Implemented first version of BridgeDB language switcher: https://bugs.torproject.org/26543 * Updated existing BridgeDB metrics files to match our updated metrics spec. Next week: * Finish prototype for obfs4 flow obfuscator * Figure out plan for how to reduce per-packet entropy Help with: * Gaba: (updated October 3rd) Last week (): * sponsor 30 coordination This week (planned): * sponsor 30 triage of tickets * sponsor 30 meeting ahf Last week: - Worked on #28930 This week: - Finished refactoring parts of #28930. Trying to figure out if we should begin the discussion on how PT's can report back on bootstrap info. - Continued to work on a tool to convert Trac tickets into Gitlab tickets. cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2019-10-03 Last week: - grant outline for meeting and set up gitlab repo for it - started new obfs4 tests - displayed preliminary results for obfs4: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/attachment/ticket/31701/obfs4-reac… - made major changes and squashed commits for sequencing layer (#29206) - helped sah with #31794 - started work on #31384 - so many reviews: #31391, #31685, #31537, #31780, #29484, #31794 - merged #31830, #31843 - talked with serna about #25598 This week: - make a patch for the proxy---broker communication (#29207) - more and better tests for #29206 (also related to #29259) - snowflake dogfood and think about how to address bad snowflake health - refactor proxy-pair state machine (#31310) - finish up #31384 - clear out any other september backlog - grant writing Help with: - review of #28942 and #29206 from dcf - feedback on whether the direction in #31384 is reasonable catalyst: week of 09/19 (planned): - reviews - sponsor31 planning - coding style discussion - comment on draft network team review guidelines - #30984 week of 09/19 (actual): - reviews - sponsor31 planning - talking with people about proposed network team review processes week of 09/26 (planned): - reviews - sponsor31 doc coordination - checking in on Season of Docs work - #30984 arlolra: 2019-09-26 Last week: - mia Next week: - add a build step / documentation for code reuse in cupcake - pick up another ticket (looking at #31497, #31685, #31537, #31765, #31028, #31310) Help with: - review of #31391 dcf: 2019-10-03 Last week: - posted Turbo Tunnel candidate protocol evaluation https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/14 - posted summary of FOCI paper on meek traffic analysis https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/13 - filed tickets for Golang security upgrade (#31889, #31890) Next week: - catch up on Snowflake tickets - review #29206 (sequencing protocol for Snowflake) - review #29206 (pion WebRTC) - archive test pion builds from #28942 - migrate Snowflake broker to a datacenter with IPv6 (#29258) Help with: - Need BridgeDB and meek-azure to redeploy meek-server for #31890

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OONI Monthly Report: September 2019
by Maria Xynou 02 Oct '19

02 Oct '19

Hello, Below we share what the OONI team worked on in September 2019. ## Launch of revamped OONI Explorer We launched the revamped version of OONI Explorer! Access the new OONI Explorer here: https://explorer.ooni.org/ Along with the launch, we published a post that explains in detail what's new about OONI Explorer 2.0: https://ooni.org/post/next-generation-ooni-explorer/ We were interviewed by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), who published a Q&A where we discuss how journalists can use the new OONI Explorer: https://cpj.org/blog/2019/09/qa-ooni-explorer-team-unlock-the-webs-untold-c… VPNCompare also published a blog post about the new OONI Explorer: https://www.vpncompare.co.uk/ooni-explorer-uncovering-global-web-censorship/ ## Report on blocking of BBC and Alhurra in Egypt In collaboration with Egyptian community members, we published a research report documenting the blocking of BBC and Alhurra in Egypt. Our report is available here: https://ooni.org/post/2019-egypt-blocks-bbc-and-alhurra/ Mohamed El-Taher translated the report to Arabic: https://moeltaher.net/2019/09/26/مصر-تحجب-بي-بي-سي-والحرة-التوسع-في-الرق/ In the report, we share network measurement data on: * Blocking of BBC: https://explorer.ooni.org/search?until=2019-09-26&domain=www.bbc.com&probe_… * Blocking of Alhurra: https://explorer.ooni.org/search?until=2019-09-26&domain=www.alhurra.com&pr… We corroborated OONI measurements by performing manual curl tests with the help of our local partners, the findings of which we share in the report. We found that Egyptian ISPs are using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology that is aware of TLS and which is most likely fingerprinting the SNI field of the TLS handshake. VPNCompare published a blog post covering our report: https://www.vpncompare.co.uk/ooni-bbc-blocked-egypt/ ## Updated test lists To help improve the quality of measurements, we updated the following test lists: 1. Algeria: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/517 2. Cameroon: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/508 3. Tanzania: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/520 4. Indonesia: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/512 5. Vietnam: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/516 As part of the process of updating the above test lists, we reviewed all of the URLs (i.e. deleted defunct URLs, replaced old URLs with new ones, added HTTPS where appropriate, etc.), fixed the category codes (i.e. changed category codes where required), and added new URLs based on relevant desktop research. We also made contributions to other test lists: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/514 https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/511 https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/510 https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/509 https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/506 https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/502 https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/501 https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/500 ## Progress on implementing new OONI Probe nettests We made significant progress (80%) towards completing the implementation of new OONI Probe nettests. Specifically, we: * Added functionality to measure SNI-based blocking: https://github.com/ooni/netx/pull/11 * Completed the ndt7 client for OONI Probe: https://github.com/m-lab/ndt7-client-go/pull/29 * Re-wrote DASH to use HTTPS: https://github.com/neubot/dash * Extracted timing of network, TLS, HTTP events: https://github.com/ooni/netx/blob/111e220d770f289108af03fc3ee5fdb526e4906a/…, https://github.com/ooni/netx/blob/111e220d770f289108af03fc3ee5fdb526e4906a/…, and https://github.com/ooni/netx/blob/111e220d770f289108af03fc3ee5fdb526e4906a/… * Implemented DoT and DoH: https://github.com/ooni/netx/tree/master/internal/dnstransport/dnsovertcp and https://github.com/ooni/netx/tree/master/internal/dnstransport/dnsoverhttps * Got the content of DNS packets (including the DoT and DoH cases): https://github.com/ooni/netx/blob/111e220d770f289108af03fc3ee5fdb526e4906a/… ## Progress towards stable release of OONI Probe desktop app for Windows and macOS We made progress on getting the OONI Probe desktop app ready for the stable release. Specifically, we: * Completed the implementation of the Web Connectivity measurement screen for the OONI Probe desktop app: https://github.com/ooni/probe-desktop/pull/44 * Added support for dev tools to aid debugging: https://github.com/ooni/probe-desktop/pull/43 * Wrapped strings (that are to be translated) in Formatted message to support translations: https://github.com/ooni/probe-desktop/pull/41 * Upgraded the dependencies of the app to the latest version: https://github.com/ooni/probe-desktop/pull/40 * Fixed some bugs related to upgrade depedencies: https://github.com/ooni/probe-desktop/pull/39 & https://github.com/ooni/probe-desktop/pull/42 The overall progress and next steps towards the stable release of the OONI Probe desktop app can be tracked through our project board: https://github.com/orgs/ooni/projects/4 ## Progress towards stable release of OONI Probe Command Line Interface (CLI) As part of our work towards the stable release of the OONI Probe ClI, we: * Prepared the v0.1.0 release of probe-engine: https://github.com/ooni/probe-engine/pull/62 * Documented the milestones for the stable probe-cli: https://github.com/ooni/probe-cli/milestone/3 ## Progress on OONI Probe mobile apps We continued to make progress towards the public release of OONI Probe mobile v.2.2.0. Android: https://github.com/ooni/probe-android/pull/263 https://github.com/ooni/probe-android/pull/262 https://github.com/ooni/probe-android/pull/258 https://github.com/ooni/probe-android/pull/256 iOS: https://github.com/ooni/probe-ios/pull/308 https://github.com/ooni/probe-ios/pull/307 ## Progress towards reducing the latency of publication of measurements We continued to make progress towards reducing the latency of the publication of uploaded measurements. This can be viewed through our work on the fast-path: https://github.com/ooni/pipeline/pull/213 The fast-path code has been reviewed and it is currently deployed against active OONI Probe collectors. The remaining next step is to add support for returning the realtime measurements via OONI API queries, and to support the searching and listing of these measurements in OONI Explorer. This is work in progress: https://github.com/ooni/api/pull/115 ## Progress on data processing pipeline heuristics for flagging relevant blocking events for the RSS feed To flag relevant blocking events via the RSS feed in OONI Explorer, we created a new data pipeline with an internal web app and API for the publication of charts and we worked on integrating the blocking events into the database. The component implements a new heuristic to analyze past events and infer when URLs become blocked or unblocked with granularity of a country. Current branch and pull request: https://github.com/ooni/pipeline/pull/228 We expect to have the event engine running soon and we'll then work on publishing it on OONI Explorer. ## Ensuring that our infrastructure is re-deployable As part of our efforts to ensure that all our infrastructure is re-deployable, we made progress on the following: * The dom0 bootstrap script has been updated to work with Debian buster: https://github.com/ooni/sysadmin/pull/353 * We dropped the legacy UID scheme to make it easier to deploy machines: https://github.com/ooni/sysadmin/issues/289 * We upgraded matomo to a latest machine, redeploying it: https://github.com/ooni/sysadmin/pull/355 (fixes: https://github.com/ooni/sysadmin/issues/225 & https://github.com/ooni/sysadmin/issues/149) * Grafana was updated to the latest version: https://github.com/ooni/sysadmin/pull/360 The master ticket with all the hosts that need to be re-deployed is available here: https://github.com/ooni/sysadmin/issues/356 ## Improving the availability of our infrastructure We made progress on improving the availability of our infrastructure. Our plan on how to go forward has been documented in this ticket: https://github.com/ooni/sysadmin/issues/359 Our work on oonifying the probe services is available in this pull request: https://github.com/ooni/sysadmin/pull/361 So far, we have deployed a new web-connectivity test helper and we will oonify the bouncer, collector, and orchestra backends into the same host. ## Community use of OONI data ### OONI data supports court case in Pakistan Back in November 2017, we reported on the blocking of several media websites, Facebook (facebook.com and Facebook Messenger), YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Telegram in Pakistan amid protests: https://ooni.io/post/how-pakistan-blocked-social-media/ Our report -- which shared OONI network measurement data collected from Pakistan -- was used as evidence in a petition filed in the Islamabad High Court by Pakistan's Media Matters for Democracy (http://mediamatters.pk/) challenging the blocking of media websites and popular social media platforms during the protests. The petition challenged the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority's (PTA) authority to block websites without due process. Details are available here: http://digitalrightsmonitor.pk/islamabad-high-court-takes-up-petition-filed… The petition was filed through Charahgar (http://mediamatters.pk/charahgar/) a legal aid centre that Media Matters for Democracy established with the support of Media Legal Defense Initiative (MLDI). As an outcome, the Islamabad High Court declared (in September 2019) that the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority's interpretation of Section 37 of PECA is against the Constitution, and that they cannot regulate content without following the due process, the principles of transparency, and oversight. Details are available here: https://tribune.com.pk/story/2061933/1-pta-not-empowered-block-website-ihc/ This is a landmark victory for internet freedom in Pakistan. ### Blocking of change.org in Cuba Through the use of OONI Probe and OONI data, YucaByte (a Cuban non-profit organization) published a report on the blocking of change.org in Cuba: http://www.yucabyte.org/confirman-bloqueo-changeorg-en-cuba/ Their report (including the use of OONI Probe) received the following press coverage: https://adncuba.com/noticias-de-cuba/tecnologia/confirman-bloqueo-de-la-pla… ### Venezuelan partners nominated for 2019 Gabo Award Through the use of OONI Probe and OONI data, IPYS Venezuela (along with Venezuela Inteligente / VEsinFiltro) has been monitoring internet censorship in Venezuela since 2014. They have created a network of volunteer OONI Probe users across Venezuela, who coordinate on measuring and reporting on emergent censorship events. Through the use of OONI data, they have published numerous research reports, documenting internet censorship events in Venezuela on an ongoing basis. Their Intercortados project (https://ipysvenezuela.org/intercortados/) has been nominated for the 2019 Gabo Award, among the 10 best innovation projects. Further information: https://premioggm.org/premio-gabo/edicion/2019/nominados/ https://premioggm.org/noticias/2019/09/conoce-a-los-40-nominados-al-premio-… https://twitter.com/Mariengracia/status/1172198403478040580 ## Community activities ### Community meeting We held our monthly community meeting on Slack (https://slack.openobservatory.org/) on Tuesday, 24th September 2019. During the meeting, we discussed: 1. Launch of revamped OONI Explorer: Update and questions 2. Query speed problem in API 3. OONI Probe testing in Egypt ## Userbase In September 2019, OONI Probe was run 417,684 times from 5,407 different vantage points in 218 countries around the world. This information can also be found through our stats: https://api.ooni.io/stats ~ The OONI team. -- Maria Xynou Research & Partnerships Director Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) https://ooni.torproject.org/ PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E

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trac into gitlab journey [3rd meeting]
by Gaba 01 Oct '19

01 Oct '19

Hey! The journey continues :) You can find agenda and notes in https://pad.riseup.net/p/e-q1GP43W4gsY_tYUNxf Logs are here: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2019/tor-meeting.2019-10-01-18.00.html The next meeting is October 15th at 1700 UTC Contents of the pad for the meeting of today: SPONSOR 30 MONTHLY MEETINGS References: mail with context: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2019-July/002407.html planning document: https://nc.riseup.net/s/SnQy3yMJewRBwA7 migration code & issues: https://dip.torproject.org/ahf/trac-migration ticket: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30857 Agenda October 1st - Review actions from last meeting experiment with moving tickets from legacy project into its own (ahf) rename torproject to tpo (gaba) Research on how to deal with spam in gitlab. (gaba) Write down a list of things that you will not see in gitlab from trac (ahf) Write down a more concrete plan for migration. What do we test for? When we do it? Who is helping? - (gaba) <-- it is in https://nc.riseup.net/s/SnQy3yMJewRBwA7 - What decision is missing to move forward? IRC ticket number bot redirection user registration - Next steps when do we do this move? Notes 1. experiment with moving tickets from legacy project into its own ahf experimented with it and "anarcat's solution" works NEXT: ahf will copy all tickets from trac into tpo/legacy project in gitlab. 2. rename torproject to tpo -> not renaming it but using tpo directly 3. spam in gitlab AHF's proposal: https://pad.riseup.net/p/MMEeAUdiUQ-XwhDV-Eww Many more proposals (trying to resolve spam issue, user registration, and anonymous users issue): debian salsa on top (for user registration) cerberus (ahf's proposal) a forum for people to send reports https://discourse.org Next steps: AHF does a trial run of a full migration of ticket (on Friday) Look at bugs.torproject.org for irc bot integration. (arma & ahf & anarcat) Write down proposal to have an instance of discourse (anarcat, gaba) -- 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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Anti-censorship team monthly report: September 2019
by Philipp Winter 01 Oct '19

01 Oct '19

Hi everyone, Here's what the anti-censorship team has been up to in September: Snowflake ========= - Snowflake will be part of the upcoming Windows version for Tor Browser: <https://bugs.torproject.org/25483> - Moved from the Chrome WebRTC standalone library to the Pion/WebRTC library in our proxies and clients. obfs4 ===== * Published a prototype of sharknado: a flow obfuscator for obfs4 (and other pluggable transports). Sharknado is a net.Conn wrapper that injects padding traffic to thwart traffic classification attacks. Here's some more info: <https://bugs.torproject.org/30716#comment:10> * Improved obfs4 bridge setup guides. Thanks to several volunteers who spotted issues in our guides and contributed new guides! * Updated our obfs4 Docker image to the new Debian buster. Made our image's "latest" tag point to the latest version, which is currently 0.2: <https://bugs.torproject.org/31692> Thanks to a volunteer, we now have a list of usability issues that we will tackle soon: <https://bugs.torproject.org/31834> BridgeDB ======== * Removed the email link to frontdesk@tpo from BridgeDB's landing page and added links to our documentation: <https://bugs.torproject.org/28533> Released BridgeDB version 0.8.2 after the merge. * Worked on syncing BridgeDB's usage metrics over to the metrics team: <https://bugs.torproject.org/19332> * Made lots of progress on updating BridgeDB's requirements.txt file: <https://bugs.torproject.org/29484> Got to a point where all unit tests pass with up-to-date libraries. * Started working on a specification for BridgeDB's usage metrics: <https://bugs.torproject.org/31780> * Started experimenting with a language switcher for BridgeDB: <https://bugs.torproject.org/26543> * BridgeDB's assignments.log file are now archived by CollecTor again: <https://collector.torproject.org/archive/bridge-pool-assignments/> This allows bridge operators to see over what mechanism their bridges are distributed: HTTPS, email, moat, or manual. <https://bugs.torproject.org/29480> GetTor ====== * GetTor now uses the Internet Archive and a Google Drive folder to distribute Tor Browser links. Give it a shot by sending an email to gettor(a)torproject.org and write "windows", "osx", or "linux" in the email's body. * Updated documentation and added nagios check to monitor GetTor's email responder. Outreach ======== * Worked with new obfs4 bridge operators who set up a bridge as part of our bridge campaign: <https://blog.torproject.org/run-tor-bridges-defend-open-internet> So far, we are counting 82 new bridges. Thanks to everyone who participated! * Provided an NGO with private obfs4 bridges for distribution among its users. We are working with a set of operators to set up new, reliable, and fast private bridges, so we can help other NGOs: <https://bugs.torproject.org/28526> Miscellaneous ============= * Deployed a set of new default obfs4 bridges thanks to Tobias Pulls from Karlstad University: <https://bugs.torproject.org/31164> * Fixed a number existing papers and added a WebSci'18 paper to CensorBib: <https://censorbib.nymity.ch> * Fixed outdated documentation on "BridgeDistribution" in tor's man page: <https://bugs.torproject.org/31807>

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gitlab next steps
by Gaba 30 Sep '19

30 Sep '19

Hi! We met today to talk about the migration from trac into gitlab. The agenda and notes are in the pad (https://pad.riseup.net/p/e-q1GP43W4gsY_tYUNxf) and in the body of this mail. You can look at the logs for the meeting in: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2019/tor-meeting.2019-09-17-18.01.html Next meeting will be on October 1st. CONTENT OF THE PAD: References: mail with context: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2019-July/002407.html planning document: https://nc.riseup.net/s/SnQy3yMJewRBwA7 migration code: https://dip.torproject.org/ahf/trac-migration ticket: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30857 Agenda September 17th * Revisit agenda * Update that where we are at * Stuff that seems that still needs to be resolved or decided upon: * IRC ticket number bot * redirection from bugs.torproject.org to gitlab ticket (legacy project resolve links?) * structure for projects * anonymous users/ user registration * Preserving existing trac data * data migration process * Next steps Notes Logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2019/tor-meeting.2019-09-17-18.01.html On ticket numbers: 1) IRC bot for tickets (zwiebelbot) - get ticket's title and a link to the ticket when we write #TICKET-NUMBER. In gitlab tickets are per project. possible solutions: 1. write a plug-in for the bot that is running zwiebelbot to fetch the data via gitlab's api. we will lose the short hand ticket id syntax (#xxx) and have to use project-name#xxx instead with that 2) redirect from bugs.torproject.org/#TICKET-NUMBER to the right issue in gitlab possible solutions: 1. a part of the migration from tickets from trac to all the different gitlab project, we save a mapping between the old ticket ID's and their new project paths, which would allow us to update the redirection service with a tool that looks at htis mapping and does the redirect 2. all tickets first get migrated to a single project where there's a one to one mapping between ticket IDs in trac and gitlab so bugs.tpo/N point to dip.tpo/legacy/N for future issues (not legacy) we will have bugs.torproject.org/project/NNN 3) the question is how to keep ticket numbers consistent across the migration if we want to have tickets split between mut roject Nick's Absolute Requirements: 1. If there is #NN in trac, and there is tor#NN in gitlab, then they must be the same bug. 2. If there is tor#MM in gitlab, and it is the same as some bug #NN in trac, then MM must equal NN. NEXT STEP: AHF will experiment with aproach 2.2 on moving tickets from legacy project into its own. (ahf will move forward) Structure for projects: Proposed structure: Group TEAM X - all team members have ownership on this group. Project X1 - the ones related to repositories. Example: snowflake or little-t tor. Group XX1 - example pluggable transports for anti-censorship team Project Y - at organization level, example scalability that may touch all teams. NEXT STEP: rename the group 'torproject' to tpo (gaba will do it) NEXT STEP: add the rule "do not have two elements in the project naming tree with the same name, even if they are not ambiguous" NEXT STEP: add the rule "short names when possible for projects or groups" Anonymous users/ user registration: Options: (1) cypherpunks - people not ok with this one as there are trolls (2) salsa custom signup form - some people say this is not totally effective (3) akismet + recaptcha - not really an option because it blocks tor users and tracks people (4) write a custom captcha plugin - some people say this is not totally effective (5) open registration - spam is a huge issue here Proposals: 1) i suggest we manually register gitlab accounts for known good contributors and open up contributions from github issues (from catalyst) 2) open registration with some spam-limiter, and moderate accounts (from nick) 3) consider experimenting with the salsa custom signup form NEXT STEP: We need more research on how to deal with spam in gitlab. NOTHING DECIDED YET. (gaba will check) Preserving existing trac data: NEXT STEP with a list of things that you will not see in gitlab from trac Data migration process: NEXT STEP: write down a more concrete plan for migration. What do we test for? When we do it? Who is helping? - (gaba will do it) Issues about migration will be deal here: https://dip.torproject.org/ahf/trac-migration -- 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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Damian's Status Report - September 2019
by Damian Johnson 29 Sep '19

29 Sep '19

Hi all. Non-technical aspects of life have kept me occupied the last few months but I should soon have more time to get back into the thick of things. https://blog.atagar.com/september2019/

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