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Meeting notes, network team meeting, 18 Dec
by Nick Mathewson 18 Dec '17

18 Dec '17

Hi! Our transcript is available at http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2017/tor-meeting.2017-12-18-17.59.html . I copy-paste our pad below: ========== Network team meeting pad, 18 December 2017 "Why," Leo's eyes widened with delight, "it's an engineering problem after all!" -- Lois McMaster Bujold, _Falling Free_ Welcome to our meeting! Every Monday at 1700 UTC 1800 UTC on #tor-meeting on OFTC. (This channel is logged while meetings are in progress.) Want to participate? Awesome! Here's what to do: 1. If you have updates, enter them below, under your name. 2. If you see anything you want to talk about in your updates, put them in boldface! 3. Show up to the IRC meeting and say hi! Note the meeting location: #tor-meeting on OFTC! (See https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2017-September/001459.ht… for background.) Meeting notes from last week: * https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2017-December/001598.html Old Announcements: - On the roadmap spreadsheet: Please take december/january tasks. (If somebody else has already taken something you want, please talk to them and/or add yourself too.) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ufrun1khEo5Cwd6OwngERn829wU3W3eskdr… - Soon it will be It is now time to triage 0.3.3.x tickets. Please make yourself the owner of tickets in that milestone that you will do. - The meeting time is now 1800 UTC. - The _free() patch got merged so I would like to bring this to everyone attention: doc/HACKING/CodingStandards.md -> Allocator conventions - Tor 0.3.2.7-rc (or alpha) came out last week - Let's have some proposal discussions. Isis kicked off the process here: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-December/012666.html Announcements: - We are planning a single-day pre-planned highly-focused hackfest before the Rome Tor meeting - teor: Jon says we will have a venue for the pre-Rome hackfest - komlo: Should there be a Rust update/planning session? What should we prepare/do beforehand to help this be planned/highly-focused? - review-group-27 is open, there are only 2 tickets left https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=needs_review&keywords… - No regularly scheduled network-team meetings on 25 Dec through Jan 5. Next team meeting is 8 Jan 2018! - Please check in with the roadmap; december is almost over as a working month! What isn't getting done? How are we doing? Discussion: - How shall we revise the 0.3.2.x schedule? - And should we revise the 0.3.3.x schedule accordingly? 18:31 <+nickm> how about we aim for jan 8 for stable (if possible), and delay feature-freeze by 1 week on 0.3.3? - strategy/plan for addressing current network issues. dgoulet, nickm, teor, isis try to figure it out. teor: - Last week: - PrivCount fixes and performance improvements - Admin for collecting research data - Got an equal-area projection for metrics maps (thanks, cyperpunks!) It's been deployed at https://atlas.torproject.org/#map Gosh, the southern hemisphere is big. And we have almost no relays south of the tropic of cancer. - Various security stuff and code reviews and helping volunteers - Booked flights for Rome - Tried to kick off the fallback directory rebuild, but didn't get time to review the tickets - This week: - It is a short week for me, I am on all-volunteer time / holidays from Wednesday onwards - Work on getting the test network running new IPv6 consensus code - Revise some of the IPv6 patches - Rebuild fallback directory mirrors, along with whoever is around at the time (pastly, Hello71, let's make a time to do fallbacks? Or talk on tor-dev@?) How about this week's patch party? (pastly) - Review some other volunteer tickets asn: Last week: - Reviewed mike's #13837 and #23101. - Restarted coding the prop247 simulator. Requires more work!! - Reviewed #23271 from ffmancera. - prop224 work: Develop and review on #24595. Worked on #24610. - Met with David Stainton, Moritz and others. Talked about relay load balancing and bandwidth dirauths. People are sad about the state of the network: some relays are overloaded while others idle, many overloaded relays cant even establish circuits to each other. Need to do something about it: deploy bwscanner and start thinking about peerflow. What about isis' bridge bandwidth scanner? This week: - Second round review of mike's #13837 and #23101. - More work on prop247 simulator. - Try to make a plan forward for the bw auth work. I'm really hoping we can find someone to work on this!!! Nick: Last week: - Reviewed a panoramix design thing for dawuud - Finished rust privcount proof-of-concept implementation - Read a bunch of rust documentation - Released 0.3.2.7-rc - Made progress on diagnosing and fixing 23847 (Make sure Tor can shut down via control port, and start again in same process). It's not perfect now, but at least it doesn't automatically crash like it used to! It'll be cool if mobile devs try it out - Diagnosed 24367 (Changing pluggable transports (during start-up) in Tor Browser is broken) and tried to fix it. Fix is either wrong, or incomplete. - Fix other issue encountered while looking at code for above. - Review, review; merge, merge. This week: - Try to help with dos issues, if I can - Try to finish a working fix for 24367 - Review review; merge, merge. - Revise recent needs_Review tickets - Check-in with december roadmap; december is nearly done. Mike: Last week: - Updated #13837 and #23101 based on asn and dgoulet's code reviews - Reviewed #24613 - Fixed a memory leak in the circuitstats unit tests. - What is the official valgrind options/leak checking thing? valgrind --leak-check=full --show-leak-kinds=all has lots of noise. This week: - Continued #13837 and #23101 updates - #244847 isabela: Last week: - met with nick, ahf and catalyst on sponsor8 Q4 work - was at Mozilla All Hands This week: - sent update to list about follow ups from Mozilla All Hands - isis - bugs #24636 and #24637 are blocking TB team on moat integration [please prioritize these, the TB team deadline is getting close] - need to follow up on all sponsor8 discussion from last week - sync on .onion states experience w/ asn, antonela and geko [wed at 1900] [asn: sounds good] komlo (offline): - Last week: - Submitted #23881 (tor logging) for re-review. - This week: - Pick the next piece that will be helpful to improving support for Rust in core tor. I wonder if #24249 (minimal automated mechanism to keep C/Rust types in sync) will be a good next step? Especially toward making future/current Rust work in core tor easier to maintain. If there is other low-hanging fruit that will be more helpful, let me know. - Helping on #24030, which someone picked up as their first tor ticket (which is great) ahf Last week: Sponsor 8: - Uploaded patches for event loop metrics (#24605). - Looked into testing if the monotime fixes have helped us on 32-bit arm: https://people.torproject.org/~ahf/sponsor8/20171217/ (#24613 + #24374) - Status meeting with Catalyst, Nick, and Isa! Misc: - Looking into the HSv3 service issue(s) that David is now digging into. This week: Sponsor 8: - Talk with Nick about next steps with CPU optimizations: - Remaining udivdi3 issues? - SHA3 ? - See if I can get Shadow to run on device/emulator to be able to run more deterministic experiments on Android. - Finish my script to `bench` tests individually with automatically generated graph+report.txt from Simpleperf. - Finish Q4 reporting (missing the benchmark info). Misc: Going to 34c3 between christmas and NYE, back Tuesday the 2 of Jan. 2018 catalyst: Last week (2017-W50): - sponsor 8 status meeting - helped review STACK patches some more - looked more at delaying descriptor downloads if we'd get stuck without a live consensus where we need one - looked at failing offline Rust builds in Travis (thanks isis!) - upgraded my virtualization infrastructure (with minor obstacles) - fighting medical billing bureaucracy This week (2017-W51): - more work on delaying descriptor downloads - somehow need a cheap way to ask guard subsystem whether it would need a live consensus to make progress; this would get called from periodic callbacks so counting smartlist entries each time probably isn't a great idea - vacation 12/22 (also 12/25-1/1 along with most of TPI) dgoulet: Last week: - HS IPv6 work starting with the unify link specifier ticket #22781. - Some scheduler work on #24554. - Investigated #24011 but wasn't able to figured it out :S - Dirauth have been notified and they are now broadcasting the consensus param hsdir_spread_store=4. #24425 - Investigated #24610 HS bug and tried to come up with a fix. This week: - Try to wrap up #22781 hopefully and continue the IPv6 HS work (see tor-dev@ thread about it that teor started). - Follow up on #24554. - Review group and ticktets for 032. - Do some more triaging on 033. isis: last week: - proposal discussion meeting for prop#249 - began writing a proposal to migrate to TLS 1.3 - began writing a proposal to use ECDH+SIDH for relay-to-relay TLS connections - worked on #23886 (fn pointers to ed25519-dalek), - #24608 (cargo issue causing build troubles for us), - several moat/spec bugs #24433 - how do we want to do low-level external crypto dependencies in our rust code? (i.e. sha2/sha3 getrandom()) [nickm: i have thoughts here; let's talk on tor-dev after the meeting? ] - this week: - vacation starting friday (through NYE)

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Notes from December 14 2017 Vegas team meeting
by Karsten Loesing 15 Dec '17

15 Dec '17

Notes for December 14 2017 meeting: Alison: 1) our Outreachy intern Pari is doing an amazing job organizing user issues and support questions to eventually share monthly with tor-project@ 2) Library Freedom Institute is now seeking applicants for the June 2018 cohort! libraryfreedomproject.org/lfi. 3) gonna send the draft of meeting invites to tor-internal today 4) working on the Tor relays wiki (#24497) Georg: 1) The security releases (Tor Browser 7.0.11 and 7.5a9) got out, finally 2) The blog post about our Fastly usage got out, finally 3) Preparations for another alpha release next week 4) Resumed review of Cloudflare's Privacy Pass extension Nick: 1) new tor rc probably comes out right after this meeting Mike: 1) Nothing new to report Shari: 1) preparing for board meeting on Monday 2) quick application for Pineapple Fund yesterday 3) editing Rose Foundation grant (due Friday) 4) getting ready to meet with auditors next week 5) trying to reschedule one-on-one with Dan Meredith 6) lots of year end stuff, including personally emailing lapsed major donors in the next two weeks 7) lots of loose ends Karsten: 1) Revised IPv6 servers statistics module after importing descriptor archive since 2007. Currently under review. Hope is to deploy by end of the year. 2) Made a list of tasks we'd like to complete by end of the year. Counting 12 tasks, where ~6 would be good, more would be better. Arturo: 1) We have been working on unbricking OONI Explorer and it's starting to present fresh data since today. See: https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-sysadmin/issues/176 2) Published a new version of the documentation on how to contribute test lists: https://ooni.torproject.org/get-involved/contribute-test-lists/ 3) Made a PoC implementation of our new website in next.js to compare it against another possible solution based on gatsby. We will pick one of the two by next week: https://github.com/OpenObservatory/ooni-website/tree/next.js, https://github.com/OpenObservatory/ooni-website/tree/gatsby 4) Landed an important pull requests for the OONI Probe backend that will allow us to dynamically provision test lists: https://github.com/TheTorProject/proteus/pull/29 Brad: 1) Closed out the books through November 30 2) Prepared financial reports for upcoming board meeting 3) Gathering financial info for Rose Foundation grant 4) Sue emailed program employees with their new time allocation budgets and cc'd the individual responsible for approving their time 5) Updating a schedule that tracks employee PTO time earned/used; planning to distribute individual info to employees for verification by end of the month 6) Meetings with reps from ADP, our domestic payroll service

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NYC meetup notes
by George 14 Dec '17

14 Dec '17

Posting to tor-project@ as recommended: Greetings all. Just a quick note on the NYC event focused on running relays. The goal isn't to build a labor-intensive meetup, but rather to have bi-monthly events which address different aspects of the project's work while simultaneously connecting with different audiences. The meeting was structured with a 20 min or so presentation, followed by over an hour of discussion. The vast majority of people in the room spoke. There was a short wrap-up at the end. At least half the attendees went to the bar afterwards for more discussion, which is a good barometer for the level of interest. The discussion covered a very vast array of topics, from recommended hardware and local ISPs, to how DNS works on the Tor network and consensus, and that great old topic about the life of a relay from birth. A core person from HOPE was there, and we informally got an ok for a free table. At least we're on the radar. There were 22 people in the room, which wasn't bad for the first meeting. The Tor blog post was great to have, as were the posts to relays@ and talk@, but we should figure out how to broaden the reach for the next one. I wasn't personally disappointed, but I assumed the attendance was going to be higher. If we can begin to loosely build networks in a number of locations, we are in a better position to engage the larger community. Local networks could allow the TPO to respond to different external events more effectively, such as a remote censorship crackdown. It could mean, in a place like NYC, having more hands on deck to manage a table at HOPE. It doesn't have to be just in places where there are core TPO people, once a general approach propagates, but people in places like SF, Seattle, Berlin, Amsterdam, Santiago or in university towns should definitely consider at least a one-off event, catered to educated guesses of what would be relevant. But to reemphasize, it's a lot of effort to maintain a full-blown user group with, say, monthly meeting, speakers, etc. We don't have to set the bar so high. Periodic events, without necessarily maintaining any strong continuity between them, is possible since there is such a large critical mass of vaguely Tor-engaged people. Responding to different censorship events, for instance, can be addressed more effectively with loose networks of familiar people. If the next event attracts a different audience, maybe focused on TB, or PTs, some development topic, or whatever, then great. Casting and recasting a net bringing in new people who maybe aren't interested in the last meeting starts to give more people better familiarity with TPO, and encourages them to increase their commitment. There are other side effects. The notions about Tor being some USG front, or whatever loopy ideas thrive the internet, weakens when people interact with others using or contributing to the TPO. Conspiracy theories die hard in the real world. I am apprehensive about proposing new mailing lists, as it can disperse audiences from talk@ and relays@, in our case. But there may come a time when a low-volume NYC list, for example, makes sense to address more local concerns, such as discussing ISPs, data centers, relay installfests, etc. At this point, I'd argue that keeping it in the current channels probably makes the most sense. Input from others onlist encouraged. This is a more general issue everyone can brain dump into. g -- 34A6 0A1F F8EF B465 866F F0C5 5D92 1FD1 ECF6 1682

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Network team weekly meeting notes, 11 Dec 2017
by Nick Mathewson 11 Dec '17

11 Dec '17

Hi! You can find the logs for our weekly network team meeting at http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2017/tor-meeting.2017-12-11-18.00.html Our notes are below: ============ Network team meeting pad, 11 December 2017 “I did not mean to break that planet it was just in the way when I came into being and I fixed it and I said I was sorry and the planet said OK so since I’m supposed to learn from stuff like that I will tell you don’t break planets, especially the ones with living things on them, or at least fix them if you do break them. Also, don’t go in black holes, no matter how much they look like cute little Nahas. They are not cute! They are actually very bitey and kind of mean. Also just OK I do not want to talk about any of this anymore.” -- The Awakened Kingdom, N. K. Jemisin Welcome to our meeting! Every Monday at 1700 UTC 1800 UTC on #tor-meeting on OFTC. (This channel is logged while meetings are in progress.) Want to participate? Awesome! Here's what to do: 1. If you have updates, enter them below, under your name. 2. If you see anything you want to talk about in your updates, put them in boldface! 3. Show up to the IRC meeting and say hi! Note the meeting location: #tor-meeting on OFTC! (See https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2017-September/001459.ht… for background.) Meeting notes from last week: * https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2017-December/001582.html Old Announcements: - On the roadmap spreadsheet: Please take december/january tasks. (If somebody else has already taken something you want, please talk to them and/or add yourself too.) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ufrun1khEo5Cwd6OwngERn829wU3W3eskdr… - Soon it will be It is now time to triage 0.3.3.x tickets. Please make yourself the owner of tickets in that milestone that you will do. - The meeting time is now 1800 UTC. Announcements: - We are planning a single-day pre-planned highly-focused hackfest before the Rome Tor meeting - komlo: Should there be a Rust update/planning session? What should we prepare/do beforehand to help this be planned/highly-focused? - review-group-27 is open, there are 5 tickets left https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=needs_review&keywords… - Let's have some proposal discussions. Isis kicked off the process here: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-December/012666.html - No regularly scheduled network-team meetings on 25 Dec through Jan 5. - The _free() patch got merged so I would like to bring this to everyone attention: doc/HACKING/CodingStandards.md -> Allocator conventions - Tor 0.3.2.7-rc (or alpha) comes out Thu or Fri Discussion: - Does anyone want to help refresh the fallback directory mirrors? It's pretty easy, and you get to thank a whole bunch of relay operators. https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-December/012674.html [Pastly is interested! So is hello71!] - teor: - Last week: - PrivCount release and deployment - Revise the client code for IPv6 in microdesc consensus (#23827) - Revise a fix for bridge descriptor caching and retries (#24392) - Review the metrics IPv6 relay graphs (#23761) - Asked for an equal-area projection for metrics maps (#24563) Anyone remember the scene from The West Wing? Well, I'm living it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection#In_popular_cul… - Emailed Jon about a venue for the pre-Rome hackfest. Awaiting a response. - Various security stuff and code reviews and helping volunteers. - This week: - Fix a bug in PrivCount where I confused "first to close" and "first to open" - Admin for collecting research data - Book flights for Rome - Work on getting the test network running new IPv6 consensus code - Maybe start implementing onion service client counts for experimental PrivCount? - Maybe revise node_get_{prim,ipv6}_{or,dir}port() so the unit tests work again (#23975) asn: Last week: - Another week of mostly code reviewing: + Reviewed mike's #23101: "Predict and build specific HS purpose circuits (rather than GENERAL)". + Reviewed #23603, #23459, #23271. - Attended UX+onion meeting and did some relevant work: + Updated the Onion-Location HTTP proposal: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-December/012660.html + Posted some analysis on #23247 on the padlock/onion states of onion+HTTPS. - Slowly started work on guard discovery again: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-December/012657.html - Opened #24544 for some leftover prop224 spec issues pointed out in [tor-dev]. This week: - Continue review/testing of prop247/SponsorV tickets. - Continue guard discovery work. Get the simulator run again. - Continue Onion+UX work. Mike: Last week: - Finished up #23100 and #23114 for merged (Thanks asn and Nick!) - Did a bit more work on #13837 in response to asn and dgoulet's code review This week: - Fix a memory leak that turned up in #23114 in the unit tests.. - Work on #13837 and #23101 - Try to find time to help review code Nick: Last week: - Worked on future sandbox strategy - Finished reviews and merges for review-group-26. (Lots of code!) Opened rg27. - Finished rewrite of free() functions. #24337 - Worked on several 0.3.2.x fixes - Worked on privcount-in-rust proof-of-concept code - komlo: If you want extra eyes on this afterward, I can help review - Worked on migrating xmit-time on channels to do less 64-bit division. Needs more work; got a false start. This week: - Meeting about wide-create cells - Follow-up about utf8 proposal (deferred) - Follow-up about privcount proposal (deferred) - Follow-up about hibernation proposal (deferred) - Release 0.3.2.7-{alpha? rc?} - Review and merge, review and merge. - See how much progress I can make on #23847 (make tor in-processs restartable.) - List sponsor8 tickets for isabela (with ahf and catalyst) dgoulet: Last Week: - #23709 got merged so very happy about this. Will allow me to continue to tackle child tickets of #23993. - Worked on a patch for #24554 which makes specific scheduler data to be stored in a channel_t. Big side effect is removing memory allocation from the scheduler main loop. - Found the cause of #24346 which was all along #23603 that just got merged this morning \o/. - Discussion on the security list. I've started an initial patch proposed by teor, nothing working yet. I'll need to put more time on this. - Reviewed review-group-27 tickets. - All my 032 tickets have been finalized This Week: - Be available for the 032 milestone and hopefully an -rc release this week. Still some tickets in there that we might want to try to resolve or explicitly postpone before the stable release. - A wise move on my part would be to start seriously the IPv6 support for HSv3. I'll go over the opened ticket and sync up with teor. - Maybe some scheduler work if time permit it. #23993 is the parrent ticket and maybe fixing stuff in #24554 once I get a review. My next move is #23744 but that depends on #24554 to be merged. komlo (offline): - This week: - I will finish #23881, I didn't have the chance to work on it last week - Thinking over which Rust work should be done next (excluding build pipeline tasks) in order to have a stable development environment for Rust-by-default/Rust-only implementations (will send an email with this for feedback). pastly: did: acted as a wall for dgoulet to bounce ideas off of todo: review #24554 for dgoulet todo: contact teor about helping build fallback directory mirror list ahf Last week: Sponsor 8: - Added patches for Android logging (#24362) - Been working on comparing progress with the reporting simpleperf does with focus on the monotime_coarse_absolute_msec() patches by Nick (#24374). - Switched over to using the `tor-android` repo for building native targets for Orbot. Misc: - Fixed Coverity issue: #24543 - Reviewed #22703, #24427 - Bug triage rotation duty. This week: Sponsor 8: - Finish event loop metrics patches. (nickm: how are they now?) - Upstream patches to `tor-android` for slightly easier compilation and to include bench/tests on devices. (nickm asks: do you mean "from" tor-android?) - Do Q4 reporting to Isa. - Status meeting with Sponsor 8 people and Isa. catalyst: Last week (2017-W49): - looked into Tails time sync issues and how they might relate to our bootstrapping related clock skew problems - looked at #24337 (*_free() macros) - looking at delaying descriptor fetches when they'd be useless (#2878) - tagging more sponsor8 stuff This week (2017-W50): - #2878 - collecting info about misleading bootstrap phases that bootstrap can hang on - out 12/15 and 12/22 (also 12/25-1/1 like many people); will occasionally check email but probably not IRC - other sponsor8 bookkeeping Hello71: - meson? https://cgit.alxu.ca/tor.git/commit/?h=meson&id=a0a6f3c4d0a0fb5f4d5bf2a27bc…

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Tor Browser team meeting notes, 11 Dec 2017
by Georg Koppen 11 Dec '17

11 Dec '17

Hi! We finally switched to the network-team meeting type where only the discussion is logged by meetbot and all the status updates are on the pad. For transparency and easier cross-team collaboration we'll send out weekly meeting notes including both the meetbot log and our status updates to the tor-project as well. The meeting transcript is available at: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2017/tor-meeting.2017-12-11-18.59.log… The notes are below: Tor Browser Meeting Notes Monday, December 11 Discussion: -release preparations for 7.5a10 sysrqb - Configured android build environment, updated Orfox build dependencies, added integrity checks of binaries downloaded by `mach bootstrap`, began rebasing Orfox's tor-browser 52.2.0 patches onto 52.5.2 boklm: (maybe offline during meeting) last week: - helped build/publish the new releases - fixed #24475 (Add support for Windows 64 to update-responses) - created ticket #24585 (Add fpcentral apache configuration on forrestii) - traveled to Austin for Mozilla All Hands planned for this week: - will be at Mozilla All Hands igt0: last week: - Configured android build env; - Updated the wiki explaining how to build Orfox and Orbot; - Added a build script to the tor-android project: https://github.com/n8fr8/tor-android/commit/1b1c0b9537d85c0bfb5e0e42cdf188f… - Sent a patch to https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/22084 (backported it from firefox) - Resent a patch to https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/23104 (it broke the content inside chrome) planned for this week: - https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19675 mcs and brade: last week: - Helped with bug triage. - Worked on Moat integration for Tor Launcher (#23136) and made a lot of progress. - You can see some screenshots of the UI here: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/23136#comment:25 planned for this week: - Help with code reviews. - More work on Moat integration and other aspects of the new Tor Launcher UI. - We hope to have this ready for code review soon. Loose ends: - improve error handling. - show a spinner or similar UI element while waiting for a reply from BridgeDB. - more testing. GeKo: last week - release work - work on Fastly related blog post (should go live rather soon) - spent hours[sic!] on https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/24421; I still don't understand what exactly is going on but I have a workaround - started to look into building our new Windows toolchain based on clang (https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21777) this week: - more work on #24421 and #21777 - fixing https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21847 - release preparations for the next alpha (planned to get released in about a week) - another round of privacy pass code review - further work on the design document update Georg (on behalf of the Tor Browser team)

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Community Team monthly update, November 2017
by Alison Macrina 11 Dec '17

11 Dec '17

Hello Tor World, Here's an update from the Community Team for November! November 2017 Community Team report Meeting notes November 2017 ================================================================== https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/CommunityTeam#Curre… Funding community team projects ================================================================== Tommy is conducting the initial research on funding for two of the community team's main work areas: Global South outreach (growing, strengthening, and supporting Tor in the region) and Tor relay operator support. Support portal ================================================================== The communications team is working with us to finalize the text for the support portal, while the UX team continues to work on design. We continued writing more content for the portal, including explanations for common log errors. Our Outreachy intern, Parinishtha, is also working on organizing user feedback to better assist with support. She's monitoring things like blog comments, IRC, and questions submitted to frontdesk@ and then cataloging user issues to share with developers and people working on the support portal. Next month, Pari will send the first update to tor-project(a)lists.torproject.org. Relay operators guide ================================================================== Last month, we were planning to write a blog post with the steps to running a relay simplified. After a lot of work on the post in November, we realized it would be better to merge it into #24497, and turn the content into information on an organized wiki: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/OperatorsTips. It's still majorly a work in progress. We need to add to some of the sections, and then simplify the document so it's not just a confusing text block. We'll be working on that in December. And we still plan to write a blog post about it! Tor talks ================================================================== In November, Alison spoke about Tor at the Freedom of Research Conference in Paris. We also submitted proposals for Tor talks at LibrePlanet and RightsCon. Library Freedom Institute ================================================================== Alison worked on finalizing the website, contacting potential guest lecturers, and getting outreach information organized for next month's launch. Translation/Localization ================================================================== Phoul put the downloads page up on Transifex and then ran into some issues with webml that needed to be troubleshooted. He also worked on a script to allow us to push translations up to Transifex faster. Community documents ================================================================== We decided to put the code of conduct proposal period on hold until after the Mozilla All-Hands meeting in December; Mozilla has an amazing Diversity and Inclusion team and we want to talk to them about codes of conduct and incident response policies. ================================================================== -- Alison Macrina Community Team Lead The Tor Project

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November 2017 report for the metrics team
by Karsten Loesing 08 Dec '17

08 Dec '17

Hello Tor, hello world! Below you'll find the highlights of Tor metrics team work done in November 2017. On behalf of the Tor metrics team, Karsten Rebranded Tor Atlas to Tor Metrics Relay Search [1] and made it visually part of Tor Metrics [2]. [1] https://atlas.torproject.org/ [2] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2017-November/013547.html Added an aggregate search [3] function to Relay Search in preparation of shutting down Compass [4] by the end of the year and a world map visualization of aggregations by country [X]. [3] https://atlas.torproject.org/#aggregate [4] https://compass.torproject.org/ [X] https://atlas.torproject.org/#map Released two Onionoo versions that come with protocol updates: Onionoo 4.3-1.7.1 [5] adds a new "host_name" parameter to filter by host name and a new "unreachable_or_addresses" field with declared but unreachable OR addresses. Onionoo 4.4-1.8.0 [6] extends the "version" parameter to bridges, adds a "recommended_version" parameter for relays and bridges, adds a "version" field to relay and bridge details documents, and adds a "recommended_version" field to bridge details documents. [5] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-November/012621.html [6] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-November/012631.html Announced next major Onionoo protocol version 5.0 [7] to be deployed after December 17, 2017, which removes $ from fingerprints in "effective_family", "alleged_family", and "indirect_family" fields. [7] https://metrics.torproject.org/onionoo.html#versions_5_0 Published draft specification of Tor web server logs [8]. [8] https://metrics.torproject.org/web-server-logs.html Added related events from the metrics timeline entries underneath graphs [9]. (Many thanks to David Fifield and to Isabela and Antonella from the UX team for valuable feedback!) [9] https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html Made sample graphs showing IPv6 support of relays and bridges [10] which are likely going to be added as regular graphs to Tor Metrics in December. (Thanks for teor for all the input there!) [10] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/23761#comment:6 Published roadmap [11] for work planned between October 2017 and September 2018. [11] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-November/012615.html Improved OnionPerf VM configuration management [12] by using SaltStack [13] for management and orchestration [2] to ensure that all OnionPerf instances run the same environment, that we can ensure updates to happen all at once, and to provision new instances more conveniently. [12] https://oniongit.eu/infra/onionperf-management [13] https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ Changed the web application server used by ExoneraTor from Tomcat to embedded Jetty [14] to facilitate development and deployment. [14] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/24174

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Notes from December 7 2017 Vegas team meeting
by Karsten Loesing 08 Dec '17

08 Dec '17

Notes for December 7 2017 meeting: Nick: 1) Had productive conversation with Mozillans last week; I'm feeling generally positive about spec work. 2) Security releases uneventful; next planned Tor release is an another alpha, or maybe a release candidate, around 15 Dec-- then aiming for another release in early January. 3) I need to disseminate knowledge to people going to the mozilla all-hands, but I don't know what. Ask me stuff? Karsten: 1) Made good progress on IPv6 relay/bridge statistics. Currently under review. 2) Relay Search (formerly known as Atlas) now has a world map! Steph: 1) going over support portal copy with Tommy to be done by end of Dec 2) planning onion services campaigning with comms, asn, & dgoulet 3) editing next fundraising email with tommy / comms 4) newsletter went out yesterday with blogs from the last month, donate call to action, upcoming events 5) I’ll be at Mozilla all-hands next week - interested to learn more about how we work together, their comms and marketing, and how we can campaign together 6) I'll be at our Tor meetup tonight in NYC Mike: 1) Is ReCaptcha acting up? I have developed a habit of skipping cloudflare captcha sites, but some guy keeps highlighting me on IRC about some issue? [GeKo: Could be, there have been some folks quite vocal about it on trac as well in the last weeks] 2) What do we think about Privacy Pass? Is it too early to ask Google if they would look at it? [GeKo: I plan to have another look at it next week. Let me get back to you then?] Georg: 1) We worked on remaining Sponsor4 items (we are almost done here, two things left) 2) The security releases are about to get out Isabela: 1) spoke at a panel at MDF annual meeting 2) Decision was made last week on what Sukhbir will work on :) which will be mail bundle (focusing on showcasing the experience of using an email client on mobile that connects to tor and then to the email provider using .onion - the bundle will enable the client to connect to tor. The email provider for this prototype will be riseup (they are already using .onion)) 3) working in Seattle this week - meeting about grants for 2018 and organizing workplan for big UX contract 4) Reviewing sponsor8 work to see how we doing for Q4 before Q4 ends [nick maybe we could sync about this like we did with ahf and catalyst (or whoever is working on this stuff)] Brad: 1) Thank you for all of the feedback on the latest employee time allocation budgets. I have made updates based on issues/concerns noted and will be sending out the updated version momentarily. 2) Jon and I have implemented a new inventory system for managing all of the swag that is sent to donors/relay operators/other friends of Tor. With the new office and the system we put in place, Jon is getting shirts out at a very high rate (over 300 in one day!) 3) Sue and I have been reviewing current use of Harvest and will be coming up with a brief report on ways we can utilize the system more effectively. Expect to distribute first to vegas team later this month. Roger: 1) CCC plans and spaces 2) rome invites 3) i disappear tomorrow to begin my five-country travel adventure

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OONI Monthly Report: November 2017
by Maria Xynou 07 Dec '17

07 Dec '17

Hello, The OONI team made steady progress in November 2017. We reported on recent censorship events in Pakistan, as well as on cases of DNS misconfiguration. We also updated various test lists in collaboration with community members, and we presented OONI at the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS). We are currently working on improving the design and usability of our mobile apps, and we completed the first draft of the onboarding process for the OONI Probe Android app. We also made an alpha release of node.js bindings for measurement-kit, made progress on implementing dynamic serving of test lists via the orchestration backend, and we started writing an architecture and threat model document for probe orchestration. # Published research report on recent censorship events in Pakistan In collaboration with Bytes for All we published a research report examining recent censorship events in Pakistan. This report is available here: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/how-pakistan-blocked-social-media/ Through the analysis of OONI network measurements collected from Pakistan, we confirmed the blocking of 14 news websites and various social media sites and instant messaging apps during Islamist protests. Our report received the following press coverage: https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/250865-internet-body-issues-report-on-news… # Published research report on cases of DNS misconfiguration* * As part of our analysis of OONI measurements and investigation into DNS failures, we uncovered various cases of DNS misconfiguration. We reported these cases in the following post: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/not-quite-network-censorship/ # Progress on mobile app redesign We are currently working on improving the design and usability of our mobile apps. During November we completed the first draft of the re-designed onboarding process for the OONI Probe Android app, and we worked on the Interaction Design elements. # Updated test lists We collaborated with community members on updating various test lists. During November, we updated the following test lists: 1. Sierra Leone: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/262 2. Pakistan: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/259 3. Nigeria: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/255 & https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/257 4. India: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/261 5. Algeria: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/249 # Architecture & Threat model for Probe Orchestration We started writing an architecture and threat model document for the Probe Orchestration system and we also started collaborating with Cure53 to get it audited by them. # OONI data publishing Amazon accepted us into their Open Data program (https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/open-data/) <https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/open-data/%29> and as a result all the public OONI data is available for free on s3. You can access all our public JSON reports inside of this s3 bucket: s3://ooni-data/autoclaved/jsonl/ Example: https://s3.amazonaws.com/ooni-data/autoclaved/jsonl/2017-11-06/20171031T181… (If you were previously using s3 hosted data, the bucket name changed from ooni-public to ooni-data) Moreover we also offer, for batch import, lz4 compressed daily dumps of all measurements. These are available here: s3://ooni-data/autoclaved/jsonl.tar.lz4/ Example: https://s3.amazonaws.com/ooni-data/autoclaved/jsonl.tar.lz4/2017-12-01/dash… To get a listing and metadata of all the files in a given bucket, you may look for the index.json.gz file Example: https://s3.amazonaws.com/ooni-data/autoclaved/jsonl.tar.lz4/2017-12-01/inde… If you are using the AWS Command Line Interface (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/) <https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/%29> and have a AWS access key configured, be sure to pass in the --no-sign-request option. Example: $ aws s3 --no-sign-request ls s3://ooni-data/autoclaved/jsonl/2017-12-04/ We will be releasing a short blog post explaining how to use this data, once Amazon updates their Open Data page to list us as a project. # Test lists orchestration Progress was made on implementing dynamic serving of tests lists via the orchestration backend. See: https://github.com/TheTorProject/proteus/pull/29 # Node.js bindings for Measurement-kit We made an alpha release of node.js bindings for measurement-kit: https://github.com/measurement-kit/measurement-kit-node It's not yet ready for usage by the general public, but we have been using this as a foundation for the development of our new OONI Probe desktop apps. # Community activities We presented OONI at the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS) in Norway on 4th November 2017. Information about our presentation is available here: https://frab.fscons.org/en/fscons17/public/events/309. We also attended the OTF Summit in Valencia, and hosted our monthly community meeting on 28th November 2017. As part of the community meeting, we discussed strategies for monitoring emergent censorship events and rapidly responding to them (in light of recent censorship events in Pakistan, for example). # Research citing OONI data During November OONI data was cited in the following research: * Citizen Lab Submission to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences: https://citizenlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Final-UNSRVAG-CitizenLab.p… * Internet Censorship Capabilities in Cyprus: An investigation of online gambling blocklisting: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319482512_Internet_Censorship_Capa… # Userbase In November 2017 OONI Probe was run 184,800 times from 3,544 different vantage points across 202 countries around the world. This information can also be found through our stats here: https://api.ooni.io/stats ~ The OONI team. -- Maria Xynou Research and Partnerships Coordinator 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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Damian's Status Report - November 2017
by Damian Johnson 06 Dec '17

06 Dec '17

Hi all, here's what I've been up to this month... http://blog.atagar.com/november2017/ http://blog.atagar.com/interview-with-ben-collier/ Cheers! -Damian

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