Hi! Our meeting transcript is at:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-dev/2017/tor-dev.2017-04-24-16.59.html
Below are the status reports from this week:
====================
Network team meeting pad update notes, 24 April 2017
nick:
* was on vacation.
* finished consdiffmgr branch (merged today)
* reviewed a bit
* Refactored directory request api
* This week:
* aiming to get consdiff implementations mostly done; will
depend on compression status.
* aiming to review and merge much more, especially compression
* Aiming to help others with priorities etc
* What am I forgetting?
* Concerning topics:
* Review backlog.
* **Revision backlog**
dgoulet:
- Worked on some small 031 tickets, most of them in needs_review or merged.
- Finalize the prop224 service hashring and upload descriptor code. (#20657)
- Working on adding unit test coverage to #20657 (ongoing work is in branch
ticket20657_031_02)
- Tickets from the prop224 groundwork are getting merged (#21888). Yay! More
ticket to come such as #21979 (load and configure service).
This week:
- Second round of review on #16861 (mike's branch)
- Continue on unit testing for #20657 while adding more and more ticket
for upstream merge by pieces.
- Resolve some 031 tickets.
ahf:
Last week (unordered):
Sponsor4:
- Monday was easter holiday.
- Got #21662, #21663, and #21664 reviewed (first round).
- Reviewed #21647 for Nick.
- Do coverage runs for the compression code and start adding
`LCOV_EXCL_*` in appropiate places and fix tests.
This week (ordered):
Sponsor4:
- Working on cleaning-up things from the #21662, #21663, and
#21664 review: currently missing to fix refactoring the different
compression test cases into one compression test suite.
- Finish coverage fixes.
- Fix #22051 (make non-streaming compression API use the
streaming compression API).
- Handle upper-bound of memory usage in LZMA code (postponed
from last week).
- Look into next steps for Sponsor4: measurements?
pastly:
- so much paper writing
- the original "vanilla" Tor scheduler has some configurable limits.
- They are never effective in practice (chosen conservatively
and never hit).
- The vanilla sched is called many times per ms. The
intra-tor process queueing times are ~0.
Therefore, 100MB (the limits
Scheduler{Low,High}WaterMark__) of data never accumulate in the
outbufs.
- I also plan on removing SchedulerMaxFlushCells__ in favor
of a static 1000 (its default).
Such a large value makes the sched behave like Tor did
before it even had a global sched:
one socket at a time. This further cleans the line between
the "vanilla" and "kist" schedulers
- Maybe max flush cells should be configurable still, but
for many other reasons, it isn't useful.
- (end for brevity)
- They were added to make the scheduler KIST-like.
- I plan on removing them. My new scheduler should be used for
KIST behavior
- As mentioned in previous meetings, it's easy to switch
between schedulers
Sebastian:
* Have been oxidating. Unfortunately, a big part of the planned
rust integration won't be as
nice as it could be, because Rust doesn't want to guarantee
interface stability for allocing
across an FFI border, even if we can ensure that the same
allocator is used.
* consdiff code compiles on debian stretch, on amd64 (probably x64
too, haven't tested)
* Found a couple of bugs in the C consdiff code, nothing major.
* Working on final touches, next up is blog post. Will send draft
to network-team list before posting.
catalyst:
* bug triage. not very many new tickets needed adjusting.
* looked at #12930. still working out how the data flow from SMETHOD
ARGS to Bridge config lines work, along with quoting, etc. will
probably propose some spec revisions to exclude problematic characters
from args as a short-term workaround.
* looked at snowflake proxy (the browser crowdsourced proxy component)
* helped gather info on some macOS Tor Browser 7.0a3 bugs (default
search engine, etc.)
* wrote regression test for #22034 (GETINFO extra-info/digest/)
* obfs4 often fails for me on Tor Browser 7.0a3 in macOS, but meek and
obfs3 work. obfs4 in 6.5.2 also works. trying to get more info about
this. could learn useful background for improving bootstrap feedback.
* a little distracted by buying a house
Mike:
Last Week:
* Updated #16861 based on dgoulet's review. Let me know if I
should squash/rebase again.
* Did some work on protocol negotiation for Adaptive Padding
* Started learning Rust. It's pretty nice!
This week:
* More Adaptive Padding, more Rust
* Bug Triage
asn:
Last week:
* About 80% to doing the ed25519 validation. Pushed branch at
#22006 . Lots of head beating with crypto math -- Ian helped.
* Talked with blockstack people. They will publish a plan for
blockstack integration with Tor in two weeks. (ask me for more info)
* Reviewed a bunch of prop224 groundwork tickets (#21888)
* Did some unittests for my WIP rend circuit crypto branch #21859
* Opened #21969 since it seems the "We're missing descriptors
for some of our primary entry guards" bug is still with us.
* GSoC stuff
Next week:
* The Roadmap Email
* Finish up the ed25519 validation code #22006
* Take care of some more ed25519 prop224 business (#22052)
* Continue work on the e2e circuit stuff (#21859). ETA
probably next week
EOF
Isabela
* Working with teams on roadmaps&dependencies - need help adding
tasks related to NSF grants and sponsorR - two dependencies people
have related to this team: tbb+ux depend on isis bridges work (already
following up with her via email) and maybe on the implementation of
the automation for tor launcher (pt selection)
* DRL sent us more questions related to our proposal - working on
answering those and will have a call with them this week
* Will share this week the DRL propsal tasks with all the teams who
will be working on them
isis:
Last week:
* finished OTF work
* set up meek-server and also meek reflector on AppEngine for
bridgedb channel to new distributor
* released draft design of distributor
* did status reports and billing and paperwork things
This week:
* Taking time off because I've not started at Tor yet (also
another personal reason)
Hi!
Here is a copy of my status report for the month of April, as sent to
OTF just now. (It's sent today because this is the last day of my OTF
Project funding.)
----- Forwarded message from isis agora lovecruft <isis(a)patternsinthevoid.net> -----
> From: isis agora lovecruft <isis(a)patternsinthevoid.net>
> Subject: April 2017 Report for Tor Bridge Distribution
> Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2017 20:20:18 +0000
> Message-ID: <20170421202018.GB4452(a)patternsinthevoid.net>
> To: otf-projects(a)opentechfund.org, otf-active(a)opentechfund.org
> Cc: isis agora lovecruft <isis(a)patternsinthevoid.net>, Henry de Valence <hdevalence(a)hdevalence.ca>
>
> Hello,
>
> The following progress was made in April 2017:
>
> - We redesigned some parts of our protocol, specifically with the aim of
> improving user experience and making it easier to design user interfaces
> for it, i.e. making the proofs about the credentials smaller.
>
> - We released a provisional draft of our social bridge distribution
> protocol, now called Hyphae, including implementation and design notes. [0]
>
> - We designed a RESTful API for Tor Browser to use to automate requests for
> bridges and reporting that bridges are blocked (cf. Appendix B of [0]).
>
> - We set up a meek-server for BridgeDB, a new Google developer account, and
> an AppEngine meek reflector, in order to allow automated requests to the
> new distributor be made in a censorship-resilient manner. [1]
>
> This is our final report for this project. We are incredibly thankful to
> OTF for their support, both financial and in terms of the wonderful
> community of fully excellent people they have worked so hard to establish
> and maintain. As always, we're happy to help ongoing and future OTF
> projects acheive their goals in the future. Also happy to just chat with
> any of you any time. Thanks! <3
>
> [0]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-April/012221.html
> [1]: https://bugs.torproject.org/16650
>
> Best regards,
> --
> ♥Ⓐ isis agora lovecruft
> _________________________________________________________
> OpenPGP: 4096R/0A6A58A14B5946ABDE18E207A3ADB67A2CDB8B35
> Current Keys: https://fyb.patternsinthevoid.net/isis.txt
----- End forwarded message -----
--
♥Ⓐ isis agora lovecruft
_________________________________________________________
OpenPGP: 4096R/0A6A58A14B5946ABDE18E207A3ADB67A2CDB8B35
Current Keys: https://fyb.patternsinthevoid.net/isis.txt
Notes for April 13 2017 meeting:
Nick:
1) I'll be away from IRC next week, but hacking as time permits
2) Network-team development continues apace
3) worked with Isa on roadmap
4) worked with Roger/asn on SponsorM-catalyst coordination
Roger:
=====Ongoing issues we should be aware of:
1) The russian exit relay operator
2) Khazakstan's dpi censorship (Allot) has spread to Azerbaijan. Also
Turkey continues to block Tor quite well and we don't know how. How do
we make progress there?
3) Snowflake development could use some attention.
4) Fastly blog post and renew
=====Stuff for individual people:
5) Fyi, MIT has blackholed all of riseup. (Fixed as of a week later.)
6) Who is leading: Sida follow-up?
7) Who is leading: Choosing people for DRL implementor's meeting?
8) Working with Nick on "censorship stuff Catalyst could work on"
9) Working with Griffin on "posting our 2015 990 soon"
10) Working with Isabela on "nsf point people from the network team"
11) Working with Linus on posting the corporate documents
Shari:
1) Met with Mozilla last week and following up this week or early next week.
2) Talked about some AMS feedback with Biella and Linus.
3) Checking in with Jon about Montreal plans.
4) Scheduling trip to NY for Netgain meeting. Making plans to meet lots
of folks while I'm there.
5) Reviewing resumes for writer applicants and doing screening
interviews with Erin.
6) Interviewing/talking with a couple of people for CommDir position.
Georg:
1) We are busy with preparing the new stable and first alpha release
(based on esr52)
2) I started to move our bug bounty program forward again
Isabela:
1) One last thing with ISC - changes on milestone 3
2) Following up on the roadmaps/dependencies things - emails to teams
are going out today
3) be off tomorrow all day
4) interviewing for comms dir
5) hiro is pretty much ready with a gitlab instance for network team to
try out (migrate out of trac project) / she is also digging into the
blog upgrade/migration work
6) Linda is working on the website redesign project - check her list for
this month at the ux team roadmap:
https://storm.torproject.org/shared/sphA6vPmW1ZI4owe0kPRRukQu3T_lvADnmnZCuH…
Mike:
1) Met with Mozilla last week
2) Distracted by taxes this week
Karsten:
1) Got the funding proposal in shape for Cass to turn it into real
English next week.
2) Worked more on simulation of directory-request statistics with
Laplace noise with mixed results.
3) Got 3 OnionPerf instances up and reporting useful measurements.
4) Preparing to go on vacation starting tomorrow night until next Friday
morning. (Somebody else will have to send these notes if they're
supposed to go out on Monday, otherwise they'll go out next Friday.)
5) Started a vote on the social contract, almost started another one for
community council membership.
Arturo:
1) We released ooniprobe 2.2.0 that includes the new web UI:
https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe/releases/tag/v2.2.0
2) We wrote a blog post with some of events we attended in the past
months: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/ooni-iff-rightscon/
3) We wrote a blog post for a Brazilian newsletter (not yet published)
4) We are coordinating with people in DRC (Congo) to monitor ongoing
possible censorship events due to current protests
5) Updated test lists for Azerbaijan and Venezuela following reports
from people informing us of censorship events in the countries
Apologies for the last minute notice, but I just found out about this
and thought maybe folks on this list might want to cobble together a
last minute application.
>From their website:
"The Citizen Lab Summer Institute (CLSI) is a meeting place for
researchers and practitioners from academia, civil society, and the
private sector who are working on Internet openness, security, and
rights. It brings together perspectives from a wide range of backgrounds
across technical and social science disciplines. Participants range from
established experts to those just entering the area."
https://citizenlab.org/summerinstitute/2017.html
Hi all,
We're meeting weekly on https://meet.jit.si/TorUX on Mondays at 15:00 UTC.
Currently, it's going to be discussions about redesigning the website.
Feel free to listen in on what is going on, if you are curious.
Hello UX meeting-y people (and I've cc'ed tor-project as well, if anyone
wants to give me their two cents):
I have gotten an unusual request--a researcher wants to observe us. Are
there guidelines on this sort of thing?
My immediate gut reactions is: well, this is technically a public channel
but having someone observe us and participating are different. And as a
researcher, I know that people being aware that they are being observed
cause them to act differently versus when they are unaware anyway (not that
he shouldn't have asked for consent, he definitely should have).
What are your thoughts?
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: COLLIER Ben <s1263350(a)sms.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 7:10 AM
Subject: Tor Research - Re: [tor-project] Weekly UX meeting on Jitsi!
To: "linda(a)torproject.org" <linda(a)torproject.org>
Dear Linda,
I hope that this finds you well. I'm a doctoral researcher at the
University of Edinburgh currently researching the Tor Project and the
broader Tor community - in particular my research seeks to explore
how antisurveillance tech communities discuss and express values through
design processes. I've been conducting some initial interviews with members
of the Tor community and I was hoping to carry out some online research -
in particular sitting in on a couple of discussions like the one on Jitsi
mentioned in your email below.
In terms of meetings like this one, or on Tor Project's IRC channels, do
you think it would be possible for me (with the consent and knowledge of
participants) to observe and include these in an anonymised form in the
research? If so, I'm very keen to conduct these in a mindful and respectful
way, and to minimise any disruption, and would be happy to discuss the best
way to do this in this particular case. I would also be very happy to feed
back and discuss my findings with participants and the wider community once
the research is complete. I'm also absolutely happy to answer any questions or
discuss any concerns which you or any other member of the team have about
my research.
Very best,
Ben Collier
Twitter: @JohnnyHistone
Scottish Centre for Crime and Criminal Justice Research:
http://www.sccjr.ac.uk/about-us/people/ben-collier/
Edinburgh University PhD Student Profile: http://www.law.ed.ac.
uk/research/students/viewstudent?ref=339
PhD Blog: https://bencollierblog.wordpress.com/
------------------------------
*From:* tor-project <tor-project-bounces(a)lists.torproject.org> on behalf of
Linda Naeun Lee <linda(a)torproject.org>
*Sent:* 11 April 2017 20:22:14
*To:* tor-project(a)lists.torproject.org; ux(a)lists.torproject.org
*Subject:* [tor-project] Weekly UX meeting on Jitsi!
Hi all,
We're meeting weekly on https://meet.jit.si/TorUX on Mondays at 15:00 UTC.
Currently, it's going to be discussions about redesigning the website.
Feel free to listen in on what is going on, if you are curious.
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
Hi All,
My employer is advertising the following position, which closes 23 April 1200 AEST (0300 UTC):
The University of New South Wales Australian Centre for Cyber Security (ACCS) is seeking a Post-Doctoral Fellow on a 2-year contract. The position is open to candidates working in cyber security or any related area. This includes, but is not limited to machine learning, AI, knowledge management, simulation, privacy, or any area that can be applied to cyber security.
For more information, including salary, benefits and potential duties, please see the following:
https://www.unsw.adfa.edu.au/post-doctoral-fellow-australian-centre-cyber-s…
The University of New South Wales is international well-respected, and consistently within the World Top 100 rankings.
The Australian Centre for Cyber Security (ACCS) is a focal point for the research of some 60 scholars from various faculties across UNSW who conduct research work on different aspects of cyber security. The Centre is based in Canberra at the Defence Force Academy that provides both advanced research as well as undergraduate and graduate education on cyber security.
ACCS serves as a national hub for policy related research and education across the full spectrum of cyber security (hardware, software, payload, networks, policy, human factors, organizational factors and the information ecosystem). ACCS offers five distinct Masters programs, an undergraduate program and supervisors a number of doctoral candidates within their research programs.
--
Tim Wilson-Brown (teor)
teor2345 at gmail dot com
PGP C855 6CED 5D90 A0C5 29F6 4D43 450C BA7F 968F 094B
ricochet:ekmygaiu4rzgsk6n
xmpp: teor at torproject dot org
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi!
Our meeting transcript is at
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-dev/2017/tor-dev.2017-04-17-17.01.html
Below our status report from this week
===========
ahf:
Last week:
- Short week due to easter in DK Thursday + Friday.
- Finished cleaning up the patches for #21662, #21663, #21664.
- Started uploading patches for #21662 + #21663 + #21664 to
https://gitlab.com/ahf/tor/tree/prop278/21663 for review. Should be done
tonight Danish time.
- All the dirty code, except streaming support, is in
https://gitlab.com/ahf/tor/tree/bugs/21663
This week:
- Going to work on reviewing Nick's consdiff code.
- Figure out a sensible upper bound for the LZMA code. (#21665)
- Add the missing header code for Prop#278 to the directory code
(#21667)
catalyst:
- last week was mostly house-hunting in Wisconsin with spouse
- week before that, refactored some baseNN code
- deleted some base64 code (nopad stuff)
- still a fair amount of work to do in that space, will try to
outline some recommendations when i get a chance
- started to look at anti-censorship stuff (sponsorM)
isis:
Last week:
- finished specification (first draft) of social bridge distributor
- talked over some parts of draft with other cryptographers
- finished up some loose ends of OTF contract
This week:
- Finish setting up the meek tunnel to BridgeDB
- Sketch out notes on UX ideas for Linda
- Sketch out API for TBB team
- Close out OTF contract on Friday
asn:
Last week:
- Busy on #21859 which is gonna be used both by service and
client-side of prop224
- Reviewed various HS groundwork tickets
- Helped collect PT/censorship tasks that must be done on the
short-term
- Tried to do some extra validation of ed25519 pubkeys based on
discussion with Ian. Failed.
This week:
- More work on e2e circuit stuff #21859
- More work on implementing the validation required for ed25519 keys
Mike:
Last week:
- Distracted by taxes and not feeling well
This week:
- Will fix up #16861 and rebase Adaptive Padding patches onto it
- Further Adaptive Padding work
pastly:
- tentative amazing results from very large kist network simulation
- more simulations in progress to confirm results
- paper written and submitted by May 2nd
- lots of progress implementing flexible scheduler selection
- added preprocessor stuff to disable kist if it is impossible to run
(like on windows/osx)
questions:
- is a consensus param desired to set UseKIST network-wide?
- if so, how do? pointers to code that does something similar?
["Yes; see use of networkstatus_get_param()". -nick]
Isabela
- sent out sponsor 4 march report
- start prepping for team roadmap/dependecy tracking exercise
Nick
- Reviewed lots of prop224 backend code.
- Finished "consdiffmgr" branch, which is the server-side backend for
prop140. Now under review.
- This week: on vacation! I'll be reviewing code, not a lot more.
dgoulet
- prop224 backend work with #21888
- hidden service, hidden service, hidden service