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Network team meeting notes, 2017 October 18
by Nick Mathewson 18 Sep '17

18 Sep '17

Hi! We had a meeting. Our logs are at http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-dev/2017/tor-dev.2017-09-18-16.59.html And I'll copy our meeting pad here, for reference: Network team meeting, 18 September 2017 Last week's notes: how did we do? https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2017-September/001439.ht… Nick: * Last week: * Reviewed and merged and triaged, to try to get ready for 0.3.2 * Got clang scan-build working on master again; found several bugs. * Worked on numerous spec-fixes and other-fixes for master * Discussed privcount at meeting; tried to find next steps. * This week: * New releases for Tor >= 0.2.8 * First stable release for 0.3.1 (0.3.1.7) * First release for Tor 0.3.2.x * Triage most things out of 0.3.2.x * Finish spec and documentation patches in 0.3.2.x * Confer with others on sponsor8 stuff, try to start getting more useful there. * Write proposals about: authority splitting, TLS 1.3, ... * Take another look at proposed PTv2 spec draft * Make scan-build part of our regular process. * Program, if I am lucky :) * What happened with 0.3.1? * Time to make 0.3.2 stable. * Merge window closed until after the dev meeting. Hack, and review -- but it'll sit. Consider bug-hunting? * 3 weeks remaining until we start doing montreal stuff. Who should be planner? Not me! [isis volunteers] asn Last week: - Got lots of prop224 fixes and improvements merged upstream: #23457, #23455, #23019, #23466, #23310, #23387 - Did more testing and debugging of prop224 (see #23543). - Wrote spec fixes for prop224 (#23130) - Reviewed #22805 and #23355. - Opened a UX ticket for torbrowser + prop224 (#23545) This week: - Test and fix more prop224 bugs. - Do reviews as required. - Triage 0.3.2 prop224 tickets - Start dogfooding prop224 even more (get some tpo stuff to run on hsv3, and maybe get a tor browser going) dgoulet: * Last week: - Multiple fixes for prop224 got in upstream for the 032 alpha. - KIST was merged upstream (#12541) last friday \o/ - Some tickets reviewed for review-group-23. * This week: - See how prop224 and KIST works out in their first alpha. - Many bugs are opened for 032 on prop224 and KIST so will try to address those as much as possible. - Review tickets for 032 milestone. pastly: last week: KIST merged \o/ this week: help with KIST tickets; boring not-Tor stuff Mike: Last week: - Worked on #23100 and #23114. These need to be done + merged for prop247 [asn: anything I can do here?] This week: - Finish up #23100 and #23114 for merge. - Work on #23101, which also needs to be done for good prop247 results. ahf: Last week: Sponsor 8: - Sponsor 8 meeting with Nick+Isa+Taylor. - Setup a HS to use for survey. Awaiting text for the site from Isa. - Upgraded to Android 8 "Oreo" on a device to see how the aggressive handling of background processes works. - Use a tor process with Orbot where I limit the amount of timed events that is triggered. Misc: - Started reading the Rust book and read some Rust code. Plan is to do a small control port library like the Python ones we have. - Upgrading the Prop224 IRC setup when there is need for it. This week: Sponsor 8: - Turn the tasks from the S8 meeting into tickets + go over the already created S8 tickets and mark them with the correct keywords. - See if I can get the event timing code to work nicely with the Doze functionality on Android(!) Misc: - Get back to the BestVPN interview that Steph set up about Tor. - Look into coverity issues from Friday and Saturday last week. (Already done by Nick apparantly!) - Coverity + Bug triage duties this week. - Talk to OFTC about some nice-to-have features. catalyst: Last week (2017-W37): - Lots of client clock skew research. It turns out to cause some pretty awful UX, including long hangs with no feedback to the user. - Fixed a couple of clock skew related bugs (#23506, #23532) for clients with clocks in the past. - Investigated client clock skew bugs for clients with clocks in the future. Turns out to be harder to correct (directory download schedules and behavior; whether to contact an authority or not, etc.). - Reviewed some patches. - sponsor8 meeting This week (2017-W38): - More investigation of clock skew bugs where the client clock is in the future. Somehow have to distinguish "we were asleep and have stale cached directory info" vs "we are in the future". isis: last week: - working on #15967 (the captcha server, farfetchd), it's done but i want a few more unittests to be sure that i'm matching the behaviours i told the Tor Launcher team it would have in the spec this week: - deployed farfetched - writing the moat server on top of it (this should be super easy because like 80% of the API is just passing back and forth the responses to/from farfetchd, but with the added step that, at the end, if the captcha was right, they get bridges) - checking in on the intern and reviewing his code [asn: we got intern? who is it?]

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Re: [tor-project] Who needs a 34c3 ticket?
by dawuud 17 Sep '17

17 Sep '17

Hi. Nevermind, I no longer need a voucher code. I have a ticket now. On Sun, Sep 17, 2017 at 12:10:53AM +0000, dawuud wrote: > > Hi. I just now realized that I want to attend congress this year. > Is the 34c3 ticket token train still running? > > > Cheers, > David > > On Wed, Sep 13, 2017 at 02:37:54PM -0400, Griffin wrote: > > On 2017-09-12 14:48, Roger Dingledine wrote: > > > On Fri, Sep 01, 2017 at 12:33:27AM -0400, Roger Dingledine wrote: > > > > So, if you are coming and you need a way to buy a ticket, and you are > > > > a contributor to the Tor world in some useful way, please let us know! > > > > We'd love to help more people from the Tor community to be there and > > > > help spread the word about Tor, and 'now' is a much better time than > > > > 'later' to help you get a ticket. > > > > > > Reminder that we have vouchers that you could use. Let us know! > > > > > > --Roger > > > > If there's a spare voucher, I'd love to have it =) > > > > ~Griffin > > _______________________________________________ > > tor-project mailing list > > tor-project(a)lists.torproject.org > > https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-project

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Who needs a 34c3 ticket?
by Roger Dingledine 17 Sep '17

17 Sep '17

It's that time of year again, when people are scrambling to find vouchers to buy 34c3 tickets. We have a few vouchers (the sort that are reusable but with a multi-day delay between each use), and we want to make sure that many Tor people can get to congress. So, if you are coming and you need a way to buy a ticket, and you are a contributor to the Tor world in some useful way, please let us know! We'd love to help more people from the Tor community to be there and help spread the word about Tor, and 'now' is a much better time than 'later' to help you get a ticket. --Roger

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Notes from September 14 2017 Vegas team meeting
by Karsten Loesing 15 Sep '17

15 Sep '17

Notes for September 14 2017 meeting: Alison: 1) Doing preliminary work -- recruiting mostly -- for my IMLS grant, which will start in December. 2) I'm glad the membership doc passed! Next step is for us to choose a membership secretary and bootstrap the list. I hope that we can get a code of conduct discussion going after that. Georg: 1) Sponsor4 work is moving forward 2) We are about to enter the next phase of the mobile browser dev hiring (coding tasks) 3) nickm: going over the review notes of the last network team meeting it seems the item for having one from the network team at the Mozilla-next-steps-to-get-tor-intregrated-into-Firefox-meeting is missing. Got that discussed and, if so, sorted out? [ Haven't discussed yet; sorry! Will send email. Here's a draft. Help me improve it? I'd like to say when and how long the meeting is. https://pad.riseup.net/p/DUKhqXvE9fth -nickm] [ Resolved this offline with Georg; sent note to network-team. -nickm ] Nick: 1) Many releases early next week 2) Go team! 3) Meeting about sponsor 8 stuff this afternoon 4) Feature-freezing 0.3.2 tomorrow Mike: 1) Mostly caught up on stuff; need to send those emails I said I would 2) Need to hike up to Mount Doom to forge a new GPG subkey 3) Confused about the team day in Montreal Isabela: 1) Focus on Tor Launcher feature for sponsor4 - dependencies coordination and also update the feature brief 2) Syncing with network team on sponsor8 work and looking at what else can move on while we are interviewing candidates for android browser team 3) Timesheets - need to review updated spreadsheet done by Brad - also start preparing for time reporting under new funding model \o/ 4) roadmaps prep work - sent email to TB team will send one to Network as well 5) invoices are out! one more to go (small one) Steph: 1) moving forward w a speaking trainer for Montreal. will be sending invites, gathering info for pre-work 2) working on post with Tommy and Colin about relay operators meet up 3) responded to zerodium inquiries. appreciate the feedback on the statement, should have considered the security angle more in depth 4) helped decide end of year fundraising theme with Seattle office and Giant Rabbit, talking next steps this evening Arturo: 1) Moving forward with OONI design stuff with Elio 2) Moving forward with implementing custom URI scheme for ooniprobe Shari: 1) confirm dates for Spring 2018 Tor meeting 2) unconscious bias training for the Montreal meeting 3) theme for end-of-year fundraising is Powering Digital Resistance 4) working on grant proposals and all sorts of stuff; very busy this week Karsten: 1) Preparing for Berlin team meeting in two weeks. Thinking about putting together a (small) agenda which may include feedback from the community what we should be working on. 2) Tor Metrics has a new logo. :) https://metrics.torproject.org/ 3) Moving more web services (back) to Tor Metrics, including CollecTor's directory listings, Atlas, and ExoneraTor, to have a single user-facing website for all of metrics. Possibly relevant for Tor website reorganization. Roger: 1) We should figure out whether we want to move forward on my capture-the-onion plans. Plan: I'll write a few paragraphs next week and we can see if we like them. We shouldn't sign up to do something that costs us a bunch of time and money if the funder doesn't want to pay for it.

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OONI Monthly Report: August 2017
by Arturo Filastò 13 Sep '17

13 Sep '17

# OONI Monthly Report: August 2017 The OONI team made steady progress in August. We published a new research report on our study of internet censorship in Cuba, and we created three new test lists. We carried out research on how best to secure probe orchestration, and we made progress on our data processing pipeline and on the custom URL scheme for the mobile clients. We also created a new OONI style guide for the design of our apps and the creation of data visualizations. Our commentary about OONI was published by Project Syndicate. ## Published research report on internet censorship in Cuba We published a new research report, titled: "Measuring Internet Censorship in Cuba's ParkNets" You can read the report here: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/cuba-internet-censorship-2017/ We also published a summary of the report on the Tor blog: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/measuring-internet-censorship-cubas-parkne… Our study was covered by the following: 1. Amnesty International: https://medium.com/@AmnistiaOnline/la-paradoja-de-internet-de-cuba-b3cd206a… 2. Motherboard: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbbjxm/here-are-the-41-websites-… 3. El Nuevo Herald: http://www.elnuevoherald.com/noticias/mundo/america-latina/cuba-es/article1… ## Style guide for design of apps and data visualizations We created a style guide for the design of our apps and for the creation of data visualizations based on OONI data. Our master style guide can be found here: https://openobservatory.github.io/design/ Our style guide for the data visualizations that are to be included in our reports and blogs can be found here: https://github.com/OpenObservatory/design/issues/2 It's worth noting that we created a graph based on this style guide for our Cuba report, which was re-used by Motherboard. We also started working on a style guide for the design of our apps: https://github.com/OpenObservatory/design/issues/3 Based on these new style guides, we created some mock-ups for the new design of our website (https://github.com/OpenObservatory/design/issues/5) and mobile apps (https://github.com/OpenObservatory/design/issues/7) ## Created new test lists In collaboration with community members, we created the following three new test lists: 1. Taiwan test list: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/205 2. Afghanistan test list: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/203 3. Angola test list: https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/204 ## Research on securing probe orchestration We brainstormed and researched on how to best secure probe orchestration. Since this is a very critical components we believe it’s essential that it does not get compromise or if compromise happens it is mitigated. The results of these discussions are documented here: https://github.com/TheTorProject/proteus/issues/24 https://github.com/TheTorProject/proteus/issues/26 https://github.com/TheTorProject/proteus/issues/27 ## Progress on custom URL scheme A major feature request that we have received from our community members is to add support in our mobile clients for testing single URLs (independently from whether or not they are included in the Citizen Lab test lists). This was implemented with a custom URI scheme (ex. ooni://nettest/web_connectivity?url=http://google.com) that allows people to put a badge on their website that, when clicked by a user with the ooniprobe app installed, will run an ooniprobe measurement to a site of their choosing or, if they don’t have the app installed, prompt them to install it. This will allow people to encourage the usage of ooniprobe for testing the reachability of sites they care to monitor and/or run experiments that they believe are important. During August, we made progress towards implementing the custom URL scheme in our mobile apps and a new version of the app supporting the URI scheme to run tests with or without custom parameter will be released soon. More details abou this in the following tickets: https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooniprobe-android/issues/66 ## Progress on data processing pipeline We continued to make progress on the engineering of our data processing pipeline. During August, we started the extraction of anomalies from the measurements and fixes a variety of different bugs we found in the processing of the data. More information about this can be found here: https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-pipeline/pull/62 ## Project Syndicate commentary about OONI We wrote a commentary explaining why running ooniprobe matters, which was published by Project Syndicate. The commentary can be found here: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ooniprobe-internet-censorship-… Our commentary was subsequently cross-published by many other publishers as well. ## Userbase In August 2017 ooniprobe was run 78,464 times from 1,728 different vantage points across 159 countries around the world. This information can also be found through our stats here: https://measurements.ooni.torproject.org/stats ~ The OONI team.

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Community Team -- August report
by Alison Macrina 13 Sep '17

13 Sep '17

Here are the highlights of the Community Team's work in August 2017: August 2017 Community Team report Meeting notes August 2017 ================================================================== https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/CommunityTeam#Curre… Tor Meeting planning ================================================================== We're still soliciting agenda items for the Montreal meeting. If you haven't submitted your ideas yet, please add them to the meeting wiki that was linked in your invitation. We'll share out a draft agenda sometime in the next few weeks. Phoul has also been planning a relay operators meetup for the Montreal meeting. Support portal/support wiki ================================================================== We had a support wiki sprint and added tons of new material to the support wiki: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/CommunityTeam/Suppo… Community documents ================================================================== We finished the proposal period for the contributor/membership guidelines document, which went up for a vote in September. Library Freedom Project ================================================================== LFP won a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to create an intensive privacy training program for librarians over the next two years. We're also working on a website redesign. Speakers bureau ================================================================== Sukhe gave a talk at the Greater Toronto Area Linux User Group (GTALUG). Next month he'll give a number of Tor talks in India. Phoul appeared on a privacy and security podcast: https://privacy-training.com/podcast.html. The community and communications teams began organizing some speaker training sessions for members of the speakers bureau. Tshirt requests ================================================================== We continue to handle all the tshirt requests! ================================================================== Next up: still more Tor Montreal meeting planning, reopening the code of conduct proposal, finishing outstanding items on support wiki, thinking of new places to ================================================================== Thanks for reading! -- Alison Macrina Community Team Lead The Tor Project

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Network team meeting notes, 11 Sep 2017
by Nick Mathewson 12 Sep '17

12 Sep '17

Hi! Our meeting log is here: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-dev/2017/tor-dev.2017-09-11-17.00.html and below is the contents of our meeting update pad: Network team meeting, 11 September 2017 (1700 UTC) Announcements and requests: - Can we have trac back? (It was down Sunday/Monday UTC) [It's back up now. Folks are working to try to make it more reliable. see thread.] - metrics team request? - privcount/prop280 meeting tomrrow (er, 2017-09-13 00:00Z) People out: - teor (offline): - Last week or two: * Released (experimental) PrivCount 1.1.0: https://github.com/privcount * Kept at it with the floating-point stuff. Now we have dev guidelines (thanks catalyst!), and a bunch of specific issues: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/23061 * Work out how many onion addresses an HSDir should expect to see (and intro and rend weights as well): https://github.com/privcount/privcount/issues/397 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/23367 [asn: interesting stuff! definitely connected to #23126 as well. we should think of what to do for v3. perhaps montreal session] +1, including thinking of useful stats with privcount. [dgoulet: The overlap period concept has changed also re #23367] * Revised the patch that fixes bridge clients on tor master https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/23347 * Reviewed a bunch of nickm's spec patches - This week: * Start developing PrivCount 1.2.0 (HSDir client usage) * Try to knock over a few of the floating-point bugs * Merge HSv3 support into chutney (thanks asn, dgoulet!), and add a v3 test network to tor master's make test-network-all https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/22430 Nick: * Last week - Release 0.3.1.6-rc - Review and merge lots of patches, cleaning up as needed. - Run through trivial open 0.3.2.x tickets, try to solve the fast ones - Some triage - Get callgraph generation working again. (See https://people.torproject.org/~nickm/tor-auto/ ) - Looked over some Rust stuff with Komlo. * This week - 0.3.2.x freeze: merging, coding, reviewing, triaging. Trying not to be too ambitious. - Triage plan: if there is anything in 0.3.1 or 0.3.2 you will not do, and it is assigned to you, unassign it, please. If it is essential, please talk to others about making it happen. - Triage plan: i'm likely to remove (nearly?) all stuff in 0.3.1 or 0.3.2 that is unowned. If you will do it, pleas assign it to yourself. - Try to do a little 0.3.3.x planning-planning - Think about 0.3.1.x: why so late? - Start on a couple of proposals for 0.3.4.x and forward. - Privcount meeting tuesday night Isabela: * Last week - spent most of the week working with Linda and Steph (f2f here in NYC) on the dev and community portals part of the website redesign project - the only deliverable network team had with 4 is now officially 'close' * This week - organize sponsor8 work - start preparing for roadmap in Montreal with the team - how are we with dependencies for TB team on Tor Launcher work? moat api work and the progress bar requests from mcs dgoulet: * Last week: - Most of my time was hunting down #23387 and working on a fix and unit tests. - Worked on KIST branch addressing pastly's review of #12541. It is now on oniongit awaiting review and hopefully make it in 032. - Reviewed some tickets in review-group-23. * This week: - Hunting down prop224 bugs and writing tests. - Will work on more general Tor for 031 and 032 upcoming releases. catalyst: * Last two weeks (2017-W35, 2017-W36): - Went down a floating point rabbit hole. Reviewed some stuff (#23061); wrote some guidelines (#23368). - Reviewed some patches, including the large buf API refactor (#23149) - Looking into bootstrap reporting led to a twisty maze of periodic events * This week (2017-W37): - Work on control protocol extensions for bootstrap reporting. Extend OR_CONN events to report per-connection PT progress? Or create a new class of events? - Maybe keep an eye on privcount stuff as relates to floating point. - Extract bootstrap reporting from deep in the call stack and make it the responsibility of higher level code. - Better error message reporting to help Tor Launcher ahf: Last week: Misc: - Back from vacation tasks: read up on email threads, time sheets, meeting logs, trac, tor.git commits, signed up for team rotation duties, etc. - Got travel approval and booked trip for the Montreal meeting via Jon+Shari. Arriving the 6th of October. - Send traveling information to OTF for the OTF meeting in Valencia. - Continuing to keep the NG HS IRC running: found one bug when mixing legacy and NG HS on the same tor instance this week. Sponsor 8: - Working on a Tor instance where I can send events from the Android Java interface to Tor via orbot. - Unbricked a device that I had borked after a failed attempt at a self-build Android image with some debugging enabled. - Going over Nick's event list from August about timed event sources and wrapped my head around that. This week: - Help out with 0.3.1 release if need be? - Continuing with the sponsor 8 work: - Try to flesh out a plan with some deadlines for the tasks/results. Maybe together with Isa? - How's it going with the Android OS dev hire we were looking for? - Spend some time wrapping my head around Rust before the montreal meeting. mike: Last week: - Meeting in Seattle This week: - Page back in everything since vacation. Here's the dump from my notes: - #23077, #23097; lower prio: #22934, #23100, #23101 - Design + document planned prop247 prototype performance experiments asn Last week: - Worked on fixing more prop224 bugs that have crawled up (#23331, #23056, #23327, #23355, #23361). We've merged most of the fixes upstream by now. The current tor.git master offers a pretty good prop224 experience. No blockers are currently known. - Worked on debugging and fixing a serious reachability issue of prop224 which could cause reachability issues under natural causes: #23387. We identified it while writing some advanced unittests for prop224 (see #23310). The fix required both a spec patch and a code patch which has already been merged mainline. - Got more people to try prop224 and join our experimental ircd server. The testing has so far been very useful since with more people we can find more rare bugs. We've already caught #23455 this way and have learned more info for #23457. This week: - Get #23457 and #23455 fixed. - Test and fix more bugs. - Get into review-group-23. isis: last week: - more work on #15967 - trac kept going down and losing stuff i typed :'( this week: - finish #15967 - start #22871 (moat backend) pastly: Finished a 2 week vanilla/kist experiement using the KIST dgoulet reviewed. I have graphs. Coming up: review dgoulet's KIST work again #12541

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Notes from September 7 2017 Vegas team meeting
by Karsten Loesing 08 Sep '17

08 Sep '17

Notes for September 7 2017 meeting: Nick: 0) Was out most of last week; back now. 1) Released 0.3.1.6-rc; trying to time the stabilization for that series. 2) Behind on implementation and triage for 0.3.2.x; not too far, though, I think. Mostly my fault? Shari: 1) trying to dig out of post-vacation backlog 2) working with Giant Rabbit on end-of-year campaign; going back-and-forth on their proposal; looks like they'll get started next week 3) trying to finalize dates for Spring 2018 Tor meeting 4) hosting Mike, Nathan, and Roger and meeting with Mozilla and Amazon tomorrow to discuss Internet of Things and browsers Brad: 1) Final invoice for Sponsor R will be issued today 2) Financial statement and compliance audits are continuing 3) Several new grants and contracts awarded this summer 4) Tentatively assigned sponsor codes to new grants/contracts and we're up to Sponsor 15 Mike: 1) Coming back to consensus reality after eschaton^Wvacation. (You can only handle so much of the undifferentiated love for all things, before it gets boring and you really wish there was a Thunderdome nearby...) 2) Going to be buried in email while I try to dig out from a couple weeks of backlog. (I ignored *all* of it :). 3) Going to Shari's for the meeting with Mozilla and Amazon today. Isabela: 1) Working f2f with Linda and Steph (and Roger) on the website redesign project - mostly focus on content mapping and organization of dev.torproject.org and community.torproject.org 2) Working with Hiro: helping with newsletter work and survey work mostly 3) reports for invoices are out for Brad - working on sponsor4 August report 4) starting to prep sponsor8 M&E stuff 5) got nice feedback on my kanban board :) Arturo: 1) Gave a remote presentation at a workshop held by CAIDA called IMAPS (https://www.caida.org/workshops/imaps/1709/) they are doing very interesting stuff 2) Most of the OONI team won the 34c3 ticket fairy game 3) Made some good progress on measurement API design and pipeline design: https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-measurements/issues/32, https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-pipeline/issues/76 4) We made a release candidate for ooniprobe android 1.2.0-rc.1: https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooniprobe-android/releases/tag/v1.2.0-rc.1 5) We are evaluating a possible headless CMS (https://headlesscms.org/about/) choice for use by OONI Georg: 1) We released Tor Browser 7.0.5 2) Collected all the meeting ideas that are Tor Browser related and for the team meeting day. nickm: We'll probably have a meeting with Mozilla about what we need to do to get tor integrated into Firefox. It would be good if one from the network team could attend to help from the little-t-tor side 3) I started to talk to Jon about special bug bounty swag 4) Timesheet reporting question (do I as a team lead need to take care of my team reporting timesheets via Harvest/to accounting?) <- Brad: Sue is taking care of that Steph: 1) working on website in NYC this week w Isa, Linda (+Roger yesterday) 2) helped publish Orfox post. Has been picked up by Threatpost, ZDNet, Extreme Tech, Neon. Pushing it and new release on social this week 3) finalizing choice of trainer / content for speaker training in Montreal 4) working w Hiro, Isa on newsletter to integrate subscribe elements from donate.tp. Will work with ux team to align design with newsletter draft 5) we are live on Outreachy for user advocate internship https://www.outreachy.org/apply/rounds/2017-december-march/

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Sponsor4 work completion report from Core Tor team [final report on this]
by isabela 07 Sep '17

07 Sep '17

Core Tor Team August 2017 report Work completion report: Subobjective 1.1: Reduce Tor processing overhead for low-bandwidth scenarios. Activity: Improve the Directory Authority consensus part of the Tor network in order to optimize low bandwidth users experience. We created a plan[1] to achieve this goal, where we would into each idea we had or could find at our issue tracker or email lists to improve the Directory Authority consensus and implement the most promising ones. Since all this is new at Tor, we had to start by building the tools[2,3] to perform this measurement and these analyses to choose the best ideas to implement for this activity. You will find on this report the list of ideas we identified as the best solutions for this activity goal. We also documented[4] this selection process on our wiki. The design changes ideas we choose gave us 45% of bandwidth reduction for relays and 41% for clients, comparing with the releases prior to the 0.3.1 where these ideas were implemented. A rock on our road for this project was a bug we reported in May related to the implementation of proposals 140 and 278, that cost us some time to figure out. This bug was leading to more bandwidth usage which is completely the contrary of our goal with this project. The bug was fixed and documented on ticket #22702 [5]. Design changes implemented to improve Directory Authority consensus part of Tor network: Idea: Consensus diffs * Proposal 140 [6]. Ticket #13339 [7]. * Idea: Instead of fetching a consensus, clients could fetch a diff from the most recent consensus they have. * Status: Implemented in Tor 0.3.1.x. Idea: Negotiate better compression algorithms * Proposal 278 [8]. Ticket #21211 [9]. * Idea: There are other algorithms like LZMA/LZMA2 or bzip2 that deliver better compression than zlib. We could use HTTP encoding negotiation to select them when available. * Status : Implemented in Tor 0.3.1.x. Idea: Rotate onion keys less frequently * Proposal: 274. Ticket #21641 [10] * Idea: In order to limit the bandwidth needed for microdescriptor listing and transmission, we reduce the onion key rotation rate from the current value (7 days) to something closer to 28 days. Doing this will reduce the total microdescriptor download volume by approximately 70%. * Status: Implemented in Tor 0.3.1.x Idea: Avoid requesting microdescriptors in small batches * Idea: Currently when we want e.g. 21 microdescriptors, we'll probably request them in 3 batches of 7. This makes our compression ratios worse than they would be otherwise. But it ensures that a single cache can't selectively deny us microdescriptors. * Status: Ticket #23220 [11] implements a simple version of this. [1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/NetworkTeam/Sponsor… [2] https://github.com/nmathewson/consensus-diff-analysis [3] https://gitlab.com/ahf/tor-sponsor4-compression [4] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/NetworkTeam/Sponsor… [5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/22702 [6] https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/140-consensus-diff… [7] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13339 [8] https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/278-directory-comp… [9] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21211 [10] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21641 [11] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/23220

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Sukhbir's August 2017
by Sukhbir Singh 06 Sep '17

06 Sep '17

Hi, In August, I worked on the following: * Tor Messenger - Resolved build issues with the ESR52 transition related to the Windows and macOS builds, including deterministic builds for these platforms. - Worked on the following tickets: #10942 #13855 #15161 #16606 #17469 #22005 #22229 This marks completion of the transition to and testing of Firefox ESR52. The next release will be based on Tor Browser tor-browser-52.3.0esr-7.0-1-build1, and THUNDERBIRD_52_3_0_RELEASE on comm-central. * TorBirdy - Released TorBirdy 0.2.3: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/torbirdy-023-released * Community: - Gave two Tor talks in Toronto, Canada 8 Aug 2017: GTALUG 9 Aug 2017: DEFCON416 (Slides: https://people.torproject.org/~sukhbir/talks/toronto-aug-17.pdf) -- Sukhbir

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