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Diversifying Bandwidth Measurement
by teor 27 Feb '17

27 Feb '17

Hi Rob and bandwidth authority operators, I've just been contacted by an Exit operator whose Exits have all seen a 60% drop in traffic over the last few weeks. This drop has been caused by a drop in bandwidth authority measurements, which seems to affect Exit connections that transit to bwauth.torproject.org (cymru) through Cogent. For example, from Australia, I get about 3 MB/s to bwauth.torproject.org [0]. A relay operator in France gets 500 KB/s. This affects at least Online S.a.ss, Feralhosting, and trabia. Do we want Exit traffic concentrating in the US? (It seems all the affected networks are UK/EU.) Is there any way that we can fix this? It also has a social impact: there are a number of disappointed exit operators out there. Can someone run another bwauth HTTPS download server on another (non-North American?) network? The required files are listed here[1]. If they did, would the bandwidth authority operators apply a patch to use it? Or could it go on 38.229.70.2 ? (That's the alternate bwauth address in the source code[2], but it's down.) [0]: https://bwauth.torproject.org/bwauth.torproject.org/64M [1]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torflow.git/tree/NetworkScanners/BwAuthority/… [2]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torflow.git/tree/NetworkScanners/BwAuthority/… T -- 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------

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We need project ideas for GSoC 2017!
by Damian Johnson 26 Feb '17

26 Feb '17

Hi all! This week I'm getting our ducks in a row to apply for Google Summer of Code 2017... https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/ I just trimmed our volunteer page of projects that were done last year and sadly that doesn't leave us with much. We need mentors and project ideas! Got anything you'd care to mentor this summer? If so please let me know! Just send me a description like the ones on the following and I'd be happy to add it to our site... https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#Coding Please note that all projects must have two mentors, one of which is an established tor person. If you're not part of our internal community that's fine, but please find a core developer to co-sponsor your project and act as a secondary mentor. Thanks! -Damian

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[Invite] Meeting to discuss features for lightsaber (a trac-cli utility)
by isabela 22 Feb '17

22 Feb '17

Hello Tor, tl;dr; Me and Hiro will be meeting this Friday (Feb 17) at 1400 UTC at #tor-project to discuss features to lightsaber, a trac-cli utility to interact with Trac that Hiro is working on. == Background: Around an year ago the Network Team discussed the idea of having a command line tool to interact with Trac, so you could use it to query Trac in ways you can't really do with their UI. This was part of a broader discussion around pain points we had on the team development process (other things came out of it that solves other problems e.g. git lab for long code reviews). == What we will do at the this meeting: As we were discussing this tool we listed some wishes we had for it in a pad: https://storm.torproject.org/shared/N_GwLqVE8Bcr1atMiUwZua35vvFVogyPGvWo2-l… When Hiro joined Tor I showed this pad to her and she came up with Lightsaber: https://github.com/hiromipaw/lightsaber At this meeting we will review what is in that pad and try to define concrete features we could add to lightsaber. == Invitation I thought would be a good idea to invite the rest of the community to this conversation as many of us interact with Trac all the time and probably have some ideas of what could make your life easier with it. So, if you would like to join us please come to #tor-project, this Friday (Feb 17) at 1400 UTC. Cheers, Isabela

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Notes from February 16 2017 Vegas team meeting
by Karsten Loesing 20 Feb '17

20 Feb '17

Notes for February 16 2017 meeting: Nick: 1) Hacking all the time 2) Trying to wrap up 0.3.0 and earlier releases; in the weeds on bugfixing. 3) asn and dgoulet being awesome on sponsor R. 4) Trying (with ahf) to make sure that design work happens on schedule for sponsor 4. 5) Not around the net much next week Karsten: 1) Did some light coding towards metrics-lib 1.6.0 release which will come out on Friday. 2) Tried setting up a second Onionoo host, but failed due to serious I/O requirements. 3) Atlas usability improvement project is on schedule, blog post planned for February 27 or 28. 4) Tor Tech Report(s) on collecting and reporting statistics is making good progress, should be ready for discussion by Amsterdam. 5) OnionPerf replacing Torperf scheduled for end of February. 6) Working on adapting CollecTor and Onionoo to Tor Metrics design. Mike: 1) Continuing to work on adaptive padding implementation. 2) Still prodding Kevin about the blog :/ 3) Sent a mail to trendmicro about getting Tor Browser into Pwn2Own in 2018. (I think we're too late for 2017). Isabela: 1) Sent sponsor4 monthly reports for core tor and tor browser work 2) created wiki pages for sponsor4 and 5 - next is to update sponsors wiki pages adding links to reports 3) Hiro finished schleuder installation \o/ - tomorrow we are hosting a meeting at #tor-project to brainstorm features for lightsaber 4) Linda is in touch with many volunteers that are helping with UX team - Antonela is one of them and both are helping the community team with their support page 5) created an example of usage of OKRs / will work next on updating the growth strategy 6) Following up with proposals that are in review process - and working on ISC Orfox project (next milestone is at the end of the month) - still having weekly syncs with Brad (its been quite useful) Alison: 1) UX team and community team met last week to discuss initial plans for the design of support.torproject.org. We plan to do a lot of work together during the meeting in March. 2) Linda and I (and other team leads) will do some of this work in Seattle at the end of the month too. 3) We connected with an advocate in Egypt which means our Global South training regions now include MENA, East Africa, and South Asia. 4) We'll start building the agenda for the Tor Meeting this week (based on the feedback we collected). 5) Phoul will soon add the Tor glossary to Transifex. Arturo: 1) We now have full multi-lingual support in ooni-wui and ooniprobe-mobile. Translations for the mobile app have started to come (Spanish is 100% done). 2) We cleaned up the citizenlab global test list and migrated to the new category code scheme 3) Progress on the data processing pipeline. We hope to manage to deploy a staging instance of it this week or next week. Shari: 1) Did my self-assessment and got it to the board. Now they're "it." 2) Hired a new Communications Director and have been helping to acclimate him. 3) working on 2017 budget; kinda hard because we still don't have final numbers for 2016 4) reminder I'm gonna be mostly offline from 2/22 thru 2/26

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Many bridges (22%) have nickname "ki"
by David Fifield 15 Feb '17

15 Feb '17

This is a bit of a followup to my earlier post on obfs4 bridges with formulaic nicknames: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2016-November/000809.html Those bridges are still there, but today I noticed a new weirdness: 756 bridges all having the nickname "ki". 756 is 21.8% of the total number, 3464. At the moment, "ki" far outnumbers every other nickname, apart from "Unnamed": $ wget -O bridges.json https://onionoo.torproject.org/details?type=bridge $ ./nodeinfo < bridges.json | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head 1519 Unnamed 756 ki 16 UbuntuCore133 6 anonymous 5 hacktheplanet 4 ididnteditheconfig 3 default 3 CoolComputers 2 UbuntuCore95 2 masterFluellen All the "ki" bridges have other things in common: they run no pluggable transports and they have platform "Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux". Their last_restarted time ranges from 2016-12-05 17:51:45 to 2016-12-13 15:34:06. Here is a sample of 20 of them. $ ./nodeinfo < bridges.json | awk '$2 == "ki" {print}' | sort -k 7 | head -n 20 hashed_fingerprint nickname first_seen last_seen last_restarted platform transports F69BE147A7CB0A1EDAE8A5E9EFF70E672CF117DF ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 17:41:03 2016-12-05 17:51:45 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux FA0F7052B6BB5572960BB08BD44C58A143F9B227 ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 17:41:03 2016-12-05 18:07:00 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux 1431FFE68CFC0383456619D87431AF23FFA2E183 ki 2016-12-05 18:41:03 2016-12-06 17:41:03 2016-12-05 18:21:30 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux 945B0892CADA14722EA3D28354995D5907CFB3AB ki 2016-12-05 18:41:03 2016-12-06 17:41:03 2016-12-05 18:34:04 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux DDB025FD0BC51FE5391D8A4F80E773334D2E523C ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 18:41:03 2016-12-05 18:52:16 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux DB4245D09CC3C705CAD292C398DDA1ABFB40DB52 ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 18:41:03 2016-12-05 19:07:01 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux 772D118449E0F938657BBD5F472088270D742F39 ki 2016-12-05 19:41:03 2016-12-06 18:41:03 2016-12-05 19:21:27 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux F8DE4C2595715190D69732FBB47EAA17255FCF3A ki 2016-12-05 19:41:03 2016-12-06 18:41:03 2016-12-05 19:34:00 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux CA7ACBB15A80381BB216939AA3D6345D4E2A6CE5 ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 19:41:03 2016-12-05 19:51:51 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux 60AE31B0D81ABE763264D442E0A8A48161ADCBD6 ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 19:41:03 2016-12-05 20:07:42 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux 0522394400AA8425445742828C577A560159AAC3 ki 2016-12-05 20:41:03 2016-12-06 19:41:03 2016-12-05 20:21:31 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux 8A9BFB4DABD6D4F0AD692C414FB3E75DC33ED47E ki 2016-12-05 20:41:03 2016-12-06 19:41:03 2016-12-05 20:34:01 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux F9AE2B2E26EACE32A6BA697118F73AC20DAA0A01 ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 20:41:03 2016-12-05 20:52:33 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux DAFFEED5B1268C8B7BEEA3AD411690E7C74024EB ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 20:41:03 2016-12-05 21:06:31 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux 7690F311EE18901A2C2B0353DF868C31C43746C7 ki 2016-12-05 21:41:03 2016-12-06 20:41:03 2016-12-05 21:21:29 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux C51B3FA6A60D116C84C867F2DC2AE0BE33CB117F ki 2016-12-05 21:41:03 2016-12-06 20:41:03 2016-12-05 21:34:00 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux 8F6C3F388EDD6D9400B5743AE29DE3AAB88E43E9 ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 21:41:03 2016-12-05 21:51:56 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux 0547724D0F88377D5A0F01D90B8BF523B869326A ki 1970-01-01 00:00:00 2016-12-06 21:41:03 2016-12-05 22:07:16 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux EE969338212C905E0425394B658FEDE1CF3BDE4E ki 2016-12-05 22:41:03 2016-12-06 21:41:03 2016-12-05 22:21:28 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux EFCD5C5E5A608DC017980A4F67CCDB51BBA50FD4 ki 2016-12-05 22:41:03 2016-12-06 21:41:03 2016-12-05 22:34:15 Tor 0.2.8.10 on Linux

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Notes from February 9 2017 Vegas team meeting
by Karsten Loesing 13 Feb '17

13 Feb '17

Notes for February 9 2017 meeting: Kate: 1) Coordinating OONI media for ooniprobe phone app release 2) Talking to reporters about uptick in Tor use and downloads 3) Social media Isabela: 1) MOSS #2 invoice/report out - finishing reports for sponsor4 2) Comms Dir interviews - jitsi + irc 3) Working with Linda on user test of Orfox Security Slider - Linda is working with Elio on making sure we have imgs+logos files resources, which eventually can be used by anyone who needs them, but we will apply it at first on our website to bring it in parity with our style guidelines (not change design just make sure we have one type of onion image on the site not 5) - She is also doing a great job on recruiting volunteers to our UX team! She has a list with 4 or 5 different folks who are already with a task and helping out o/ 4) Hiro is working with Metrics team as well as installing schleuder (for using trac via email) - we are planning on hosting an open meeting next week to discuss features for the script she created where you can query trac tickets and do stuff - we are looking at network team wish list as inspiration, just need to triage things a little and define better the 'feature requests' 5) working on sponsorS final report Mike: 1) Working on Sponsor2 traffic analysis resistance. I have most of the system written how I want it; now comes testing. 2) We have a blog URL to test, but Kevin is still slowly fixing remaining issues. I found a few myself and asked him about them. I should just send the URL around to see if others have more. Alison: 1) I'm going to put the social contract up to a formal vote sometime next week (since atagar doesn't want anything grandfathered in. 2) After that, will get back on the membership docs. 3) Phoul and I will meet with Linda next week to discuss the support portal design. 4) Global South outreach continues apace. One of our trainers had a successful workshop in Karachi, and now we're planning the next one with another trainer in Nairobi. Once we've had a few go well, I will write a blog post. 5) I'm reviewing the Tor Meeting agenda feedback emails this weekend. Georg: 1) We made progress on our Sponsor4 items Arturo: 1) Launched ooniprobe mobile app, yay! See: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/ooni-mobile-app/ 2) Made a release candidate for the new ooniprobe web UI. See a live demo of it here: http://demo.probe.ooni.io/ Nick: 1) Wrapping things up with 0.3.0 2) Stabilizing older release series again 3) Trying to finish core-dev hire.

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Notes from February 2 2017 Vegas team meeting
by Karsten Loesing 12 Feb '17

12 Feb '17

Notes for February 2 2017 meeting: Georg: 1) We concentrated our work on Sponsor4 items and on fixing regressions in Tor Browser 6.5 2) Where are we with our applications team? <- we'll discuss things further in Amsterdam + plan to have a meeting there 3) Helped a bit with the Tor Browser related Metrics blog post Nick: 1) Hiring still going on. Lessons learned. 2) I'm going to be semi-afk 2/20 through 2/24. Email will be fine. 3) I think this is the week where we fix the remaining open 030 issues. Another alpha next week probably. Then Sponsor4 prelim work, piles of design proposals, and stable backports? 4) ahf-onboarding seems to be going okay so far (day 2). Shari: 1) Interviewing candidates for Communications Director position. 2) Working on Tor meeting details. 3) Approaching funders. 4) Catching up on stuff from being out of the office last week. Kate: 1) Answering press queries, posting on social media, will be working with OONI on press push next week. Mike: 1) Kevin ran into two issues with the blog that he is still resolving (tag imports have issues, and there is a deployment issue). Sorry for the false alarm last week :/. 2) Working on implementing Adaptive Padding generalization for tor-core (Sponsor2); coordinating with Matt Wright, Marc Juarez, and SecureDrop folks. Alison: 1) Collecting responses for the Tor meeting agenda until tomorrow. Will send a summary to this group before next week's meeting. Continuing to do other meeting planning stuff with Shari and Gunner. 2) Global South outreach: will write a blog post once we've got a few trainings scheduled 3) LFP events upcoming: Pratt Institute, Drexel University, Sacred Heart Church, Temple University 4) Working with Shari, Isa, and Erin on comms director interviews Karsten: 1) Blogged about Tor Metrics' new graph on Tor Browser downloads and updates: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-numbers 2) Planning to add another graph on Tor Browser downloads by operating system. 3) Put out a new Onionoo release and closed about a dozen Atlas tickets towards making Atlas more user-friendly, scheduled blog post for end of February when next Onionoo protocol version 4.0 gets released. 4) Preparing for in-person meeting in Berlin next Friday. Arturo: 1) Fires related to ooni infrastructure all resolved. Data has been reprocessed new database has been populated, by the end of today ooni-explorer will roll-over to the new database and everything will be back to normal. 2) The first stage of the re-engineered data processing pipeline is finished. We are now able to generate "canned" reports that are compressed and result in much reduced storage and faster re-processing times. 3) The ooniprobe mobile release is on track. We expect to upload an app for review by apple today or tomorrow. 4) Addressed all items in the feedback provided by Linda to the new ooniprobe web UI. Live demo available here: http://37.218.242.109/ Isabela: 1) SponsorU stuff is all done and invoice is being processed 2) Sponsor5 Milestone 2 was finished and reported to sponsor 3) SponsorS final quarterly report will be submitted today 4) New DRL proposal - had the call, waiting for follow up steps 5) Need to work on: Task Force proposal - OKRs example - User Growth Strategy update report - sponsor4 reports 6) Interviewing candidates for Comms Dir position

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We're bricking up #nottor; keep your eyes open
by Roger Dingledine 11 Feb '17

11 Feb '17

Hi folks, After another round of irc crazy, we're moving forward with the plan of bricking up the #nottor irc channel: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2016WinterDevMee… velope is going to do the actual bricking in the next few days, once he's tied up some loose ends. (Maybe I'll be the one to run the actual commands, so it's got my name on it and it's more clear what's going on.) So, be on the lookout for more misbehavior than usual in the coming days. If you want to help but you don't know how to, let one of us know on irc and we'll try to help you help. Also, if we wanted to do some of the other transitions on that page, like more work on making the mailing lists better, now could be a good time. :) --Roger

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EFF is looking for border search stories
by Shari Steele 07 Feb '17

07 Feb '17

Hey all. EFF is looking for stories of border searches of electronic devices while trying to enter the United States. Pass this along to anyone you know who might fit the criteria: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/02/invasive-digital-border-searches-tell… <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/02/invasive-digital-border-searches-tell…> Shari

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New Tor Metrics graph: Tor Browser downloads and updates
by Karsten Loesing 02 Feb '17

02 Feb '17

Hi everyone, we just put a new graph on Tor Metrics called "Tor Browser downloads and updates": https://metrics.torproject.org/webstats-tb.html This graph is the result of a joint effort of the metrics team (with a lot of input on the underlying code from iwakeh) together with Sebastian (who co-authored the original database schema and who operates the web log sanitizer), gk and boklm (who analyze an earlier graph and provided insights about Tor Browser internals), and others who discussed the graph and earlier prototypes. Please take a look at this graph, play a bit with the two inputs (start and end date), and give us feedback by raising questions about the data or giving answers to previously raised questions. The goal would be to write a blog post about this graph together with an early analysis. Currently open questions are: - gk asks on the ticket (https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21236#comment:11) "The results still confuse me (like: We have 100,000 new downloads each day but that does not show up in the update pings which basically stay the same? We still have more than 120,000 update requests every day, even after almost 6 weeks after the last release?). But that is probably another story. :)" - hellais asked at yesterday's Vegas meeting: "how many times does a normal tor browser do an update ping every day?" which was answered by mikeperry and gk with "twice" "and on every start". This is probably something we should clarify in the graph description. - yawning asks on the ticket (https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21236#comment:25) "Does it matter that the Linux sandbox behavior is totally different from everyone else, because it uses a different implementation to download, update check, and update? I suspect the user base isn't that big right now, but I'd hate to throw stats off..." Note that we're mostly hoping for feedback on the data, not on the presentation. We know that there's room for making the graph prettier or for providing more inputs to customize it. But we already spent way more time on this graph than we had planned, so we'd save any feedback on the presentation (except for typos or trivial tweaks) for later in the year. Thanks! All the best, Karsten

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