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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2024-01-11
by Shelikhoo 11 Jan '24

11 Jan '24

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2024/tor-meeting.2024-01-11-15.57.html And our meeting pad: cohosh Anti-censorship work meeting pad -------------------------------- Anti-censorship -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday, January 18 16:00 UTC Facilitator: Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC (channel is logged while meetings are in progress) This week's Facilitator: shelikhoo == Goal of this meeting == Weekly check-in about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor. Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at the Tor Project and Tor community. == Links to Useful documents == * Our anti-censorship roadmap: * Roadmap:https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/boards * The anti-censorship team's wiki page: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/home * Past meeting notes can be found at: * https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/ * Tickets that need reviews: from sponsors, we are working on: * All needs review tickets: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/merge_requests?s… * Sponsor 96 <-- meskio, shell, onyinyang, cohosh * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/24 * Sponsor 150 <-- meskio working on it * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/issues/?label_na… == Announcements == * Since December 2023, getting TLS certificates for subdomains of torproject.net (e.g. snowflake-broker.torproject.net) requires asking the sysadmin team to create a CAA record in DNS to authorize a specific account. * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41462 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/howto/tls?version_id=41c… == Discussion == * DTLS anti-fingerprinting library similar to uTLS * Useful for snowflake: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… * Sean DuBois (from pion) has been interested in this and may have ideas on what this library could look like == Actions == == Interesting links == * https://opencollective.com/censorship-circumvention/projects/snowflake-dail… == Reading group == * We will discuss "" on * * Questions to ask and goals to have: * What aspects of the paper are questionable? * Are there immediate actions we can take based on this work? * Are there long-term actions we can take based on this work? * Is there future work that we want to call out in hopes that others will pick it up? == Updates == Name: This week: - What you worked on this week. Next week: - What you are planning to work on next week. Help with: - Something you need help with. cecylia (cohosh): 2024-01-11 Past weeks: - Lox + Tor Browser integration - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/116 - worked on Lox distributor bug fixes and testing - spun up a few temporary Lox bridges for testing - integration testing of Snowflake with Shadow - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - proxy command-line option to specify probe server URL - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - SetNet fix for probetest - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - probetest command-line option to specify STUN URL - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - opened shadow issue to deal with missing setsockopt support for snowflake - https://github.com/shadow/shadow/issues/3278 - unit testing feedback on SQS rendezvous MR - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… This week: - Lox + Tor Browser integration - figure out what we need to get the snowflake server running in shadow again - rebase and try out manifest v3 patch - Conjure bridge maintenance Needs help with: dcf: 2024-01-11 Last week: - upgraded snowflake bridges to 0.4.8.10 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - figured out a CAA issue to prevented renewing TLS certificates for torproject.net domains (e.g. snowflake.torproject.net, snowflake-broker.torproject.net) https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - opened an issue to let the snowflake bridge and broker use a newer type of ACME challenge https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - documented WireGuard setup for the snowflake-01 bridge https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/Survival-Gui… - azure CDN bookkeeping https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/Snowflake-co… Next week: - review draft MR for unreliable data channels https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors is nonzero https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - parent: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - open issue to disable /debug endpoint on snowflake broker Before EOY 2023: - move snowflake-02 to new VM Help with: meskio: 2023-12-21 Last week: - grant writing Next week: Shelikhoo: 2024-01-11 Last Week: - Work on snowflake performance improvement (WIP): https://gitlab.torproject.org/shelikhoo/snowflake/-/tree/dev-udp-performanc… https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - HTTPS distributors in rdsys: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/191 - Merge request reviews Next Week/TODO: onyinyang: 2023-01-11 Last week(s): - Finished Telegram bot dev - Continue to support Lox wasm stubs as needed - Holiday! This week: - Bug fixing and other things that come up as lox integration is rolled out - document API for lox client/server requests - Other Lox bug fixes/improvements - attempt hyper upgrade again (long term things were discussed at the meeting!): https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-ac-community-azaleas-room-keep - brainstorming grouping strategies for Lox buckets (of bridges) and gathering context on how types of bridges are distributed/use in practice Question: What makes a bridge usable for a given user, and how can we encode that to best ensure we're getting the most appropriate resources to people? 1. Are there some obvious grouping strategies that we can already consider? e.g., by PT, by bandwidth (lower bandwidth bridges sacrificed to open-invitation buckets?), by locale (to be matched with a requesting user's geoip or something?) 2. Does it make sense to group 3 bridges/bucket, so trusted users have access to 3 bridges (and untrusted users have access to 1)? More? Less?

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OONI Monthly Report: December 2023
by Maria Xynou 09 Jan '24

09 Jan '24

Hello, Happy New Year! We wish you all the best for 2024. :) This email shares OONI's monthly report for December 2023. *# OONI Monthly Report: December 2023* Throughout December 2023, the OONI team worked on the following sprints: * Sprint 106 (4th - 17th December 2023) * Sprint 107 (18th - 31st December 2023) Our work can be tracked through the various OONI GitHub repositories: https://github.com/ooni Highlights are shared in this report below. *## Year in Review: OONI in 2023* We published our "Year in Review: OONI in 2023" blog post: https://ooni.org/post/2023-year-in-review/ In our annual end-of-year post, we share: * OONI highlights from 2023 * Highlights from the OONI community (i.e. how OONI tools and data were used by the community) * Upcoming OONI projects in 2024 Warm thanks to everyone who supported our work in 2023! We’re excited for 2024. *## Published new reports on the OONI Censorship Findings page* Following the launch of the OONI Censorship Findings page ( https://explorer.ooni.org/findings) in November 2023, we published more reports on the platform in December 2023. Specifically, we published the following new reports: * Nepal blocked TikTok: https://explorer.ooni.org/findings/112092297601 * Malaysia blocked MalaysiaNow and website of former MP: https://explorer.ooni.org/findings/178720534001 We also updated our Kenya report (published in November 2023) to communicate the unblocking of Telegram: https://explorer.ooni.org/findings/228466228201 *## OONI Probe Mobile* In December 2023, we worked towards addressing a bug impacting RTL on OONI Probe iOS (https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/2578) and we worked towards coming up with better ways of sharing apk for testing ( https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/2643) *## OONI Run* As part of our work on creating the next generation version of OONI Run (“OONI Run v2”), there were several key activities we undertook this month: * We developed a test plan in preparation for a round of internal testing we’d like to complete in early 2024; * We began testing the link flow; * We continued to work on implementing the add link flow ( https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/2595) * We worked on implementing the dashboard link loading and we reviewed the updates (https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/2594) * As part of testing and adding polish to the application, we also worked on revising the UX for adding an expiry date to links, as well as improved layout for status messaging. *## OONI Probe CLI* We released OONI Probe 3.20.0. The main improvement consists of changes making sure Web Connectivity v0.5 produces the same top-level keys (e.g., `blocking`) of v0.4 when running integration tests in our Gvisor-based QA suite. We also added experimental functionality to miniooni to run scripts written in JavaScript, which supports research use cases where it is not practical to follow a develop-build-deploy-test-edit-repeat loop. See the full changelog for more information: https://github.com/ooni/probe-cli/releases/tag/v3.20.0 We also improved the Web Connectivity Test Helper (oohelperd) to be more robust in case of excessive load (as documented here: https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/2649) We included this improvement into the 3.20.1 OONI Probe release. *## Expanding OONI’s testing model to support richer testing input* The JavaScript based functionality for miniooni that we included in the OONI Probe 3.20 release is an evolution of experimental code that we implemented for richer testing input. You may remember that in May 2023 we created the richer testing input repository ( https://github.com/ooni/2023-05-richer-input) to experiment with several possible richer-input designs. We decided to go with a more minimal richer-input design. But, some of the code we produced as part of this experiment turned out valuable in situations in which we or on-the-field testers require greater flexibility to inform changes in the implementation of existing experiments or in the development of new experiments. *## Creating a methodology for measuring throttling* The Web Connectivity v0.5 improvements included in the OONI Probe 3.20.0 release are such that we can move forward with the A/B testing of v0.4 and v0.5 more widely thanks to the richer-input feature flags now included in the check-in API. We therefore will be able to run this A/B testing, identify additional issues with Web Connectivity v0.5, and make it the default Web Connectivity implementation. In turn, this will allow us to collect better throttling data, given the superior v0.5 capabilities in this regard. *## OONI Explorer* As a result of having added several new menu items to OONI Explorer throughout 2023, the main navigation ended up taking too much space on mobile. To improve the user experience on mobile, we made adjustments to the menu items on OONI Explorer (https://github.com/ooni/explorer/issues/896) We also fixed a bug impacting the display of the countries page in the mobile version of OONI Explorer (https://github.com/ooni/explorer/issues/860) *## New OONI backend documentation* Throughout December 2023, we worked on OONI backend documentation that describes the architecture of the main components of OONI infrastructure. Specifically, we focused on improving the documentation of our backend architecture, data flows, and deployment workflows. We also documented the application metric data flows, our backend systems for monitoring and providing alerts on any infrastructure issues, the dashboards that we use, how we manage logs, as well as information about our pipeline, API, test helpers, URL prioritization system, and other backend information. Our new OONI backend documentation is available here: https://github.com/ooni/backend-documentation/blob/main/backend_documentati… *## Published OONI Community Interview with Ihueze Nwobilor (Paradigm Initiative)* In December 2023, we published a new OONI community interview with Ihueze Nwobilor, the Senior Programs Officer at Paradigm Initiative ( https://paradigmhq.org/) Notably, Ihueze’s advocacy and policy work helped unblock Twitter in Nigeria in 2022! Ihueze’s interview (which we published on the OONI YouTube channel) can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVHeROiypF4 This interview is part of our “OONI Community Interviews” series, through which we highlight the important work of OONI community members. We also published a blog post to share the interview and information about Paradigm Initiative’s work: https://ooni.org/post/2023-interview-with-ihueze-nwobilor/ *## Published OONI Outreach Kit in Swahili* The OONI Outreach Kit is now available in Swahili (in addition to Russian, Spanish, French, and English)! Access the Swahili version of the OONI Outreach Kit here: https://ooni.org/sw/support/ooni-outreach-kit/ We thank our partner, Zaina Foundation ( https://ooni.org/partners/zaina-foundation/) for the Swahili translation of the OONI Outreach Kit. We also thank Small Media (https://smallmedia.org.uk/) for sharing translations for the speaker notes in the OONI workshop slides (included in the Outreach Kit). We hope that the Swahili version of the OONI Outreach Kit will help support OONI community engagement efforts! *## Published the OONI FAQ in Burmese* The OONI Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) documentation is now available in Burmese: https://ooni.org/my/support/faq We thank the community members who translated this documentation to Burmese. We generally consider it important to have this documentation translated in as many languages as possible (particularly in languages spoken in high-risk countries), as it provides answers to the most frequently asked questions involving the use of OONI tools. The OONI FAQ documentation (https://ooni.org/support/faq/) is also available in Arabic, Farsi, Khmer, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, and Vietnamese. *## Published OONI Probe Mobile User Guide in Burmese* The OONI Probe Mobile User Guide is now available in Burmese: https://ooni.org/my/support/ooni-probe-mobile We thank the community members who translated this documentation to Burmese. The OONI Probe Mobile User Guide (https://ooni.org/support/ooni-probe-mobile) is also available in Farsi, Russian, German, Turkish, and Vietnamese. *## Published OONI Probe Desktop User Guide in Portuguese* The OONI Probe Desktop User Guide is now available in Portuguese: https://ooni.org/pt/support/ooni-probe-desktop We thank Cauan Henrique Zorzenon from the Localization Lab community for the translation. The OONI Probe Desktop User Guide ( https://ooni.org/support/ooni-probe-desktop) is also available in Farsi, Russian, German, Turkish, and Vietnamese. *## End-of-year fundraising efforts* As part of our end-of-year fundraising efforts, we improved upon our Donations page (https://ooni.org/donate) and we published a new “Supporters & Funders” page (https://ooni.org/about/supporters) introducing new supporter tiers and benefits for those interested in supporting OONI's mission. On OONI’s 11th Anniversary (5th December 2023), we launched the OONIque Boutique (https://shop.ooni.org) through which the public can get OONI swag (t-shirts, water bottles, mugs, stickers, tote bags) in support of OONI’s work. *## Rapid response efforts### Pakistan blocked access to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube* On 17th December 2023, ISPs in Pakistan blocked access to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. We rapidly responded by sharing real-time OONI data on the blocks (via our social media platforms) on the same day ( https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/1736461861338431903) We also shared relevant OONI data and findings with the KeepItOn advocacy community. Most OONI measurements suggest that the blocks were implemented by means of TLS interference. OONI data shows that these platforms were unblocked by the next day (18th December 2023): https://explorer.ooni.org/chart/mat?probe_cc=PK&since=2023-11-18&until=2023… *## Resources created by the community### Open Culture Foundation’s (OCF) OONI Research project* Our partner, Open Culture Foundation ( https://ooni.org/partners/open-culture-foundation/) launched a new OONI Research project to support OONI censorship measurement in Taiwan. You can find information about OCF’s OONI Research project here: https://ocf.tw/en/p/ooni/ OCF’s OONI Research project is also available on GitHub: https://github.com/ocftw/ooni-research Their OONI Research project covers the following areas: * ASN coverage analysis * Updating the Citizen Lab test list for Taiwan * Localizing OONI tools and documentation In December 2023, OCF published their first observation report (based on the analysis of OONI data from 1st September 2023 to 3rd December 2023): https://ocf.tw/en/p/ooni/report/202312.html *### Building Digital Resilience Comic Strip* Access Now and Core23Lab published a comic strip for journalists, politicians, and human rights activists ahead of the DRC’s 2023 elections. This comic strip features OONI (among other tools) and is available here: https://www.accessnow.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Ngao-Comics-V5-English… *## Citations### Top10VPN December 2023 Newsletter* OONI is cited in Top10VPN’s last newsletter for 2023, which provides a “Year in Review” on internet shutdowns, digital privacy and AI surveillance. Their newsletter is available here: https://top10vpn.substack.com/p/year-in-review-internet-shutdowns The newsletter includes quotes from OONI’s Maria, as well as links to many of the research reports that we published in 2023. The newsletter also discusses the new OONI Explorer features that we launched in 2023 (including our new Censorship Findings page), as well as our plans for releasing a new version of OONI Run in 2024. *## Community activities### State of the Onion 2023* On 6th December 2023, OONI’s Arturo presented OONI at the Tor Project’s annual State of the Onion Community event ( https://blog.torproject.org/state-of-the-onion-2023/) As part of his presentation, Arturo shared OONI highlights from 2023, as well as upcoming OONI projects for 2024. The live-stream of the presentation is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtgTwho1wfQ *### SplinterCon* Between 7th-8th December 2023, OONI’s Simone attended the SplinterCon conference (https://splintercon.net/) in Montreal, Canada. As part of his participation, Simone delivered an OONI presentation and facilitated a workshop on how to use OONI Probe in adversarial networks. This workshop touched upon the following topics: * Basic usage of OONI Probe Desktop, CLI, Mobile, and the miniooni research client; * Failures contacting the OONI backend, tunnel options (psiphon, tor, etc.), and the possibility of configuring circumvention using the `bridges.conf` file; * Failures geolocating the probe’s IP address and plans to make this step more robust; * Using OONI Run v1 for personal research and to coordinate measurement campaigns; * OONI Run v2 with miniooni as a tool to execute any experiment; * Overview of what is possible to measure using the urlgetter research experiment; * The JavaScript functionality introduced in miniooni 3.20.0. The general goal of the workshop was to discuss how to overcome common issues in heavily-censored networks and use miniooni (and hence the OONI Engine) as a platform to collect data that is useful for research, as well as to contribute to improving OONI Probe methodologies. *## Measurement coverage* In December 2023, 54,838,460 OONI Probe measurements were collected from 2,975 networks in 180 countries around the world. This information can also be found through our measurement stats on OONI Explorer (see chart on “monthly coverage worldwide”): https://explorer.ooni.org/ ~ OONI team.

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Nina’s Monthly Status Report: December 2023
by Nina 08 Jan '24

08 Jan '24

Hi! Below is my December’23 report! In December, I resolved 570 tickets: On Telegram (@TorProjectSupportBot) - 410 On RT (frontdesk@tpo) - 150 On WhatsApp (+447421000612) - 5 and on Signal (+17787431312) - 5 In December, we had an issue with bridges not working for the users with OS Windows 7 [1]. The issue was caused by the most recent Go toolchain update, that discontinued Windows 7 support and affected many Russianspeakingusers. We had more than 20 user requests regarding this issuein less than 24 hours. The problem was solved with an emergency Tor Browser desktop-only release 13.0.8 [2]. This month, we were still getting requests from OPPO users concerned that Tor Browser does not work on their devices [3]. In December, I also: 1. Helped Russian-speaking users to bypass censorship: shared bridges, helped with troubleshooting; 2. Collected user feedback on Tor circumvention settings and apps; 3. Helped to solve Windows-related Tor Browser issues like antivirus software blocking Tor Browser or non-ASCII characters in your username or lack of admin or escalated privileges to install and run Tor Browser. [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42179 [2] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-1308/ [3] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41289

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Rhatto's Monthly Status Report, December 2023
by rhatto 04 Jan '24

04 Jan '24

Hi all :) This is my monthly status report for December 2023 with the main relevant activities I have done during the period. ## 0. Research * Did another round of Onion Services Quality Assurance for Tor Browser. Full results not published yet, pending a review/decision on some (still) confidential issues. ## 1. Development * No notable development activities during the period. ## 2. Support * Ongoing sponsored work with deployment, maintenance and monitoring of Onion Services. ## 3. Organization * A lot of my time was invested in organization/reporting/planning/etc to wrap up 2023 and get ready to 2024. * Time spent (from the total available for Tor-related work): | Category | Percentage |---------------|------------ | Research | 10 | Development | 0 | Support | 37 | Organization | 53 |---------------|------------ | Total | 100 -- Silvio Rhatto pronouns he/him

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PieroV's Monthly Status Report, December 2023
by Pier Angelo Vendrame 02 Jan '24

02 Jan '24

Hi everyone! Here is my status report for December 2023. For most of the month, I kept working on the connection assist for Android. I wrote some quick styling for about:torconnect to make it appear like the native UI we are still implementing. I also wrote a gating mechanism Claire used to write an opt-in UI for the latest TBA alpha. While working on this, I also found that the Onion Location setting wasn't persisted [0], and I wrote a fix. All this work went into the 13.5a3 alpha. Richard wrote a great blog post [1] with more information about that. In addition to that, I worked on quicker tasks, such as: - Preparing the 13.0.7 releases and rebasing the alpha branches. - Resizing all the wordmarks to the same size to address fingerprintability of nightly vs. alpha [2]. - Enabling GeckoDriver on all desktop platforms and including it in the released artifacts [3]. - Using LLD on all Linux platforms, re-enabling debug symbols for Linux i686 [4], and improving the format of our debug symbol archives [5]. - Use Go 1.20 on Windows to restore Windows 7 compatibility on pluggable transports [6]. Best, Pier [0] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42324 [1] https://blog.torproject.org/new-alpha-release-tor-browser-135a3/ [2] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42319 [3] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42337 [4] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42146 [5] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/4… [6] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42179

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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2023-12-21
by meskio 21 Dec '23

21 Dec '23

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-12-21-15.57.html And our meeting pad: Anti-censorship -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday, January 11 16:00 UTC Facilitator: shelikhoo Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC (channel is logged while meetings are in progress) This week's Facilitator: meskio == Goal of this meeting == Weekly check-in about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor. Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at the Tor Project and Tor community. == Links to Useful documents == * Our anti-censorship roadmap: * Roadmap:https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/boards * The anti-censorship team's wiki page: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/home * Past meeting notes can be found at: * https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/ * Tickets that need reviews: from sponsors, we are working on: * All needs review tickets: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/merge_requests?s… * Sponsor 96 <-- meskio, shell, onyinyang, cohosh * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/24 * Sponsor 150 <-- meskio working on it * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/issues/?label_na… == Announcements == * No meetings December 28, neither January 4 == Discussion == * Tor Browser users on Windows 7/8 have started having problems with PTs because Go 1.21 removed support * tor-browser-build now uses Go 1.20 for everything except Snowflake: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/commit/2… * we'll try to fix the issue by providing our own random source and see how invasive si the change * manifest v2 deprecation in browsers and snowflake webextension * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… * https://developer.chrome.com/blog/resuming-the-transition-to-mv3/ * google chrome will stop supporting mv2 June 2024 * will the snowflake webextension stop working? do we want to do something? or just recommend firefox? * cohosh will look into this next year and see how hacky needs to be the solution * validation for bridgelines * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41913#n… * there is no fingerprint in the conjure bridgeline we shared, and we have some doubts if giving an error on bridgelines without fingerprint in TB or not * we'll include a fingerprint in future conjure bridgelines * and we'll not give an error for now on missing fingerprint bridgelines == Actions == == Interesting links == == Reading group == * We will discuss "" on * * Questions to ask and goals to have: * What aspects of the paper are questionable? * Are there immediate actions we can take based on this work? * Are there long-term actions we can take based on this work? * Is there future work that we want to call out in hopes that others will pick it up? == Updates == Name: This week: - What you worked on this week. Next week: - What you are planning to work on next week. Help with: - Something you need help with. cecylia (cohosh): 2023-12-21 Last week: - debugged some issues with the lox distributor deployment - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41406 - lox tor browser integration work - removed extra log message for snowflake connection closure - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - worked on finding alternative domain fronting providers This week: - conjure bridge maintenance - review SQS rendezvous Needs help with: dcf: 2023-12-14 Last week: - opened issue to upgrade snowflake bridges to 0.4.8.10 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - azure CDN bookkeeping https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/Snowflake-co… Next week: - upgrade snowflake bridges to 0.4.8.10 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - review draft MR for unreliable data channels https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors is nonzero https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - parent: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - open issue to disable /debug endpoint on snowflake broker Before EOY 2023: - move snowflake-02 to new VM Help with: meskio: 2023-12-21 Last week: - grant writing Next week: Shelikhoo: 2023-12-21 Last Week: - Work on snowflake performance improvement (WIP): https://gitlab.torproject.org/shelikhoo/snowflake/-/tree/dev-udp-performanc… https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - Analysis of S150 HTTPS distributors design: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/191 - Merge request reviews Next Week/TODO: onyinyang: 2023-12-21 Last week(s): - Worked on Telegram bot: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/merge_requests/223 - Added several additional Lox wasm stubs needed by applications team This week: - Finish up Telegram bot dev - Continue to support Lox wasm stubs as needed - attempt hyper upgrade again - Holiday! (long term things were discussed at the meeting!): https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-ac-community-azaleas-room-keep - brainstorming grouping strategies for Lox buckets (of bridges) and gathering context on how types of bridges are distributed/use in practice Question: What makes a bridge usable for a given user, and how can we encode that to best ensure we're getting the most appropriate resources to people? 1. Are there some obvious grouping strategies that we can already consider? e.g., by PT, by bandwidth (lower bandwidth bridges sacrificed to open-invitation buckets?), by locale (to be matched with a requesting user's geoip or something?) 2. Does it make sense to group 3 bridges/bucket, so trusted users have access to 3 bridges (and untrusted users have access to 1)? More? Less? -- meskio | https://meskio.net/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- My contact info: https://meskio.net/crypto.txt -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Nos vamos a Croatan.

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The Tor Project Community Policies new website!
by gus 15 Dec '23

15 Dec '23

Hello Tor Community, I'm happy to announce that the Tor Project Community Policies have a new website! You can visit our Policies website here: <https://community.torproject.org/policies>. The website hosts the Tor Project Community governance policies, including our Code of Conduct, Social Contract, Relay Operators docs, and other important documents. The website was generated using Onion MkDocs[1] and was part of our project at Tor Hackweek[2]. We've also updated all links directing to the old repository (gitweb.tpo) to the new website. If you find any issue or have suggestions for improvements, please feel invited to open a ticket in the Community/Policies repository: <https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/policies>. A special thanks to Rhatto and Lavamind for their support and assistance with the deployment. I'm very happy to have a more accessible and user friendly page for the Tor Community. Best regards, Gus [1] Onion MkDocs: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/onion-mkdocs [2] Tor Hackweek: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/hackweek/-/issues/13 -- The Tor Project Community Team Lead

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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2023-12-14
by onyinyang 14 Dec '23

14 Dec '23

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-12-14-15.59.html And our meeting pad: Anti-censorship -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday, Dec 21 16:00 UTC Facilitator: meskio Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC (channel is logged while meetings are in progress) This week's Facilitator: onyinyang == Goal of this meeting == Weekly check-in about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor. Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at the Tor Project and Tor community. == Links to Useful documents == Our anti-censorship roadmap: Roadmap:https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/boards The anti-censorship team's wiki page: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/home Past meeting notes can be found at: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/ Tickets that need reviews: from sponsors, we are working on: All needs review tickets: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/merge_requests?s… Sponsor 96 <-- meskio, shell, onyinyang, cohosh https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/24 Sponsor 150 <-- meskio working on it https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/issues/?label_na… == Announcements == == Discussion == Snowflake UDP-like transport ready for a draft review: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… since the prior draft, disabled KCP stream mode, and disabled data channel retransmission (the earlier draft had only turned off "ordered" mode, but had not also turned off "reliable" mode): https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2023-March/0002… will wait for cohosh to be around: manifest v3 deprecation in browsers and snowflake webextension https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… https://developer.chrome.com/blog/resuming-the-transition-to-mv3/ google chrome will stop supporting mv2 June 2024 will the snowflake webextension stop working? do we want to do something? or just recommend firefox? == Actions == == Interesting links == https://opencollective.com/censorship-circumvention/projects/snowflake-dail… https://ooni.org/post/2023-interview-with-ihueze-nwobilor/ https://explorer.ooni.org/findings https://ooni.org/post/2023-launch-ooni-censorship-findings-platform/ == Reading group == We will discuss "NetShuffle: Circumventing Censorship with Shuffle Proxies at the Edge" on December 14 https://www.cs-pk.com/papers/3/ Questions to ask and goals to have: What aspects of the paper are questionable? Are there immediate actions we can take based on this work? Are there long-term actions we can take based on this work? Is there future work that we want to call out in hopes that others will pick it up? == Updates == Name: This week: - What you worked on this week. Next week: - What you are planning to work on next week. Help with: - Something you need help with. cecylia (cohosh): 2023-11-09 Last week: - conjure bridge maintenance - caught a bug in safelog library - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - caught problem with domain front in conjure - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/conj… This week: - lox tor browser UX integration - lox distributor testing - look into alternative domain fronting providers Needs help with: dcf: 2023-12-14 Last week: - opened issue to upgrade snowflake bridges to 0.4.8.10 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - azure CDN bookkeeping https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/Snowflake-co… Next week: - upgrade snowflake bridges to 0.4.8.10 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - review draft MR for unreliable data channels https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors is nonzero https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - parent: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - open issue to disable /debug endpoint on snowflake broker Before EOY 2023: - move snowflake-02 to new VM Help with: meskio: 2023-12-14 Last week: - grant writing - prepare settings anti-listing logic to be reused by HTTP distributor (rdsys#181) - setup rdsys staging server (rdsys#170) Next week: - investigate missing bridges in the assignments (rdsys#190) Shelikhoo: 2023-12-14 Last Week: - Work on snowflake performance improvement (WIP): https://gitlab.torproject.org/shelikhoo/snowflake/-/tree/dev-speedwithudp?r… https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - Merge request reviews Next Week/TODO: - Write Tor Spec for Armored URL (continue) - Work on snowflake performance improvement (WIP): https://gitlab.torproject.org/shelikhoo/snowflake/-/tree/dev-speedwithudp?r… - Check any blockers for s150 rdsys HTTPS distributor - Merge request reviews onyinyang: 2023-12-14 Last week(s): - continued and nearly finished Telegram bot dev - Splintercon This week: - Finish up Telegram bot dev - Add Lox wasm stubs needed by applications team - Start of Tor browser integration - attempt hyper upgrade again (long term things were discussed at the meeting!): https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-ac-community-azaleas-room-keep - brainstorming grouping strategies for Lox buckets (of bridges) and gathering context on how types of bridges are distributed/use in practice Question: What makes a bridge usable for a given user, and how can we encode that to best ensure we're getting the most appropriate resources to people? 1. Are there some obvious grouping strategies that we can already consider? e.g., by PT, by bandwidth (lower bandwidth bridges sacrificed to open-invitation buckets?), by locale (to be matched with a requesting user's geoip or something?) 2. Does it make sense to group 3 bridges/bucket, so trusted users have access to 3 bridges (and untrusted users have access to 1)? More? Less? -- --- onyinyang GPG Fingerprint 3CC3 F8CC E9D0 A92F A108 38EF 156A 6435 430C 2036

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Tails report for November 2023
by bokonon 13 Dec '23

13 Dec '23

Hello :) * Tails report for November 2023 <https://tails.net/news/report_2023_11/>* Highlights * We had asked Radically Open Security <https://www.radicallyopensecurity.com/> to audit Tails. The results of the audit <https://tails.net/news/audit_by_ROS/index.en.html> reinforced Tails credentials as a "solid" operating system for preserving anonymity. We were super proactive with addressing the reported vulnerabilities, fixing them all within 3 weeks of being reported. This is a reminder that as good as Tails is, it needs to be updated regularly! * We undertook a bunch of home improvement projects for our new address <https://tails.net/news/new_domain/index.en.html>. Highlights: o the language switcher on the website is more prominent, and also in the website footer, o warning buttons display warnings better - in a new colour, and with wrapped text, o our redesigned security page <https://tails.net/security/index.en.html> better showcases the history of our security advisories. * We have a new sponsor: igaming.com <https://www.igaming.com/> joined our mission! Our donors also received the quarterly newsletter with early insights into upcoming Tails features. You, too, could subscribe while making your next donation <https://tails.net/donate/index.en.html>. Help make our ongoing fundraiser <https://tails.net/news/gift_of_privacy/index.en.html> a success! Releases November featured 2 new versions of Tails: 5.19.1 and 5.20. 5.19.1 <https://tails.net/news/version_5.19.1/index.en.html> was an emergency release. We updated the Tor client to bring the fix to the TROVE-2023-006 vulnerability <https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/team/-/wikis/NetworkTeam/TROVE> to Tails users. And in 5.20 <https://tails.net/news/version_5.20/index.en.html>, we: * brought the usual, latest updates to Tor Browser and Thunderbird, * fixed a security vulnerability in uBlock Origin to protect Tails users from advanced browser fingerprinting techniques, and * continued making Persistent Storage more usable, and made it even easier to report issues when it doesn't work through improvements to WhisperBack. Metrics Tails was started more than 825,741 times this month. That's a daily average of over 27,520 boots

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OONI Monthly Report: November 2023
by Maria Xynou 12 Dec '23

12 Dec '23

Hello, This email shares OONI's monthly report for November 2023. *# OONI Monthly Report: November 2023* Throughout November 2023, the OONI team worked on the following sprints: * Sprint 103 (1st - 5th November 2023) * Sprint 104 (6th - 19th November 2023) * Sprint 105 (20th - 30th November 2023) Our work can be tracked through the various OONI GitHub repositories: https://github.com/ooni Highlights are shared in this report below. *## Launched the OONI Censorship Findings platform* We are excited to share that we launched a new Censorship Findings platform! Along with the launch, we published: * 20 reports on censorship events that emerged in 2023: https://explorer.ooni.org/findings * Blog post sharing information about the Censorship Findings platform: https://ooni.org/post/2023-launch-ooni-censorship-findings-platform/ The Censorship Findings platform was also featured as a “Tool of the Week” in Top10VPN’s newsletter: https://top10vpn.substack.com/p/friday-digest-4-fb-messenger-whatsapp The Censorship Findings platform includes 20 reports on internet censorship events that emerged around the world in 2023 based on OONI data. These short reports include key censorship findings and charts based on OONI data. We describe the criteria that inform which cases we report on in our blog post: https://ooni.org/post/2023-launch-ooni-censorship-findings-platform/#limita… Our goal is to support research and advocacy efforts aimed at monitoring and responding to internet censorship around the world. In response to emergent censorship events, we will continue to publish reports on the Censorship Findings platform on an ongoing basis. We thank the global OONI community for contributing measurements, making the creation of this platform possible. *## OONI Team Meeting 2023* Our team is distributed in various countries (and continents) and throughout the year, we work remotely online. Once a year, we come together for an in-person OONI Team Meeting to discuss projects, strategic priorities, and to refine our roadmaps. Between 8th-10th November 2023, we hosted our annual OONI Team Meeting in Nairobi, Kenya. We chose Nairobi as a location for our team meeting based on our script which automatically provides locations that are visa-friendly, safe, and cost-effective to help ensure in person attendance from all of our team members. We took this measure because last year, half of our team was not able to travel to Rome for our 2022 Team Meeting due to visa issues (and we therefore had to host a hybrid event). This year, hosting the meeting in Kenya meant that all of our team members were able to join in person! And this meeting provided us the opportunity to meet some of our colleagues in person for the first time! In addition to our team, the meeting also included an OTF research fellow who we will be hosting over the next year. As part of the 3-day OONI Team Meeting 2023, we facilitated the following 15 sessions: 1) OONI Strategy: Now and in the Future 2) Automating censorship detection and characterization, and creating a Social Media Censorship Alert System: Discussion of current status and next steps 3) Community engagement and new community roadmap 4) Supporting richer testing input: Discussion of current status and next steps 5) Presenting thematic censorship findings on OONI Explorer: Discussion of current status and next steps 6) Measuring the blocking of VPNs and evolving circumvention games 7) Evolution of OONI measurement representations: Moving towards a flexible architecture and data model for research and presentation 8) Methods for measuring throttling: Discussion of current status and next steps 9) OONI Run v2: Discussion of current status and next steps towards launch 10) Team Health Check 11) Psychological safety and supportive group norms 12) Roadmap session (Part 1) 13) Roadmap session (Part 2) 14) OONI funds and finances for 2024 15) OONI fundraising priorities As an outcome, we have significantly improved roadmaps, and we made important progress on many of our high-priority projects and activities. We also had an opportunity to discuss strategic priorities for the future, as well as approaches for improving our team’s health and organization’s long-term resilience. On 11th November 2023 (after the 3-day team meeting), we hosted a “team bonding day”, providing our team some extra time for in person bonding – which is important given that we work remotely throughout the year. *## Published blog post about IMC 2023 internet measurement hackathon* In collaboration with ISOC, M-Lab, Censored Planet, and IODA, OONI co-hosted an internet measurement hackathon alongside the Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2023. In November 2023, we published a blog post sharing the great projects that came out of the hackathon: https://ooni.org/post/imc-hackathon-results-2023/ The hackathon participants worked on using OONI data to investigate IPv6 connectivity, data triangulation to infer censorship or shutdown events, and on correlating alarms across multiple datasets. We were very impressed with the results produced by the participants! During the hackathon, OONI's Arturo created "The Sound of Internet Shutdowns": a sonification project which transforms some of the features of the IODA dataset into synthesized sounds: https://shutdown-sound.vercel.app/ Here is an example of how an internet shutdown in Iraq based on IODA data sounds like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1TFc1AyqI4 The "Sound of Internet Shutdowns" project was featured as a “Tool of the Week” in Top10VPN’s newsletter: https://top10vpn.substack.com/p/friday-digest-3-vpn-vulnerabilities We thank all the participants and co-organizers for making the hackathon a great event! *## OONI Probe Mobile* In November 2023, we released OONI Probe Mobile 3.8.5 for both Android ( https://github.com/ooni/probe-android/releases/tag/v3.8.5) and iOS ( https://github.com/ooni/probe-ios/releases/tag/v3.8.5) which included some minor improvements and maintenance work. *## OONI Run* As part of our work on creating the next generation version of OONI Run (“OONI Run v2”), we continued to iterate on the user interface designs for the web and mobile applications. Most notably, we updated the run button from the dashboard to display the new flow for selecting tests ( https://github.com/ooni/probe-android/pull/632) and we updated the preferences to reflect the new designs ( https://github.com/ooni/probe-android/pull/633) We also started working on our test plans to prepare for internal testing and QA next year. Moreover, we added OONI Run link ID support ( https://github.com/ooni/backend/pull/768) and backend support for searching measurements from a specific OONI Run v2 link ( https://github.com/ooni/backend/issues/701) to the fastpath pipeline. *## OONI Probe CLI* We released OONI Probe CLI versions 3.19.1 and 3.19.2 to address data quality issues caused by changes in the endpoints used by the Signal application. You can read the changelogs at the following links: * https://github.com/ooni/probe-cli/releases/tag/v3.19.1 * https://github.com/ooni/probe-cli/releases/tag/v3.19.2 We also continued working on improving our throttling methodology by merging work into the master branch (see the throttling section) and starting to prepare for the OONI Probe CLI 3.20 release. Our community has asked us to add support for Go 1.21, but unfortunately it seems we will not be able to do that for OONI Probe 3.20. We will nonetheless try our best to support Go 1.21 before Go 1.20 goes EOL in February 2024. You can read more about this topic here: https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/2548 *## Expanding OONI’s testing model to support richer testing input* As part of our OONI Team Meeting 2023 in Nairobi, we facilitated a session on “supporting richer testing input”, as part of which we discussed the current status and next steps. As part of this, we documented the next milestones and improved upon our relevant roadmap. We illustrate the updated plan in the following GitHub issue: https://github.com/ooni/ooni.org/issues/1291 In summary, we aim to incrementally add richer testing input to the data structure returned by the check-in API for the experiments that would benefit the most from obtaining richer input. Based on our current plan, the OONI experiments that would benefit most from richer testing input include: * DNS Check: Richer testing input would allow us to serve information about HTTP/3 and start testing DNS-over-HTTP3. * Signal: Richer testing input would enable us to serve the custom CA and to measure the endpoints from the backend, thus eliminating the need to make emergency releases (such as with OONI Probe CLI 3.19.1 and 3.19.2) to handle endpoint changes. *STUN Reachability: Richer testing input will allow us to serve the STUN endpoints used by the snowflake client and to keep updating them without making new releases. * Tor Snowflake: Richer testing input will allow us to modify some parameters used by snowflake to bootstrap and to reduce the number of cases where we need to issue new bug-fixing releases. * RiseupVPN: Richer testing input will allow us to eliminate the functional coupling in the experiment implementation between checking for Riseup’s API reachability and obtaining the endpoints to measure, thus making the experiment more robust and adaptable. * (Potentially) urlgetter: Richer testing input will allow us to run custom measurements when there is an emerging censorship condition for which we don’t already have an experiment. These changes will modify the OONI Probe client and, for some experiments, we will take advantage of the new ooni/data processing pipeline ( https://github.com/ooni/data) *## Creating a methodology for measuring throttling* We already implemented better support for measuring throttling in Web Connectivity v0.5, which is currently not enabled for most OONI Probe apps users. To enable this experiment for everyone, we first need to make sure that it is fully compatible with the current stable version (v0.4). That is, if a website was previously marked as blocked in a specific way by v0.4, we would like v0.5 to say the same. We would also like v0.5 to provide a more nuanced view of the blocking that is happening, but we definitely don’t want to introduce data quality issues. During November 2023, we made significant progress to make this happen. Specifically, we ran A/B testing between Web Connectivity v0.5 and v0.4 using our Gvisor-based QA suite. As part of this work, we wrestled with the difficulty of mapping the results produced by v0.5 to the ones produced by v0.4. The underpinning issue is that v0.5 results answer the question of “all the ways in which the tested website is blocked.” Conversely, v0.4 analysis code aims to answer the question of “the first way in which the website is blocked.” To reconcile these differences, we needed to significantly enrich our in-probe data processing capabilities. To this end, we authored a new Go package named “minipipeline.” We implemented this package to mirror the data analysis architecture implemented in the new ooni/data processing pipeline ( https://github.com/ooni/data) The general idea is that an OONI measurement (i.e., the piece of JSON OONI Probe sends to the backend and you can inspect in Explorer) goes through the following set of standard transformations: 1) We process the fundamental results inside the measurement (e.g., the results of DNS lookups, TCP connects, TLS handshakes) to produce flat “observations.” Each observation is a statement about measurements performed by OONI Probe with a single possible failure. In other words, each DNS lookup produces an observation, and each attempt at measuring an endpoint (e.g., “8.8.8.8:443” with SNI equal to “dns.google”) is also an observation. We also link DNS and endpoints observations together, take note of the redirect depth (i.e., is this the first request or the N-th redirect?), and distinguish between observations that aim to fetch a webpage and observations that just enrich the measurement. 2) We analyze the observations to produce a synthetic representation called “analysis,” which contains metrics such as (a) which DNS lookups failed where we expected them to succeed based on the control measurement and (b) the linear list of operations performed to fetch the final webpage, sorted by descending redirect depth, type, and result. In turn, Web Connectivity v0.5 uses the “analysis” results to produce its top-level keys (e.g., the blocking and accessible fields also produced by Web Connectivity v0.4). Thanks to this more comprehensive and more accurate measurement analysis process, and by filtering observations to only include into the analysis those observations that would also be produced by v0.4, we’re now able to obtain the same documented top-level test keys in v0.4 and v0.5 for all the test cases defined in our GVisor-based QA suite. This result is a significant milestone for us, because it means we can start running A/B testing in production using existing probes once the new code has been shipped. The aim of this further A/B testing stage would be to collect real world data that is useful to compare v0.4 and v0.5, possibly leading to additional bug fixes and new QA test cases. Additionally, from the engineering perspective, using a similar data processing architecture between OONI Probe and the ooni/data pipeline enables running A/B testing between the two tools in the future, and potentially opens up the possibility of sharing code between them. *## OONI Explorer* As part of our OONI Team Meeting 2023 in Nairobi, we facilitated a session on “presenting thematic censorship findings on OONI Explorer”. As part of this session, we discussed the challenges associated with grouping OONI measurements by resource and presenting thematic censorship findings (while eliminating the risk of false positives) in an automated way. We also discussed and determined the next steps towards implementing this area of work over the next months. In November 2023, we also launched the new Censorship Findings ( https://explorer.ooni.org/findings) page on OONI Explorer (as discussed previously in this report). *## Creating a Social Media Censorship Alert System* As part of our OONI Team Meeting 2023 in Nairobi, we facilitated a session on “creating a Social Media Censorship Alert System”. As part of this, our colleagues presented the current status of the alert system, and we discussed related challenges and next steps. *## Automating censorship detection and characterization based on OONI measurements* In November 2023, we made significant progress in the area of automating the detection and characterization of internet censorship. Specifically, we came up with a new metric for representing the outcomes related to blocking happening, called the Likelihood of Network Interference (LoNI). This metric represents the likelihood that access to a given resource is being restricted via a particular method within the specified network region over some period of time. The LoNI metric is implemented through a new data model called Experiment Results. The analysis code of ooni/data (https://github.com/ooni/data) has been significantly refactored to generate Experiment Results through an intermediate data model called Analysis. The basic idea is to take the Analysis keys that are generated by comparing an individual observation with ground truth data. Through a very large set of rules we are able to assign individual blocking, down and ok rules based on how confident we are in that particular signal being a sign for censorship. We then take all the scores pertaining to a particular observation group relevant to a measurement and generate a MeasurementExperimentResult which should be backward compatible with our existing data model. In terms of performance, some cursory benchmarks were run on the dataset from 2023-09-01 to 2023-11-01 and it was processing data at a rate of ~7k observations per second, scaling on 34 cores. As part of our work (https://github.com/ooni/data/pull/44) we: * Implemented the Experiment Result generation based on the analysis tables; * Implemented minimal UI for MeasurementExperimentResult; * Added support for generating MeasurementExperimentResult as part of mkanalysis cli command; * Added more tests for all of the above. Moreover, we implemented a basic web interface for exploring these Experiment results (https://github.com/ooni/data/pull/43) We started working on creating a fastapi based HTTP API to expose this data to other OONI services, such as OONI Explorer (https://github.com/ooni/data/pull/45) We also wrote a minimal PoC that makes use of the backward compatible aggregation API that is using the new LoNI based experiment results ( https://github.com/ooni/explorer/pull/892) *## Preparing OONI backend documentation* In November 2023, we started working towards writing OONI backend documentation that describes the architecture of the main components of OONI infrastructure. Specifically, we focused on improving the documentation of our backend architecture, data flows, and deployment workflows. You can see a work in progress of the documentation here: https://github.com/ooni/backend-documentation/blob/main/backend_documentati… *## Published OONI Outreach Kit in French and Spanish* The OONI Outreach Kit is now available in both French and Spanish (in addition to Russian and English)! * French OONI Outreach Kit: https://ooni.org/fr/support/ooni-outreach-kit/ * Spanish OONI Outreach Kit: https://ooni.org/es/support/ooni-outreach-kit/ We thank our partner, Computech Institute ( https://ooni.org/partners/computech/) for the French translation, and we thank OONI community members, Mariengracia Chirinos and Katherine Pennachio, for the Spanish translation. We hope that the French and Spanish versions of the OONI Outreach Kit will help support OONI community engagement efforts! *## Published OONI Risks documentation in Burmese* The OONI Risks documentation is now available in Burmese: https://ooni.org/my/about/risks We thank the community members who translated this documentation to Burmese. We generally consider it important to have this documentation translated in as many languages as possible (particularly in languages spoken in high-risk countries), as it communicates the potential risks associated with running OONI Probe. The OONI Risks documentation (https://ooni.org/about/risks/) is also available in Arabic, Farsi, French, Russian, Spanish, and Swahili. *## Creating OONI Community Interview videos* In previous months, we interviewed community members so that they can share their work and their experience with using OONI tools and data. The goal of these interviews is to share how community members around the world make use of OONI tools and data as part of their work. As an outcome, we hope that such interviews will encourage others to use OONI tools too, and that our community members will receive more support for their important work. Throughout November 2023, we collaborated with a videographer on editing footage for OONI community interviews. Specifically, we worked on multiple rounds of video edits and iterations towards producing final short videos (based on lengthy footage). *## Rapid response efforts### Kenya blocked Telegram during KCSE 2023 exams* On 16th November 2023, we were notified by our community that access to Telegram was intermittently blocked in Kenya. We analyzed OONI data and rapidly responded on Twitter, where we shared OONI data findings and charts: https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/1725202738370290053 We were surprised by this block, as this was the first time that we observed the blocking of a popular instant messaging app in Kenya. Overall, OONI data shows intermittent signs of Telegram blocking on several networks in Kenya between 8th to 24th November 2023. The timings of the blocks correlate with the timings of the KCSE 2023 exams. However, it’s worth noting that the block did not appear to be implemented on all networks, as OONI data shows that Telegram was accessible on many other networks in Kenya in November 2023. Out of all tested networks, Jambonet appears to have implemented the heaviest restrictions, as Telegram appears to have been consistently blocked since 8th November 2023. Interestingly, OONI data only shows signs of Telegram blocking until 24th November 2023, which was the last day of the KCSE 2023 exams. We also reported on this case on the OONI Censorship Findings platform: https://explorer.ooni.org/findings/228466228201 *### Guinea blocked WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube* As of 24th November 2023, OONI data suggests that some ISPs in Guinea started blocking access to WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. OONI data shows that the blocks appear to be implemented by means of TLS interference. On 27th November 2023, we responded to this block by sharing relevant OONI data findings and charts on Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/1729105525437346052 We also reported on this case on the OONI Censorship Findings platform: https://explorer.ooni.org/findings/296303006301 Recent OONI data suggests that these blocks remain ongoing. *### Nepal blocked TikTok* In late November 2023, we were notified by our community that access to TikTok was blocked in Nepal. We immediately responded by making a public call for OONI Probe testing (sharing relevant testing instructions) on Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/1729499672694161890 We subsequently published a report on the OONI Censorship Findings platform, documenting the blocking of TikTok in Nepal based on OONI data: https://explorer.ooni.org/findings/112092297601 OONI data only shows signs of TikTok blocking in Nepal between 24th to 29th November 2023. *## Community use of OONI data### Access Now’s press statement on the blocking of Telegram in Kenya* In response to the blocking of Telegram in Kenya, Access Now published a press statement which cites OONI data: https://www.accessnow.org/press-release/telegram-kenya-connected-national-e… *## Community activities### OONI training for human rights defenders in the DRC* Between 15th-17th November 2023, OONI’s Maria and Arturo facilitated an online OONI training for human rights defenders and journalists in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This training was organized by Partenariat pour la Protection Integree (PPI) and the Integrated Refugee Organization (IRO), and it included 2 OONI training programmes for 2 groups of human rights defenders and journalists from the DRC. We were initially intending to travel to Kinshasa to facilitate a week-long training in person, but we unfortunately were unable to due to visa issues. As a result, we adapted the training programme accordingly and facilitated it entirely online. As part of this online training, we facilitated the following OONI sessions (twice each for 2 groups): * Introduction to OONI * Using OONI Probe and OONI Run: Hands-on workshop * Updating the DRC test list: Hands-on workshop * Using OONI Explorer: Hands-on workshop As part of these sessions, we provided relevant online presentations, followed by Q&A and hands-on exercises. Due to connectivity issues, we also created videos for each of the above sessions to enable the participants to watch the presentations without internet connectivity. To create the videos, we wrote 4 scripts (one for each session) and we automatically converted the scripts to French, which were read as part of the videos. That way, participants were able to watch the video presentations in French. We also followed up with the participants and organizers to share the training surveys and relevant resources for further learning. *### OONI presentation at RIPE 87* On 28th November 2023, OONI’s Arturo presented the Measurement Aggregation Toolkit (MAT) as part of a presentation (“Measuring Internet Censorship with OONI”) at RIPE 87 in Rome, Italy. Information about the event is available here: https://ripe87.ripe.net/programme/meeting-plan/mat-wg/ *### OONI Community Meeting* On 28th November 2023, we hosted the monthly OONI Community Meeting on our Slack channel (https://slack.ooni.org/) during which we shared OONI updates from the past month, and we discussed our thoughts for improving future OONI community meetings. As part of this discussion, we asked participants to share their thoughts and feedback on how we can improve the structure and format of future OONI community meetings to help make them as useful as possible to the community. *## Measurement coverage* In November 2023, 48,336,322 OONI Probe measurements were collected from 3,134 networks in 174 countries around the world. This information can also be found through our measurement stats on OONI Explorer (see chart on “monthly coverage worldwide”): https://explorer.ooni.org/ ~ OONI team.

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