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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2023-05-25
by Shelikhoo 25 May '23

25 May '23

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-05-25-15.57.html And our meeting pad: Anti-censorship work meeting pad -------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ THIS IS A PUBLIC PAD ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Anti-censorship -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday, June 1 16:00 UTC Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC (channel is logged while meetings are in progress) == 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 139 <-- hackerncoder, irl, joydeep, meskio, emmapeel working on it * https://pad.riseup.net/p/sponsor139-meeting-pad == Announcements == == Discussion == * Research about designing an armored bridge line sharing URL format * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/126 * we will not include forward error correction * shelikhoo will do a test implementation * Update on Analysis of speed deficiency of Snowflake in China, 2023 Q1 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… * after a lot of research the proposed solution is to enable datagram transport on webrtc to deal with the packet loss situation * that will convert webrtc into an unreliable channel, and snowflake will add reliability with kcp * PT implementation version in the descriptors * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/11101 * Will be included in next Tor version (0.4.8???) * we'll need to update goptlib and the different PTs == Actions == * == Interesting links == * Unofficial(?) Snowflake extension for Safari in Apple App Store? * https://apps.apple.com/us/app/torproject-snowflake/id1597501940 * Previously noted at https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2022-February/0… == 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): last updated 2023-05-25 Last week: - mostly away - foci stuff This week: - open issue about archiving snowflake prometheus metrics - lox-wasm tor browser builds - catch up on gitlab todos Needs help with: dcf: 2023-05-25 Last week: - did more analysis of blocking of the snowflake broker front domain in China https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/iss… - upgraded snowflake-01 bridge to tor 0.4.7.13 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - opened a merge request to use IP_BIND_ADDRESS_NO_PORT in snowflake-server's localhost connections, necessary tor upgrade 0.4.7.13+ https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - migrated goptlib, meek, flashproxy, bundle, fog projects from gitolite to gitlab https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41182 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41190 - commented on interpreting Tor Metrics data https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/123#note_29… - participated more in discussion on shelikhoo's proposal for a new snowflake client–proxy protocol based on unreliable data channels https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… Next week: - 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 Help with: meskio: 2023-05-25 Last week: - fix rdsys handling webtunnel bridges (rdsys!126) - debug bridgedb webtunnel implementation (rdsys#142) - fix build errors of obfs4 in Tor Browser (obfs4#40011) - redesign the OnionSproutsBot deployment using plugins (onionsproutsbot#52) - review bridge flikering metrics in rdsys (rdsys!122) - review webtunnel IP for bridge line (webtunnel!9) Next week: - finish webtunnel rdsys support - migrate missing repos from git.tpo to gitlab (team#86) Shelikhoo: 2023-05-25 Last Week: - [Merge Request Awaiting] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support to snowflake (snowflake!64) - [Research] HTTPT Planning https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/http… - Snowflake Performance Analysis (Ongoing, https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…) - Trying to fix vantage point (Ongoing) - Snowflake Performance Analysis - read & comments on papers Next Week/TODO: - [Research] WebTunnel planning (Continue) - Try to find a place to host another vantage point - logcollector alert system - webtunnel document for proxy operator - Snowflake Performance Analysis - Trying to fix vantage point (Ongoing) onyinyang: 2023-05-25 Last week: - Added tests for Lox library and worked on doing the same for Lox distributor - Refactored rdsys metrics changes to prevent risk of testing in deployment - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/merge_requests/122 - Looking into a more reasonable way of storing Lox library data structures: - https://gitlab.torproject.org/onyinyang/lox/-/issues/2 - https://gitlab.torproject.org/onyinyang/lox/-/issues/3 - Met with Ian & Vecna (MMath student) on possible future research directions for Lox: - https://pad.riseup.net/p/lox-tor-stuff-keep - Sent a follow up email to provide more info about tooling/infrastructure that _does_ exist to inform about blocked bridges This week: - Still Adding tests Lox distributor - Finish up changes to rdsys: - metrics: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/merge_requests/122 - more aggressive `gone` labelling to follow that being merged - Looking into a more reasonable way of storing Lox library data structures: - https://gitlab.torproject.org/onyinyang/lox/-/issues/2 - https://gitlab.torproject.org/onyinyang/lox/-/issues/3 - First change the vectors in the bridge_table to maps. (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 useable 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? Itchy Onion: 2023-05-11 Last week: - Continue investigating offline bridges (team#112) - Discovered bridgestrap#37 (cache gives wrong status of bridge sometimes) - Start working on rdsys#56 (persistent storage for certain bridge arributes) This week: - Continue working on rdsys#56 (https://gitlab.torproject.org/itchyonion/rdsys/-/tree/use-embedded-db?ref_t…) hackerncoder: 2023-04-20 last week: - (py-)ooni-exporter torsf (snowflake) - (py-)ooni-exporter web_connectivity Next week: - work on "bridgetester"? - how does Iran block bridges?

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User support report for April 2023
by ebanam 24 May '23

24 May '23

Hello everyone! Here are updates from the user support team for last month (April, 2023). Most of our work has been around helping users in countries where Tor is censored and some user support work in light of the new stable Tor Browser release (Tor Browser 12.0.5). With the release of Mullvad Browser[0], we also published some documentation for our Support Portal[1]. Timeframe: 01 - 30 April 2023 # Frontdesk (email) -584 RT tickets created -428 RT tickets resolved Most frequent tickets by numbers: 1. 158 RT tickets: Private Bridge requests from China. 2. 39 RT tickets: Circumventing censorship in Russia. 3. 21 RT tickets: Circumventing censorship in Turkmenistan. 4. 4 RT tickets: Circumventing censorship with Tor in Iran. 5. 3 RT tickets: Tor Browser doesn't run with Mandatory ASLR on Windows (the issue is fixed with the 12.0.5 Tor Browser release)[2] # Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal Support channel -751 tickets resolved Breakdown: -697 tickets on Telegram -42 tickets on WhatsApp -12 tickets on Signal The most frequent tickets on cdr.link have been about: 1. 209 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Russia. 2. 137 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Turkmenistan. 3. 77 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Iran. 4. 39 tickets: Circumventing censorship in China. Thanks! e. [0]: https://blog.torproject.org/releasing-mullvad-browser/ [1]: https://support.torproject.org/mullvad-browser/ [2]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/4…

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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2023-05-18
by onyinyang 18 May '23

18 May '23

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-05-18-15.58.html And our meeting pad: Anti-censorship work meeting pad -------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ THIS IS A PUBLIC PAD ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Anti-censorship -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday, May 25 16:00 UTC Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC (channel is logged while meetings are in progress) == 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 139 <-- hackerncoder, irl, joydeep, meskio, emmapeel working on it * https://pad.riseup.net/p/sponsor139-meeting-pad == Announcements == == Discussion == * Reported blocking of Snowflake in China since 2023-05-12 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/iss… * https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/249 * https://forum.torproject.net/t/snowflake-bridge-does-not-work-in-china-sinc… * May have something to do with double rendezvous caused by having 2 bridge lines * "two or more TLS connections with the same SNI within a short time to a Fastly IP address" * got similar reports from two users * for one user the blocking threshold was 2 (https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/249#issuecomment-1547034480) for the other the threshold was 3 (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/iss…) * Seems to have stopped since 2023-05-15 * List of mitigations at https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/iss… * first step, if it happens again, is to specify just 1 bridge in Connection Assist for China * use snowflake-02 as it is currently more lightly loaded * Web browsers also make 2 or more near-simultaneous connections, maybe they were getting overblocked and that's why it stopped? * https://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.max-connections-per-server * Setting MaxConnsPerHost=1 in snowflake-client still does a double rendezvous, but to 2 *different* Fastly IP addresses rather than the some one twice. * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40578 was for two bridges already, so would not directly fix this case * "we could set numentryguards 1 for snowflake users i guess, but i think we want two" * Update on Analysis of speed deficiency of Snowflake in China, 2023 Q1 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… * after a lot of research the proposed solution is to enable datagram transport on webrtc to deal with the packet loss situation * that will convert webrtc into an unreliable channel, and snowflake will add reliablity with kcp * (Proposal under discussion, discuss on irc meeting next week) * Research about designing an armored bridge line sharing URL format * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/126 * Regarding bridge churn for Lox (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/lox-overview/-/wikis/…) * past research and source code on relay (not bridge) churn: * https://metrics.torproject.org/networkchurn.html * https://nymity.ch/sybilhunting/churn-values/ * https://www.cs.kau.se/philwint/spoiled_onions/ * https://nymity.ch/papers/pdf/winter2014a.pdf#page=22 == Actions == * == Interesting links == * Unofficial(?) Snowflake extension for Safari in Apple App Store? * https://apps.apple.com/us/app/torproject-snowflake/id1597501940 * Previously noted at https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2022-February/0… == Reading group == * We will discuss "Lox: Protecting the Social Graph in Bridge Distribution" on 2023 May 18 * https://cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/lox-popets23.pdf * 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): last updated 2023-05-18 Last week: - away - foci stuff - reviewed some Lox MRs - wrote up a Lox roadmap from meeting - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/lox-overview/-/wikis/… This week: - open issue about archiving snowflake prometheus metrics - lox-wasm tor browser builds Needs help with: dcf: 2023-05-18 Last week: - did analysis of blocking of the snowflake broker front domain in China https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/iss… - commented on shelikhoo's proposal for a new snowflake client–proxy protocol based on unreliable data channels https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… Next week: - upgrade tor on snowflake-01 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 Help with: meskio: 2023-05-18 Last week: - catching up after vacation - review rdsys metrics for flickering bridges (rdsys!122) Next week: - finish webtunnel rdsys support Shelikhoo: 2023-05-18 Last Week: - [Merge Request Awaiting] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support to snowflake (snowflake!64) - [Research] HTTPT Planning https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/http… - Research about designing an armored bridge line sharing URL format (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/126) - Snowflake Performance Analysis (Ongoing, https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…) - Trying to fix vantage point(Ongoing) - logcollector alert system(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/connectivity-measu… Next Week/TODO: - [Research] WebTunnel planning (Continue) - Try to find a place to host another vantage point - logcollector alert system - webtunnel document for proxy operator - Snowflake Performance Analysis onyinyang: 2023-05-11 Last week: - Finished up the Lox library changes to replace gone bridges with new bridges - Added tests and changes to Lox distributor to support this - Refactored lox-distributor for readability This week: - Adding tests for both Lox library and Lox distributor - Refactoring rdsys metrics changes to prevent risk of testing in deployment - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/merge_requests/122 - Looking into a more reasonable way of storing Lox library data structures: - https://gitlab.torproject.org/onyinyang/lox/-/issues/2 - https://gitlab.torproject.org/onyinyang/lox/-/issues/3 (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 useable 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? Needs Help with: - figuring out whether or not the metrics I added to rdsys actually collect what we want them to. I can run prometheus locally, but am unsure how to match this with a realistic onbasca test that can actually show whether the metrics are useful/correct. Is there a known way to do such tests other than deploy and find out? Update: Not yet! but we are going to work on staging for this soon Itchy Onion: 2023-05-11 Last week: - Continue investigating offline bridges (team#112) - Discovered bridgestrap#37 (cache gives wrong status of bridge sometimes) - Start working on rdsys#56 (persistent storage for certain bridge arributes) This week: - Continue working on rdsys#56 (https://gitlab.torproject.org/itchyonion/rdsys/-/tree/use-embedded-db?ref_t…) hackerncoder: 2023-04-20 last week: - (py-)ooni-exporter torsf (snowflake) - (py-)ooni-exporter web_connectivity Next week: - work on "bridgetester"? - how does Iran block bridges?

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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2023-05-11
by Shelikhoo 11 May '23

11 May '23

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-05-11-15.58.html And our meeting pad: Anti-censorship work meeting pad -------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ THIS IS A PUBLIC PAD ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Anti-censorship -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday, May 18 16:00 UTC Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC (channel is logged while meetings are in progress) == 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 139 <-- hackerncoder, irl, joydeep, meskio, emmapeel working on it * https://pad.riseup.net/p/sponsor139-meeting-pad == Announcements == == Discussion == * Update on Analysis of speed deficiency of Snowflake in China, 2023 Q1 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… * after a lot of research the proposed solution is to enable datagram transport on webrtc to deal with the packet loss situation * that will convert webrtc into an unreliable channel, and snowflake will add reliablity with kcp * (NO update from shell @ May 11, research ongoing) * == Actions == * == Interesting links == * Unofficial(?) Snowflake extension for Safari in Apple App Store? * https://apps.apple.com/us/app/torproject-snowflake/id1597501940 * Previously noted at https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2022-February/0… * Research about designing an armored bridge line sharing URL format(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/126) * https://opencollective.com/censorship-circumvention/projects/snowflake-dail… == Reading group == * We will discuss "Lox: Protecting the Social Graph in Bridge Distribution" on 2023 May 18 * https://cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/lox-popets23.pdf * 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): last updated 2023-05-04 Last week: - tor meeting This week: - catch up on emails - foci stuff - open issue about archiving snowflake prometheus metrics - go over lox notes again from meeting - lox-wasm tor browser builds Needs help with: dcf: 2023-05-11 (since 2023-04-20) Last week: - made a merge request to add an error check to the distinctcounter program https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - opened an issue to upgrade tor on snowflake-01 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - posted April 2023 snowflake-01 update https://opencollective.com/censorship-circumvention/projects/snowflake-dail… - posted a history of pluggable transport placeholder IP addresses https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/webt… Next week: - upgrade tor on snowflake-01 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 Help with: meskio: 2023-04-20 Last week: - update PTs to use goptlib from gitlab.tpo - distribute bridges in rdsys even if there fewer than requested in the hashring (rdsys#162) - add webtunnel support to BridgeDB (rdsys#142) Next week: - tormeeting Shelikhoo: 2023-05-11 Last Week: - [Merge Request Awaiting] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support to snowflake (snowflake!64) - [Research] HTTPT Planning https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/http… - Research about designing an armored bridge line sharing URL format(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/126) - Snowflake Performance Analysis(Ongoing) Next Week/TODO: - [Research] WebTunnel planning (Continue) - Try to find a place to host another vantage point - logcollector alert system - webtunnel document for proxy operator - Snowflake Performance Analysis onyinyang: 2023-05-11 Last week: - finished up implementing metrics to check on flickering resources and ratios observed (maybe) awaiting review - Worked through changes to handle `gone` resources. rdsys changes are tentatively implemented, Lox library changes are more hairy. This week: - Finished up the Lox library changes - Added additional changes to Lox distributor - Refactoring lox-distributor for readability - Adding tests for both Lox library and Lox distributor - Looking into a more reasonable way of storing Lox library data structures: - https://gitlab.torproject.org/onyinyang/lox/-/issues/2 - https://gitlab.torproject.org/onyinyang/lox/-/issues/3 (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 useable 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 sacrified 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? Needs Help with: - figuring out whether or not the metrics I added to rdsys actually collect what we want them to. I can run prometheus locally but am unsure how to match this with a realistic onbasca test that can actually show whether the metrics are useful/correct. Is there a known way to do such tests other than deploy and find out? Itchy Onion: 2023-05-11 Last week: - Work on team#112 (Some bridges are reported offline but are online and working) This week: - Continue investigating offline bridges (team#112) - Discovered bridgestrap#37 (cache gives wrong status of bridge sometimes) - Start working on rdsys#56 (persistent storage for certain bridge arributes) hackerncoder: 2023-04-20 last week: - (py-)ooni-exporter torsf (snowflake) - (py-)ooni-exporter web_connectivity Next week: - work on "bridgetester"? - how does Iran block bridges?

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minutes from the sysadmin meeting
by Antoine Beaupré 09 May '23

09 May '23

Hello everyone! Long time no see! Here's your usual dose of sysadmin minutes, sorry for the late mail, we skipped a few... # Roll call: who's there and emergencies anarcat, gaba, kez, lavamind, no emergency apart from CiviCRM hogging a CPU but that has been happening for the last month or so # Dashboard review We went through our normal per-user, weekly, check-in: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/boards?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&… * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/boards?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&… * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/boards?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&… We do not go through the general dashboards anymore as those are done in triage (by the star of the week for TPA, with gaba and anarcat for web). # Q2 prioritisation We looked at the coming deliverables, mostly on the web side of things: - developer portal - repo: force-push new HUGO site into https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/dev - staging: use pages for it until build pipeline is ready - triage/clean issues in web/dev (gaba) - edit/curate content (gaba) - review by TPO - send to production (maybe Q4 2023) - donation page (next project meeting is on May 17th) ~ kez working on it - self-host forum ~ wrapping up by the end of June - download page when ux team is done with it We also looked at the [TPA milestones][]. Out of those milestones, we hope for the [gnt-dal migration][] to be completed shortly. It's technically done, but there's still a bunch of cleanup work to be completed to close the milestone compeltely. Another item we want to start completing but that has a lot of collateral is the bullseye upgrade, as that includes upgrading Puppet, LDAP (!), Mailman (!!), possibly replacing Nagios, and so on. Anarcat also wants to push the gitolite retirement forward as that has been discussed in Costa Rican corridors and there's momentum on this now that a set of rewrite rules has been built... [gnt-dal migration]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/tpa/-/milestones/2 [TPA milestones]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/tpa/-/milestones # Holidays planning We reviewed the summer schedule to make sure everything is up to date and there is not too much overlap. # Metrics of the month * hosts in Puppet: 85, LDAP: 86, Prometheus exporters: 155 * number of Apache servers monitored: 33, hits per second: 658 * number of self-hosted nameservers: 6, mail servers: 9 * pending upgrades: 0, reboots: 2 * average load: 1.17, memory available: 3.31 TiB/4.45 TiB, running processes: 580 * disk free/total: 35.92 TiB/105.25 TiB * bytes sent: 306.33 MB/s, received: 198.85 MB/s * planned bullseye upgrades completion date: 2023-01-21 (!) * [GitLab tickets][]: 192 tickets including... * open: 0 * icebox: 143 * backlog: 22 * next: 16 * doing: 6 * needs information: 4 * needs review: 1 * (closed: 3121) [Gitlab tickets]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/boards Upgrade prediction graph lives at: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/howto/upgrades/bullseye/ Note that we're late in the bullseye upgrade procedure, but for the first time in months we've had significant progress with the retirement of a bunch of machines and rebuilding of existing ones. We're also starting to deploy our first bookworm machines now, although that is done only on a need-to basis as we can't actually *install* bookworm machines yet: they need to be installed with bullseye to get Puppet boostrapped and then we immediately upgrade to bookworm. A more detailed post-mortem of the upgrade process is under discussion in the wiki: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/howto/upgrades/bullseye#… -- Antoine Beaupré torproject.org system administration

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cohosh's monthly status report, April 2023
by Cecylia Bocovich 05 May '23

05 May '23

Hi! This is my status report for contract work done in April 2023. # Reputation-based Bridge Distribution - Iterated on wasm target addition to rust project in tor-browser-build https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/merge_re… - Reviewed and merged work on the rdsys backend api rust library and lox-distributor # Conjure PT - Added basic CI to Conjure https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/conj… - Added dependency bot to the Conjure project https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/conj… - Opened an upstream issue to restore needed functionality in the newest version of tapdance https://github.com/refraction-networking/gotapdance/issues/113 - Properly close all opened SOCKS conns https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/conj… # Snowflake Webextension - Added a Content Security Policy to manifest https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - Released a new version of the web extension (v0.7.2) - Reviewed several merge requests

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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2023-05-04
by Itchy Onion 04 May '23

04 May '23

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-05-04-15.59.log… And our meeting pad: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - THIS IS A PUBLIC PAD ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Anti-censorship -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday, May 11 16:00 UTC Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC (channel is logged while meetings are in progress) == 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 - https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/24 - Sponsor 139 <-- hackerncoder, irl, joydeep, meskio, emmapeel working on it - https://pad.riseup.net/p/sponsor139-meeting-pad == Announcements == == Discussion == - Update on Analysis of speed deficiency of Snowflake in China, 2023 Q1 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - after a lot of research the proposed solution is to enable datagram transport on webrtc to deal with the packet loss situation - that will convert webrtc into an unreliable channel, and snowflake will add reliablity with kcp - (NO update from shell @ Apr 20) - goptlib now lives in gitlab.torproject.org == Actions == - read the safari snowflake extension code (team) - try to reach the developer (itchyonion will write an email draft, and the team will go over it) == Interesting links == - https://guardianproject.info/2023/03/04/arti-next-gen-tor-on-mobile/ - "Support for features like advanced censorship circumvention or onion services is not exactly straight forward on mobile operating systems, because they tend to be way more locked down than traditional computers. Currently, we can successfully test pluggable transports in 'managed' mode on old versions of Android. However this technique will likely not work on the latest version of Android and never worked iOS to begin with. We have shared our findings with the Arti developer team and hope they’ll work on getting us to full Pluggable Transports support, integraing with our existing IPtProxy Library soon." - Unofficial(?) Snowflake extension for Safari in Apple App Store? - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/torproject-snowflake/id1597501940 - Previously noted at https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2022-February/0… == Reading group == - We will discuss "Lox: Protecting the Social Graph in Bridge Distribution" on 2023 May 18 - https://cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/lox-popets23.pdf - 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): last updated 2023-05-04 Last week: - tor meeting This week: - catch up on emails - foci stuff - open issue about archiving snowflake prometheus metrics - go over lox notes again from meeting - lox-wasm tor browser builds Needs help with: dcf: 2023-04-20 - Last week: - - did a haproxy security upgrade on snowflake-01 and snowflake-01 bridges https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - - moved goptlib from git.torproject.org to gitlab.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2023-April/014829.html - - analyzed the rate of client_ip reporting since the release of snowflake-webext-0.7.2 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - Next week: - - 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 - Help with: meskio: 2023-04-20 Last week: - - update PTs to use goptlib from gitlab.tpo - - distribute bridges in rdsys even if there fewer than requested in the hashring (rdsys#162) - - add webtunnel support to BridgeDB (rdsys#142) Next week: - - tormeeting Shelikhoo: 2023-05-04 Last Week: - - [Merge Request Awaiting] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support to snowflake (snowflake!64) - - [Research] HTTPT Planning https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/http… - - Finish all the accumulated task during in person meetup AFK Next Week/TODO: - - [Research] WebTunnel planning (Continue) - - Try to find a place to host another vantage point - - logcollector alert system - - webtunnel document for proxy operator - - Snowflake Performance Analysis - onyinyang: 2023-05-04 Last week: - Tor meeting This week: - - finished up implementing metrics to check on flickering resources and ratios observed (maybe) awaiting review - Working through changes to handle `gone` resources. rdsys changes are tentatively implemented, Lox library changes are more hairy. - (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 useable 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 sacrified 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? Needs Help with: - - figuring out whether or not the metrics I added to rdsys actually collect what we want them to. I can run prometheus locally but am unsure how to match this with a realistic onbasca test that can actually show whether the metrics are useful/correct. Is there a known way to do such tests other than deploy and find out? Itchy Onion: 2023-05-04 Last week: - - Costa Rica This week: - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/112 (Some bridges are reported offline but are online and working) - - consulted network health team to understand what "offline" means from the Metrics's POV (and discovered a small wording inconsistency in their doc) - - better understood the difference between "offline" and working (they are not mutually exclusive) - hackerncoder: 2023-04-20 last week: - (py-)ooni-exporter torsf (snowflake) - (py-)ooni-exporter web_connectivity Next week: - work on "bridgetester"? - how does Iran block bridges?

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Nina’s Monthly status report for April’23
by Nina 04 May '23

04 May '23

Hi! Below is my report for April 2023. In April, I resolved 759 tickets, which is 200 more than in March: On Telegram (@TorProjectSupportBot) - 556 On RT (frontdesk@tpo) - 203 Additionally, I also resolved some tickets on WhatsApp (+447421000612) and Signal (+17787431312). The majority of the tickets I deal with are related to censorship circumvention and issues that happen around it, like using VPN and bridges simultaneously or incorrect use of the bridges. Another often issue I deal with is Tor Browser and antiviruses. During the internet shutdown in Kazakhstan, I helped with the translation of the Twitter post related to the situation [1] I also communicated with users a lot, gathering feedback on different pluggable transports and the work of our services. [1] https://twitter.com/torproject/status/1645868260624306176

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Rhatto's Monthly Status Report, April 2023
by rhatto 03 May '23

03 May '23

Hi all :) This is my monthly status report for April 2023 with the main activities I have done during the period. ## 0. Research * Onion Plan session in Costa Rica: * Slides and notes: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/team/-/wikis/2023-Tor-Meeting-Costa-Rica-… * Issue: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/onionplan/-/issues/7 * I'd like to thank everyone that attended the session and also those who gave valuable feedback :) * Onion Plan updates: while preparing to the session, I made a number of updates, but there's still many things in the TODO list. * Website: https://tpo.pages.torproject.net/onion-services/onionplan/ * Recent changes: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/onionplan/activity * Onion-Location: problems and fixes session in Costa Rica: * Helped with note taking and with the discussion: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/team/-/wikis/2023-Tor-Meeting-Costa-Rica-… ## 1. Development * Onionprobe: 1.1.0 and 1.1.1 releases: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/onionprobe/-/blob/main/Cha… * Helped with the internal Security Policy Session at the Tor In-person meeting. ## 2. Support * For the Community Day in Costa Rica, * I helped writing the `cebollitas` project, with some small Onion Services examples currently based on Docker: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/cebollitas * We had a nice workshop about setting up Onion Services and we did a small exercise about how a very basic distributed chat system could work. It was just people writing messages on HTML files and refreshing each other Onion Service tabs on their browsers, but was enough to teach the mechanics and let people know how the technology can easily enable them to send content without having to run a centralized service. * We collected feedback about how to improve the workshop and also how deploying and developing system with Onion Services technology could be made easier. ## 3. Organization Time spent (from the total available for Tor-related work): | Category | Percentage |---------------|------------ | Research | 19 | Development | 7 | Support | 17 | Organization | 57 |---------------|------------ | Total | 100 (Despite lot's of research, development and support, the Costa Rica meeting made me track most of my time as "organization" work). -- Silvio Rhatto pronouns he/him

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Job Opening: OONI Project Manager
by Maria Xynou 03 May '23

03 May '23

Hello, I'm excited to share that we're hiring! The OONI team (a non-profit fighting internet censorship) is looking for a dedicated *project manager* to help us manage our software development work. *Information about the job description, qualification requirements, and how to apply* is available here: https://ooni.org/post/2023-job-opening-ooni-project-manager/ Born in 2012, OONI builds free software (OONI Probe) that enables anyone to detect and collect evidence of internet censorship. With more than 100k installs, OONI Probe is run in more than 160 countries every month. To increase transparency of internet censorship, we publish censorship measurements as open data in near real-time. This data supports research and advocacy efforts investigating and fighting internet censorship worldwide. By joining our team, you will help manage our software development work, supporting a global community measuring internet censorship. This is a *full-time 12-month contract position* (which may be extended), starting ASAP. This is a *fully remote position*. We encourage applications from anywhere in the world! Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. Please spread the word ( https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/1653444903462895631) and help us find someone who can best serve the internet freedom community! Thank you, OONI team.

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