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A go-ahead to share my blog post
by Cecilia Orji 17 Feb '23

17 Feb '23

Hi Isabela, Kindly go ahead to share the blog post. ~Cecilia

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Moving Tor Browser Weekly to Tuesday (2023-02-21)
by Richard Pospesel 16 Feb '23

16 Feb '23

Next Monday is a TPO holiday, so we will be moving the weekly meeting to Tuesday at 1500 UTC in #tor-meeting on OFTC IRC. best, -Richard

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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2023-02-16
by Shelikhoo 16 Feb '23

16 Feb '23

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-02-16-15.58.html And our meeting pad: Anti-censorship work meeting pad -------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ THIS IS A PUBLIC PAD ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Anti-censors -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday, February 23 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 28 * must-do tickets: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/10 * possible-do tickets: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&… * 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 == * Tor Browser 12.0.3 released with Hello Verify Request mitigation for Snowflake * https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-1203/ * we are in the process of upstreaming, last remaining piece is https://github.com/pion/webrtc/pull/2407 * success reports: * https://ntc.party/t/second-snowflake-bridge-available-for-testing/3445/12 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/connectivity-measurement/… == Discussion == * What is the status of activating the snowflake-02 bridge in Orbot? * snowflake-01 is still pretty much saturated, and snowflake-02 relatively almost unused * no news yet from Orbot on status of deployment * latest Orbot release was 2023-01-13 * will add to S96 agenda and discuss in 2 weeks if they are not around * Proposal for reading group: * https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/madweb2021_23011_paper.pdf * Detecting Tor Bridge from Sampled Traffic in Backbone Networks * "Current researches on Tor bridge detection have used a small amount of complete traffic, which makes their methods not very practical in the backbone network. In this paper, we proposed a method for the detection of obfs4 bridge in backbone networks. To solve current limitations, we sample traffic to reduce the amount of data and put forward the Nested Count Bloom Filter structure to process the sampled network traffic. Besides, we extract features that can be used for bridge detection after traffic sampling. The experiment uses real backbone network traffic mixed with Tor traffic for verification." == Actions == * We should make a ticket for pion to cache its stun answers when possible, because right now it surprises us by asking way more stun questions than it actually needs to. * is this about DNS? * BTW stun.stunprotocol.org is going away: https://groups.google.com/g/stunprotocol/c/upVwaG97ggY/m/3ddUBGA_FAAJ * it's been removed from proxies and Tor Browser clients (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…) and circumvention settings, but is likely still being used by Orbot * We might want to be able to spin up our own stun servers, on our own ip/port, for debugging. We should talk to TPA about that goal at some point (not urgent). == Interesting links == * == Reading group == * We will discuss "Detecting Tor Bridge from Sampled Traffic in Backbone Networks" on March 9 * https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/madweb2021_23011_paper.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 2023-02-16 Last week: - FOCI workshop prep - Lox tor browser integration work in progress - https://gitlab.torproject.org/cohosh/tor-browser/-/tree/lox-integration This week: - Lox tor browser integration - continue work on conjure client-side recovery Needs help with: dcf: 2023-02-16 Last week: - opened issue to restart snowflake bridges for haproxy CVE-2023-0056, CVE-2023-25725 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… Next week: - restart snowflake bridges https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - migrate goptlib to gitlab https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/86#note_282… (for real) Help with: meskio: 2023-02-16 Last week: - integrate onbasca into rdsys to test bridge speed (rdsys#150) - UAE circumvention settings configuration doesn't seem to be necesary (team#106) - merge whatsapp integration in rdsys (rdsys#74) - review bridgestatus README (bridgestatus!1) Next week: - integrate onbasca into rdsys to test bridge speed (rdsys#150) - deploy onbasca in polyanthum Shelikhoo: 2023-02-16 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… - Try to find a place to host another vantage point(not working so far) - WebTunnel @ TorBrowser mobile Next Week: - [Research] WebTunnel planning (Continue) - Try to find a place to host another vantage point - WebTunnel @ TorBrowser mobile onyinyang: 2023-02-16 Last week: - Lox wasm bindings for Tor integration: - public keys - open invitation - trust promotion - trust migration This week: - continuing with bindings for the rest of the Lox protocols: - encrypted bridge table - level up - issue invitation - check blockage - blockage migration Help with: - questions about best way to handle timing for freshness credentials (fresh for x time period or fresh until x time each day)<this is not especially urgent> Itchy Onion: 2023-02-16 Last week: - Continue working on issue #40108 (standalone proxy bind specific IP) - RACE T&E meeting This week: - Continue working on issue #40108 (standalone proxy bind specific IP) - Created issue #40252 (NAT probetest for standalone proxy) - Foci - Work on updating snowflake plugin for the latest race version (code freeze on Friday) hackerncoder: 2023-02-02 last week: - Lunar New Year break Next week: - getting ooni-exporter to work with torsf (snowflake) - work on monitoring bridges health - work on "bridgetester"? cece: 2022-12-22 This week: - working on creating a dummy WhatsApp bot Next week: - My bot is not yet working as expected s? still trying to figure that out Help with: - resources

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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2023-02-09
by meskio 09 Feb '23

09 Feb '23

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-02-09-15.58.html And our meeting pad: Anti-censors -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday, February 16 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 28 * must-do tickets: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/10 * possible-do tickets: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&… * 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 == * FOCI workshop is next week (and it's free!): https://foci.community/ * You do need to register ahead of time to get the gather.town invite link == Discussion == * Conjure is in nightly versions of Tor Browser now, an update on how it's going and the roll out plan * cohosh has done the work to integrate cojure into tor * client-side library: https://github.com/refraction-networking/gotapdance * station: https://github.com/refraction-networking/conjure/ * the current conjure setup is having some reliability issues, maybe turbotunnel will help here * snowstorm * https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2023/02/08/as-the-internet-freedom… * https://snowstorm.net/ * Raw probe log (with packet capture) from logcollector is available for download * You need a password to access it * The link is the 7th field in * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/connectivity-measurement/… == Actions == * We should make a ticket for pion to cache its stun answers when possible, because right now it surprises us by asking way more stun questions than it actually needs to. * We might want to be able to spin up our own stun servers, on our own ip/port, for debugging. We should talk to TPA about that goal at some point (not urgent). * Roger will look more at https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40578 ("only contact the first few working bridges on your bridge list") and plan to have a sense of whether it will be an easy hack or a hard one, for next week. == 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): last updated 2023-02-09 Last week: - FOCI workshop prep - wrote more conjure documentation - Lox tor browser integration work in progress - https://gitlab.torproject.org/cohosh/tor-browser/-/tree/lox-integration This week: - Lox tor browser integration - continue work on conjure client-side recovery - FOCI workshop! Needs help with: dcf: 2023-02-09 Last week: - tried Conjure PT in Tor Browser nightly https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/124#issuecomment-1414281358 - fixed a bug in the snowflake bridge installation guide https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/Survival-Gui… - documented another short-term block of cdn.sstatic.net in Iran https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/115#note_28… Next week: - migrate goptlib to gitlab https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/86#note_282… (for real) Help with: meskio: 2023-02-09 Last week: - deploy circumvention settings removing stun servers (rdsys-admin!12) - add android links to gettor (rdsys#42) - review changes on monit config (monit-configuration!5) - plan bridge scanner (onbasca) deployment in polyanthum - review telegram distributor fixes after a crash (rdsys!73) Next week: - integrate onbasca into rdsys to test bridge speed (rdsys#150) Shelikhoo: 2023-02-09 Last Week: - [Merge Request Awaiting] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support to snowflake (snowflake!64) - [Discussion & Deployment] Rollout of Distributed Snowflake Support - [Coding & Deployment] Proposal: Centralized Probe Result Collector (anti-censorship/team#54) - [Research] HTTPT Planning https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/http… - Have a download link for raw vantage point packet capture files(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41061, https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/connectivity-measurement/…, https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/connectivity-measurement/…, https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/connectivity-measurement/…) Next Week: - [Research] WebTunnel planning (Continue) - Try to find a place to host another vantage point onyinyang: 2023-02-09 Last week: - Lox wasm bindings for Tor integration This week: - continuing with bindings for the rest of the Lox protocols Help with: - questions about best way to handle timing for freshness credentials (fresh for x time period or fresh until x time each day) Itchy Onion: 2023-02-02 Last week: - Lunar New Year break - Continue working on issue #40108 (standalone proxy bind specific IP) - Review MRs This week: - Continue working on issue #40108 (standalone proxy bind specific IP). The option to bind a specific IP in pion/wetrtc comes with a required additional option to specicfy the type of candidate. I'm investigating what to choose for our usecase. hackerncoder: 2023-02-02 last week: - Lunar New Year break Next week: - getting ooni-exporter to work with torsf (snowflake) - work on monitoring bridges health - work on "bridgetester"? cece: 2022-12-22 This week: - working on creating a dummy WhatsApp bot Next week: - My bot is not yet working as expected s? still trying to figure that out Help with: - resources -- meskio | https://meskio.net/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- My contact info: https://meskio.net/crypto.txt -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Nos vamos a Croatan.

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Marco's Monthly Status Report, January 2023
by msim 07 Feb '23

07 Feb '23

Hi everyone, This month I focussed on WebRTC build things for S131. I managed to get a successful build under MSVC reasonably early on, however swapping out the toolchain for MinGW didn't work as I'd hoped. I then focussed on just resolving build errors locally under MinGW on a Windows host. This displayed multiple weird errors, such as a MinGW C++ header included a Firefox STL wrapper, which included other STL files which assumed there was no `extern "C"` block around it, but the original MinGW C++ header had an `extern "C" {` before including the Firefox STL wrapper. Alongside weird errors like this was multiple cases of `mach` not liking the MSys2 environment that `mozilla-build` creates (failure to find tools such as touch, rm, same as last month - this issue is scattered across multiple makefile templates). That's about it for this month, mainly just weird build bugs :-) Best, Marco

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minutes from the sysadmin meeting
by Antoine Beaupré 06 Feb '23

06 Feb '23

Hi! The moment you have all been waiting for: the first sysadmin minutes of 2023! Whoohoo! # Roll call: who's there and emergencies There was a failed drive in fsn-node-03, handled before the meeting, see [tpo/tpa/team#41060][]. [tpo/tpa/team#41060]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/incident/41060 # Dashboard review Normal per-user 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&… General dashboards, were not reviewed: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/boards/117 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/web/-/boards * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/tpa/-/boards # Q1 prioritisation We discussed the priorities for the coming two months, which will be, in order: 1. new gnt-dal cluster setup, see [milestone 2][] 2. self-hosting the forum (@lavamind? march? project ends in July, needs to be setup and tested before! created issue [tpo/tpa/team#41063][]) 3. donate page overhaul (meeting this week, @kez, could be Q1, may overflow into Q2 - download page in Q2 will need kez as well) 5. email changes and proposals ([TPA-RFC-45][], [TPA-RFC-47][]) 6. bullseye upgrades ([milestone 5][]) 7. considered lektor-18n update for Google Summer of Code but instead we will try to figure out if we keep Lektor at all ([TPA-RFC-37][]), then maybe next year depending on the timeline 8. developer portal people might need help, gaba will put anarcat in touch [milestone 2]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/tpa/-/milestones/2#actual-timeline [tpo/tpa/team#41063]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41063 [TPA-RFC-45]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/policy/tpa-rfc-45-mail-a… [TPA-RFC-47]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/policy/tpa-rfc-47-email-… [milestone 5]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/tpa/-/milestones/5#tab-issues [TPA-RFC-37]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/policy/tpa-rfc-37-lektor… # OOB / jumpstart Approved a ~200$USD budget for a jumphost, see [tpo/tpa/team#41058][]. [tpo/tpa/team#41058]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41058 # Next meeting March 6th 1900UTC (no change) # Metrics of the month * hosts in Puppet: 95, LDAP: 95, Prometheus exporters: 163 * number of Apache servers monitored: 31, hits per second: 675 * number of self-hosted nameservers: 6, mail servers: 9 * pending upgrades: 13, reboots: 59 * average load: 0.79, memory available: 4.50 TiB/5.74 TiB, running processes: 722 * disk free/total: 33.42 TiB/92.30 TiB * bytes sent: 513.16 MB/s, received: 266.79 MB/s * planned bullseye upgrades completion date: 2022-12-08 (!!) * [GitLab tickets][]: 192 tickets including... * open: 0 * icebox: 148 * backlog: 20 * next: 9 * doing: 11 * needs information: 5 * (closed: 3024) [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/ Now also available as the main Grafana dashboard. Head to <https://grafana.torproject.org/>, change the time period to 30 days, and wait a while for results to render. -- Antoine Beaupré torproject.org system administration

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Tor Browser Meeting moved to 2023-02-07
by Richard Pospesel 06 Feb '23

06 Feb '23

Hey All, Since most of us are unavailable today, let's move the Tor Browser weekly meeting to tomorrow (Tuesday 2023-02-07) in #tor-meeting on OFTC IRC. best, -Richard

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major outage at Hetzner
by Antoine Beaupré 04 Feb '23

04 Feb '23

Hi, We are witnessing a large outage at our main service provider, Hetzner. According to the information we have gathered so far, four switches (4!) have failed and that affects four (yes, again, 4!) of the servers in the 8-node cluster. Many services are down. We have not made a full inventory yet, but the mail server is currently up so I'm using this time to send this notification while we decide on short-term mitigations. We hope this outage to be resolved shortly, but we do not have an ETA. Stay tuned. a. PS: and yes, that affects the mechanics behind status.torproject.org so we don't have an update on that site just yet. We have a backup plan for that, but we never drilled for it, so it could take a while to setup. -- Antoine Beaupré torproject.org system administration

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Joydeep's Monthly Status Report for January 2023
by Joydeep Sen Gupta 03 Feb '23

03 Feb '23

Hello everyone! Here are my updates from January 2023. In total, I resolved 1275 tickets across our email, telegram and signal user support channels. Most of my work last month has been around helping users in regions where Tor is censored. There has been another massive uptick in user requests from China. I have been working with users to get feedback, help them use pluggable transports and troubleshoot Tor. On Tor Browser front, we had one major stable release and with that some post-release user support work. I received a few reports of users on Apple Silicon-based Macs unable to fetch Tor Browser updates[1] since Tor Browser 12. The issue is resolved in the latest update i.e. 12.0.2. I also made a small update to the documentation about our GetTor distributor in the Tor Browser Manual[2]. Now, a quick overview of our user support channels: Timeline: 01 - 31 January 2023 # Frontdesk tickets created: 816 tickets resolved: 1461 Most frequent tickets by numbers: 1. 308 RT Tickets - Private Bridge requests from China 2. 96 RT Tickets - How to use a Tor Bridge in Russia 3. 59 RT Tickets - Circumventing censorship with Tor in Iran 4. 9 RT Tickets - Unable to update to 12.0.1 on Apple Silicon-based Mac[1] # Telegram and Signal Support channel (cdr.link) tickets resolved: 650 The most frequent tickets we received have been about: 1. 195 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Russia 2. 166 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Iran 3. 92 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Turkmenistan 4. 19 tickets - Circumventing censorship in China # Tor Forum Most popular topics in the Support category (in terms of number of views): 1. "Changing operating system changes browser fingerprints?" [3] 2. "Wanted to run something like tor network in china"[4] 3. "Road from restricted to unrestircted!"[5] 4. "Do Snowflake Proxies Reveal Tor Traffic to ISP?"[6] 5. "Snowflake standalone proxy in Docker: How to make NAT unrestricted?"[7] Thanks, -- Joydeep [1]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/4… [2]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/manual/-/issues/138 [3]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/changing-operating-system-changes-browser-fi… [4]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/wanted-to-run-something-like-tor-network-in-… [5]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/road-from-restricted-to-unrestircted/6409/ [6]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/do-snowflake-proxies-reveal-tor-traffic-to-i… [7]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/snowflake-standalone-proxy-in-docker-how-to-…

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Nina’s Monthly status report for January’23
by Nina 03 Feb '23

03 Feb '23

Hi! This is my report for January, 2023. In that month, I resolved 770 tickets: On Telegram (@TorProjectSupportBot) - 464 On RT (frontdesk@tpo) - 306 On January'23, I worked on user support, mostly but not exclusively focusing on Russian-speaking users. The main directions of my communication with users were: - Sharing bridges and troubleshooting around bridges; - Gathering user feedback regarding the new TB versions 12.0.1 and 12.0.2; - Finding the working ways of censorship circumvention and getting feedback on working and not working solutions. @raya and I also started to work on the educational campaign to expand the understanding of the Tor Browser features and use it for censorship circumvention and avoidance of surveillance. In January, I got several complaints from OPPO/Realme phone users [1] with a "Proxy Server Refused Connection" error. I've spotted a Mac-related bug [2], which fortunately does not persist after 12.0.2 release. [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41289 [2] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41336#n…

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