Hi,
This is my monthly status report for work completed in January 2022.
I have restructured the dynamic bridges such that they are now handled by unique identifiers, rather than by a numeric index. This makes it a lot easier to increase/decrease the number of bridges hosted on each provider, with targeted removal of specific bridges. Previously it was only possible to decrease the count, removing bridges according to their index.
The bridges are now being monitored for the “overload” parameter in their descriptors, so that it’s possible to see when a pool is undersupplied to meet the demand.
I now have a local dashboard for managing the bridges, making replacement easier and no longer requiring manual changes to text files with an editor. (Although any more advanced operations still require that.)
I have deployed an instance of CDR Link (https://digiresilience.org/solutions/link/) for user support. This instance is being used to evaluate the platform with a view to eventually replacing RT as the hub for user support tickets.
Throughout February, I am planning to add another cloud provider to the dynamic bridge framework and continue to monitor the deployed dynamic bridges and CDR Link instance for any maintenance that may be required.
Thanks,
Iain.
--
Iain Learmonth (he/him)
SR2 Communications Limited
Phone: +44 (0)1224 900 202 | Email: irl(a)sr2.uk
Hello, everyone!
We have a new job opening for a Director of Engineering:
https://www.torproject.org/about/jobs/director-of-engineering/
Please help us spread the word. Thank you!
Erin Wyatt
Director of People Operations (she/her)
ewyatt(a)torproject.org
PGP: 35E7 2A9F 6655 45F9 2CB6 6624 BA0C 9400 F80F 91CE
https://www.torproject.org <https://www.torproject.org/>
http://2gzyxa5ihm7nsggfxnu52rck2vv4rvmdlkiu3zzui5du4xyclen53wid.onion/
------------------------------------ >8
January 28, 2022
The Tor Project is seeking a Director of Engineering. This newly created position is the most senior engineering role at the organization, reporting directly to the Executive Director. The position will require deep technical expertise and the ability to lead in a geographically dispersed environment. (Most people keep hours between Central European and American Pacific time.)
The Director of Engineering role presents an opportunity for an individual who is passionate about privacy and Internet freedom to guide the engineering aspects of the Tor network, Tor Browser and other applications. Our technology helps millions of people around the world, across mobile and desktop platforms, to securely and freely access the Internet.
Our teams are composed of talented people who are passionate about our mission to advance human rights and freedoms by creating and deploying free and open-source anonymity and privacy technologies. Our product decisions are directly connected to our engineering efforts, so the Director of Engineering will be working with both our engineering teams and product manager. Our collective efforts are presently focused on four fronts: Applications, Tor Network (core tor), Network Health, and Censorship Circumvention.
You will be joining The Tor Project at a unique moment in the project’s history, as we are laying the foundation for Tor to scale and continue to grow. You will be working with all these teams, supporting them in executing a long-term vision and strategy.
The Tor Project has a strong culture of transparency and democratic processes. We are looking for a Director of Engineering who shares these values to lead our teams and help Tor to continue to provide the most private and secure way to access the Internet.
Academic degrees are great, but not required if you have the right experience! Further, if you feel that you meet most of these requirements or could meet them with a little time and support, we would love to hear from you!
This is a full-time and permanently remote position. Salary for this position is $150,000 USD (negotiable) and there is voluntary opt-in salary transparency for employees and contractors.
<applewebdata://7C080C49-82E0-49D7-B510-29E8444F1085#the-job>The job:
Work with the teams and individuals working on Tor Network, Network Health, Censorship Circumvention, and Applications.
Empower and support team leads, and guide decisions on technical strategy.
Guide product strategy and drive alignment across teams, crafting team coordination to build features that touch all areas and work across all supported platforms.
Work with teams supporting the development of their roadmaps and long-term strategy for the Tor network and applications.
Identify and execute on opportunities to improve operational excellence of the teams.
Build a trusted partnership with our Project Manager.
Build a trusted partnership with our Community Team lead to coordinate efforts as necessary. (Community is a very important part of Tor.)
Coordinate with the Fundraising and Communication teams for media or funder requests and/or events.
Interact with our funders and/or partner organizations from the Internet Freedom Community, business organizations that are part of Tor’s Membership Program, and potential future collaboration partners.
Support the ED’s in exploring a sustainability strategy for the expansion of the Tor network.
<applewebdata://7C080C49-82E0-49D7-B510-29E8444F1085#your-skills-and-experience>Your skills and experience:
8+ years of professional experience working with product and engineering teams.
4+ years of leadership experience with teams of 30+people, including hiring, managing, and developing talent.
Significant experience with anonymity and privacy online, and network security.
Experience mentoring and developing product and engineering teams.
Initiative to push projects forward and knowledge of when to involve others.
Past demonstrable success defining, articulating, and executing on the strategic vision for a team with a keen focus on user needs.
Excellent personal and professional communication skills.
Experience building cross-platform applications.
Ability to work productively and collaboratively with a diverse group of colleagues from around the globe.
Comfort working with privacy-preserving metrics to evaluate objectives.
<applewebdata://7C080C49-82E0-49D7-B510-29E8444F1085#how-to-apply>How to Apply
To apply, submit a cover letter, your CV/resume in PDF format to job-direng at torproject dot org with "Director of Engineering" in the subject line. In your cover letter, please include the reason you want to work at the Tor Project, your experience as it relates to the job description, and where you heard about this job.
<applewebdata://7C080C49-82E0-49D7-B510-29E8444F1085#about-the-tor-project>About The Tor Project
The Tor Project's workforce is smart, committed, and hard working. We currently have a paid and contract staff of around 37 developers and operational support people, plus many volunteers who contribute to our work and thousands of volunteers who run relays. The Tor Project is funded in part by government research and development grants, and in part by individual, foundation, and corporate donations.
Tor is for everyone, and we are actively working to build a team that represents people from all over the world - people from diverse ethnic, national, and cultural backgrounds; people from all walks of life. We encourage people subject to systemic bias to apply, including people of color, indigenous people, LGBTQIA+ people, women, and any other person who is part of a group that is underrepresented in tech.
The Tor Project has a strong culture of transparency and democratic processes, and long-standing community guidelines and cultural norms. Our community is committed to creating an inclusive and welcoming environment. Please read more here:
Our Code of Conduct: https://gitweb.torproject.org/community/policies.git/tree/code_of_conduct.t… <https://gitweb.torproject.org/community/policies.git/tree/code_of_conduct.t…>
Our Social Contract: https://gitweb.torproject.org/community/policies.git/tree/social_contract.t… <https://gitweb.torproject.org/community/policies.git/tree/social_contract.t…>
Our Statement of Values: https://gitweb.torproject.org/community/policies.git/tree/statement_of_valu… <https://gitweb.torproject.org/community/policies.git/tree/statement_of_valu…>
The Tor Project has a competitive benefits package, including a generous PTO policy, 16 paid holidays per year (including the week between Christmas and New Year's, when the office is closed), and flexible work schedule. Insurance benefits vary by employment status and country of residence.
The Tor Project, Inc. is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer.
Hey everyone!
Here are our meeting logs:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2022/tor-meeting.2022-01-27-15.59.html
And our meeting pad:
Anti-censorship work meeting pad
--------------------------------
Next meeting: Thursday January 27th 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 checkin about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor.
Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at Tor.
== 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 30
https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/4https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/7https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/5https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/6
Sponsor 28
must-do tickets: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/10
possible tickets: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&…
== Announcements ==
== Discussion ==
no news about obfs4 security fixes, needs to be looked into
Tor Browser will update first: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/4…
status of snowflake load balancing upgrade
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
currently staging bridge is handling almost all the traffic
plan to do the upgrade on the production bridge today or tomorrow
then switch the DNS back next week
our metrics are low, the current hypothesis is that the counts are coming from only one of the instances
plan to prevent onion key rotation by making the key files read-only
will try profiling on the staging bridge to help reduce CPU usage of snowflake-server https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
test deployment of rdsys + bridgedb
next week, will be available to @torproject.org email addresses
aim for production in February
Hetzner networking issue, shall we add it to the timeline
Find more details of the incident and if it has affected any parts of the Tor network
bridgedb and many bridges are in hetzner
== Actions ==
== Interesting links ==
== Reading group ==
We will discuss "Meteor: Cryptographically Secure Steganography for Realistic Distributions" on 2022-02-03
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3460120.3484550https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/686https://meteorfrom.space/
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.
anadahz: 2022-01-27
Last weeek:
- Increase timeout check cycles for default-bridge-felix-1 and default-bridge-felix-2 as they have been generating too many alerts: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/monit-configuration/-/mer…
cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2022-01-27
Last week:
- filed shadow bug: https://github.com/shadow/shadow/issues/1869
- lots of reviews
- roadmapping and documentation writing
- sponsor reports
- reached out to default bridge operators about down or unreliable bridges
- helped with deployment of bridge-port-scan fixes
This week:
- more reviews
- finish documenting and cleaning up shadow simulation scripts
- use these snowflake + shadow scripts to do more performance testing
- start looking at what is needed for a tapdance/conjure PT
- write up more documentation
Needs help with:
dcf: 2022-01-27
Last week:
- set up load balanced staging bridge for snowflake, monitored its switchover from the production bridge https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-relays-how-to-reduce-tor-cpu-load-on-a-s…
Next week:
- test the read-only file idea for preventing onion key rotation https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-relays-how-to-reduce-tor-cpu-load-on-a-s…
- upgrade the snowflake production bridge for load balancing https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
- switch snowflake DNS records back to the production bridge https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/40602
- before switching over, enable profiling on the staging bridge for https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
Help with:
agix: 2021-01-13
Last week:
- Busy with work on Censored Planet
Next week:
- Continue work on gettor-twitter
Help with:
-
arlolra: 2022-01-20
Last week:
- [added 2022-01-20 by dcf] ALPN support for pion DTLS https://github.com/pion/dtls/pull/415
Next week:
- Figure out where in pion/webrtc ALPN should be configured and used
- Maybe add Chacha20Poly1305 to pion/dtls
https://github.com/pion/dtls#planned-featureshttps://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
Help with:
-
maxb: 2021-09-23
Last week:
- Worked on https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… re: utls for broker negotiation
- Had conversation with someone about upstream utls http round tripper https://github.com/refraction-networking/utls/pull/74
- Too busy with work :/
Next week:
- _Really_ want to get a PR for utls round tripper
meskio: 2022-01-27
Last week:
- select the type of bridges distributed by each distributor (rdsys#63)
- add a third pool to the telegram bot (team#53)
- rdsys/bridgedb setup coordination with tpa (tpa/team#40581)
- update gettor links (gettor#85)
- implement country block mechanism for rdsys and bridgedb (bridgedb#40036)
Next week:
- test deployment for the new rdsys/bridgedb setup (rdsys#12)
- make easier to test bridgedb ater rdsys change (bridgedb#40034)
- check whats up with obfs4 security fixes
Shelikhoo: 2022-01-27
Last Week:
- [Merge Request Awaiting] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support to snowflake(snowflake!64)
- [Merge Request Awaiting] Privacy preserving stats in Snowflake standalone proxy(snowflake#40079, snowflake!72)
- [Merge Request Done] Add Google backend support for gettor updater(rdsys!19)
- [Merge Request Done] Add callbacks in the client for key events during snowflake connections(snowflake#40076)
- [Discussion] Implement metrics to measure snowflake churn(snowflake#34075)
- [Discussion] Proposal: Support for Dynamic IP obfs4 bridges with unattended proxy information update(aka "Subscription")
- [Discussion] Proposal: Push Notification Based Signaling Channel
- [Discussion] Proposal: Centralized Probe Result Collector(anti-censorship/team#54)
- [Investigate] Is there a better moat/snowflake SNI than cdn.sstatic.net? (snowflake#40068)
- [Investigate] Multi-instance Load Balanced Tor - Snowflake Deployment
- [Investigate] China "Anti-Fraud" Webpage Redirection Censorship(censorship-analysis#40026)
Next Week:
- [Discussion] Designing the Container Layout for rdsys
- [Discussion] Implement metrics to measure snowflake churn (snowflake#34075)
- [Discussion] Proposal: Push Notification Based Signaling Channel
- [Merge Request] Privacy preserving stats in Snowflake standalone proxy(snowflake#40079, snowflake!72)
- [Merge Request Review] Configure what distributor does distribute each resource type
- [Discussion] Proposal: Centralized Probe Result Collector(anti-censorship/team#54)
- [Investigate] uTLS for broker negotiation
HackerNCoder: 2021-12-16
This week:
Last/done:
Setup web mirror on tor.encryptionin.space
Next:
Get (new VPs with) new IP and setup new web mirror on new domain
hanneloresx: 2021-3-4
Last week:
- Submitted MR for bridgestrap issue #14
Next week:
- Finish bridgestrap #14
- Find new issue to work on
Help with:
-
--
meskio | https://meskio.net/
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
My contact info: https://meskio.net/crypto.txt
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Nos vamos a Croatan.
Hi,
Here's our meeting log:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2022/tor-meeting.2022-01-24-13.59.log…
And our meeting pad:
Next meeting: Monday, January 31, 2022 - 1400 UTC
Weekly meetings, every Monday at 14:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC
(channel is logged while meetings are in progress)
## Goal of this meeting
Weekly checkin about the status of Community Team work at Tor.
## Links to Useful documents
* Looking for volunteers:
https://forum.torproject.net/t/looking-for-volunteers-to-contribute-to-the-…
## Discussion
* Outreachy - Gamification project update and next steps
* User support/Telegram soft launch
* RT backlog
* Run a bridge campaign retrospective
## Updates
Joydeep:
This week:
- Community Team OKRs
- Testing the cdr.link user support platform
- RT backlog
Gus:
This week:
- Roadmapping with Isa and Gaba
- Writing S9 new proposal
- Meeting with Sajolida and TGP team about Tor trainings for S30
- Writing bridges campaign blog post and doing some logistics
Miko:
Last week:
New resources here: UX insights, motivations and pain points
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/relays/-/issues/27
This week:
- Ideation. Submitting ideas for gamification and gathering
feedback (votes!)
- Discussing interview prompts for Relay Operator interviews
(specifically Exit Relay Ops)
- Preparing an interview script for Relay Operators
- Survey Analysis: Working on UX Survey analyses and
observations
Next week:
- Picking best ideas and building mockups, understanding
feasibility/viability of some features I'll pitch this week
emmapeel:
Last week:
- Localization hangout
- updates with loclab
- translation previews in gitlab
- emergency fund translations
This week:
- Translation previews in gitlab
- prepare move to weblate
- contact Chinese translators about support.tpo
Nina:
Last week:
- Meetings participation
- Responding to user requests (tickets)
- The announcement translation
- the cdr.link platform testing and discussion
This week:
- start of the user support via Telegram
- complete the translation of the article
--
The Tor Project
Community Team Lead
Hi,
At our first meeting of the year, we didn't have time to complete the
web team OKRs and prioritization for the first quarter, so we scheduled
another meeting to do this. Here are the minutes.
We might have more of those emails in the weeks to come, as we have a
bunch of brainstorms and planning sessions coming up. Let me know if
this is too noisy...
# Roll call: who's there and emergencies
anarcat, kez, lavamind, linus joined us.
# 2022 Q1/Q2 web OKRs
gaba and anarcat previously established a proposal for a set of OKRs for
the web team, which were presented during the meeting, and copied below:
## Proposal
* OKR: make the donate page easier to maintain and have it support
.onion donations ([milestone 22][])
* [new lektor frontend][]
* [vanilla JS rewrite][]
* [we can donate through the .onion][]
* OKR: make it easier for translators to contribute (almost done! not
ambitious enough?)
* translators can find their own copy of the website without help
* bring build time to 15 minutes to accelerate feedback to
translators
* allow the web team to trigger manual builds for reviews
* OKR: improve documentation across the organization
* [launch dev.tpo][] (Q2)
* "Remove outdated documentation from the header", stop pointing to
dead docs
* we have a plan to fix the wiki situation so that people can find
and search documentation easily
[milestone 22]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/22
[new lektor frontend]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/donate-static/-/issues/37
[we can donate through the .onion]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/donate-static/-/issues/36
[vanilla JS rewrite]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/donate-static/-/issues/45
[launch dev.tpo]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/dev/-/issues/6
## Progress update
The translation CI work is already going steadily and could be finished
in early Q1.
We are probably going to keep prioritizing the donate page changes
because if we postpone, it will be more work as updates are still
happening on the current site, which means more rebasing to keep things
in sync.
## Things that need to happen regardless of the OKRs
We have identified some things that need to happen, regardless of the
objectives.
This key result, for example, was part of the "documentation" OKR, but
seemed relevant to all teams anyways:
* teams have less than 20 tickets across the three lists (backlog,
next, doing), almost zero open (untriaged) tickets
We also need to support those people as part of sponsored work:
* s9 usability - Q1/Q2
* support web maintaince based on the UX feedback
* Work on torproject.org usabilty issues based on user feedback
* Work on community.torproject.org usabilty issues based on user
feedback
* Work on dev.torproject.org usabilty issues based on user feedback
* phase 6 may bring more TPA work but we need to make the schedule
for it with TPA
* s30 - anti-censorship - Q1
* bridges.torproject.org - Q1
* s61 network performance - whole year
* support the work on network simulation
* s96 - china censorship - whole year
* support snowflake scaling
* support rdsys deployment
* support moat distribution
* support HTTP PT creation
* support monitoring bridge health
* support creation and publication of documentation
* support localization
* s123 - USAGM sites - Q1/Q2
* support the project on onion sites deployments
* most of the work will be from February to April/May
* new onion SRE and community person starting in February
Non-web stuff:
* resurrect bridge port scan
* do not scan private IP blocks: kez talked with cohosh/meskio to get
it fixed, they're okay if kez takes maintainership
* make it pretty: done
Some things were postponed altogether:
* decide if we switch to Weblate is postponed to Q3/Q4, as we have
funding then
We observed that some of those tasks are already done, so we may need to
think more on the longer term. On the other hand, we have a lot of work
to be done on the TPA side of things, so no human cycles will be wasted.
# Prioritise the two set of OKRs
Next we looked at the above set of OKRs and the [2022 TPA OKRs][] to see
if it was feasible to do *both*.
[2022 TPA OKRs]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/roadmap/2022
Clearly, there was too much work, so we're considering ditching an OKR
or two on TPA's side. Most web OKRs seem attainable, although some are
for Q2 (identified above).
For TPA's OKRs, anarcat's favorites are mail services and retire old
services, at least come up with proposals in Q1. lavamind suggested we
also prioritize the bullseye upgrades, and noted that we might not want
to focus directly on RT as we're unsure of its fate.
We're going to prioritise mail, retirements and upgrades. New cluster
and cleanup can still happen, but we're at least pushing that to
Q2. We're going to schedule work sessions to work on the mail and
upgrades plans, specifically, and we're hoping to have an "upgrade work
party" where we jointly work on upgrading a bunch machines at once.
# Other discussions
No other discussion took place.
# Next meeting
TPA mail plan brainstorm, 2022-01-31 15:00 UTC, 16:00 Europe/Stockholm,
10:00 Canada/Eastern
--
Antoine Beaupré
torproject.org system administration
Hi,
Here's our meeting log:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2022/tor-meeting.2022-01-19-12.59.log…
And our meeting pad:
## Community Team Meeting pad
Weekly meetings, every Monday at 14:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC
(channel is logged while meetings are in progress)
## Goal of this meeting
Weekly checkin about the status of Community Team work at Tor.
## Links to Useful documents
* Looking for volunteers:
https://forum.torproject.net/t/looking-for-volunteers-to-contribute-to-the-…
## Discussion
* (update) user support on Telegram:
* Deployment: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/40578
* Planning: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40059
* Tor translations in Chinese (S96 work)
* Community Team OKrs, 1:1 and team organization
## Updates
Joydeep:
Last week:
- Tor Browser 11.0.4 support
- Reviewed one pending Gitlab ticket
This week:
- RRF meeting (done)
- Tor Browser Alpha 11.5a2 support and testing
- Montly L10n Hackathon
Help with:
-
Gus:
This week:
- Sponsor9/30 training materials
- Dynamic bridge health in Russia:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40054
- Writing Bridges campaign wrap up blog post:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/relays/-/issues/24
- Outreachy mentorship work
- Meeting with ux team about user feedback collection
- Meeting with sajolida to discuss S30 work in Mexico
Help with:
- Something you need help with.
Miko:
Last week:
- Competitive Audit (and Report)
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/relays/-/issues/29
- blog post to understand motivations and gamification
better:
https://mikoing.wordpress.com/2022/01/15/what-is-fun-kids/
Next week:
- Relay Operator Survey analysis report
Help with:
- Call for ideation - freely send your ideas about how to
incentivise relay operators for their great contributions! No
ideas, too wild!
Nina:
Last week:
- Tickets from Kazakhstan (shutdown)
- Bridges request and basic troubleshooting around them
- Translations - articles, website
- Support on #Tor User Support
This week:
- RRF meeting
- User support on multiple channels
emmapeel:
Last week:
- still landing from NYE, lots of backlog
This week:
- there are problems with our translation.git bot
- translation websites previews
- move to weblate
- l10n hangout
Help with:
- I need help from tpa to fix the translation previews.
--
The Tor Project
Community Team Lead