Hi,
In the last three years, Community and UX teams have been working
together to collect user feedback and integrate it into our products
while preserving Tor users' privacy. In this email, we're going to
explain the present, how it works, and our next phase.
## 1. User Advocate
Since 2018, the Community team works with an intern from Outreachy[0] as
a User Advocate. You can read more about this project here: "Help us
support our users"[1]. Every month, the User Advocate submits to the
tor-project mailing list an User Feedback Report with questions and
comments from our Frontdesk system and other sources (Reddit, Tor stack
exchange, Google Play, blog comments, IRC #tor, etc.).
If you were around at that time, maybe you remember Pari presented an
user feedback research[2] at the Tor Dev Meeting in Rome, in 2018. You
can read our previous user feedback reports here: Cybelle (2018)[3],
Wayward (2019)[4], and Cleopatra (2020)[5]. As Nicolei started last
month, on May 19th, he sent his first user feedback report[6]. Nicolei's
internship will end in August this year. And Outreachy will open a new
selection process in September/October.
After the report is sent, we discuss the issues and comments at UX
and/or Community team meetings on IRC (#tor-meeting). For some of these
issues, we open new tickets in Gitlab, our new bug tracker, and the user
advocate adds comments to open issues. For example, we have some tickets
to improve the website, Tor Browser and other products. We have plans to
introduce a global label [user-feedback] to make explicit which issue
came directly from users.
There's also a proposal to use Discourse, but so far, we only discussed
it a few times during the Gitlab process and at the last all hands, and
mostly to improve our blog moderation and user feedback.
## 2. User Research: UX feedback and Tor training in the Global South
As part of sponsor work, the Community and UX teams have met users face
to face during our digital security training in the Global South. We
wrote about it and also added some metrics of this project in a blog
post[7], "Reaching people where they are." The user research reports are
publicly available here[8], and the users we've met during this project
informed the work we did to outline User Personas. Personas were made
not to frame our work to any target, but instead to reach a common
understanding across teams of "Who are Tor users?" and who we are
designing for. We also did a session about Users Personas[9] in
Stockholm Dev Meeting (2019). We sent a more detailed narrative report
regarding the activities to all Tor core contributors in January (2020),
where outlines each activity we ran carefully in all the countries we
visited.
The new Community portal reflects the first step in understanding the
different roles we host in our community. The intent is to serve as a
home for non-savvy technical people but also technical people as relay
operators or onion sites admins to collaborate with Tor. Furthermore, we
made public and gave open access to the material at the training section
in the Community portal, where we collected and organized the materials
that we have used during our travels and meetings with groups. All this
content was co-designed with our community based on their needs.
The most significant difference from Frontdesk, where users come to us
to report issues, this program works with our team members to reach out
and go to communities to run usability tests and interviews with users.
Both ways of collecting user feedback complement each other. We not just
collect feedback but also teach about digital security holistically, to
encourage critical users to make decisions by themselves. Threat
modelling exercises to understand digital security assets have been run
with communities in the Global South.
The point about the whole program it's not just a way to collect
software feedback. Part of our non-profit work is to educate users about
privacy, anonymity and technology as a way to promote and advance human
rights. We developed a program focused on building a network of human
rights defenders, journalists, whistleblower platforms, digital security
trainers, hackerspaces, activists, marginalized communities, and having
a stable relationship with them, the people who trust and most need our
software.
In the last year, we built partnerships in our first Training Program,
where NGOs and other organizations in the Global South were running Tor
training and UX tests by themselves. We had training in Brazil,
Colombia, Mexico, Uganda, Indonesia, and Tanzania. We developed a
process of continuous improvement for these organizations to collect
feedback from their assistants about our products and the decision they
just ran[10].
## 3. Next steps
The next phase of this sponsor will happen from July 2019 - 2020, where
we will focus on supporting our partner organizations during this
Covid-19 pandemic, the migration to secure spaces for running their
activities online and also the spread of remote user research made by
them and for us on our recently released improvements in Tor Browser for
desktop and Android, and the entire Tor Project new portals.
In July, Narrira Lemos will be back to work with us as a fellow from
Bertha Institute. The work Nah will be running will be focused on
mobiles and per se Tor Browser for Android. She also will give support
(as she did in 2019) on coordinating user research with communities.
Antonela and Gus
UX and Community Team
## Notes
[0] Outreachy https://www.outreachy.org/
[1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/Outreachy#TheProjects
[2]
https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/trac/-/wikis/org/meetings/2018Rome/Not…
[3]
Jun 2018 User Feedback Report -
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2018-June/001829.html
Jul 2018 User Feedback Report -
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2018-July/001871.html
Aug 2018 User Feedback Report -
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2018-August/001940.html
[4]
Oct 2018 User Feedback Report -
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2018-November/002058.html
Nov 2018 User Feedback Report -
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2018-December/002125.html
Dec 2018 User Feedback Report -
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2019-January/002176.html
Jan 2019 User Feedback Report -
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2019-February/002230.html
Feb 2019 User Feedback Report -
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2019-March/002259.html
Mar 2019 User Feedback Report -
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2019-May/002311.html
Apr 2019 User Feedback Report -
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2019-May/002333.html
[5]
Dec 2019 User Feedback Report -
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2020-January/002645.html
Jan 2020 User Feedback Report -
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2020-February/002688.html
[6]
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2020-June/002887.html
[7] https://blog.torproject.org/reaching-people-where-they-are
[8] https://community.torproject.org/user-research/
[9]
https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/trac/-/wikis/org/meetings/2019Stockhol…
[10]
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/ux/research/-/tree/master/communityhttps://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2020-May/002850.html
--
The Tor Project
Community Team Lead
http://expyuzz4wqqyqhjn.onion/
Hi!
Network meetings are happening every Monday at 1700UTC on
#tor-meeting in irc.oftc.net. Everyone is welcome to participate in them!
Here are the logs and notes for the meeting on July 13th.
Log:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2020/tor-meeting.2020-07-13-17.01.log…
Pad:
http://kfahv6wfkbezjyg4r6mlhpmieydbebr5vkok5r34ya464gqz6c44bnyd.onion/p/tor…
Contents of the pad for today:
== Network meeting pad! ==
Next meeting is at Monday 20th July 1700 UTC on #tor-meeting on OFTC.
June Schedule:
* Monday 20 July 17:00 UTC
Welcome to our meeting!
We meet each month at: Mondays at 1700 UTC
On #tor-meeting on OFTC.
(This channel is logged while meetings are in progress.) (See
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2017-September/001459.ht…
for background.)
Want to participate? Awesome! Here's what to do:
1. If you have updates, enter them below, under your name.
2. If you see anything you want to talk about in your updates, put
them in boldface!
3. Show up to the IRC meeting and say hi!
After each week's meetings, the contents of this pad will be sent to
tor-project @ lists.torproject.org.
After that is done, the pad can be used for the next week.
== Previous notes ==
(Search the tor-project mailing list archive for older notes.)
15 June:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2020-June/002877.html
22 June:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2020-June/002890.html
== Stuff to do every week ==
Let's check and update our roadmap:
What's done, and what's coming up? Any change?
Board: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/core/-/boards
S28 & S30 - Continue after October - Ahf
S55 - Nickm & dgoulet
Non sponsor stuff
DoS defenses = Dgoulet + Asn
Library Size reduction = Ahf + Dgoulet
sbws = Ahf + Juga
Check reviewer assignments! How reviews from last week worked? Any
blocker? Here are the outstanding reviews, oldest first, including sbws:
Merge requests in Core:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/core/-/merge_requests
Let's check out 0.4.4 release status and open tickets!
Tickets in 0.4.4.x with no owner.
https://gitlab.torproject.org/dashboard/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&sta…
nickm:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/dashboard/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&sta…
dgoulet:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/dashboard/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&sta…
ahf:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/dashboard/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&sta…
asn:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/dashboard/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&sta…
== Reminders ==
* Remember to "/me status: foo" at least once daily.
* Remember that our current code reviews should be done by end-of-week.
* Make sure you are in touch with everybody with whom you are doing work
for the next releases.
* Check other's people call for help in their entries.
Volunteers need help. Please help them when you are around. Maybe we
should have times of day when different people are responders, and
expectations of who helps.
-------------------------------
---- 13 July 2020
-------------------------------
== Announcements [please date] ==
== Discussion [please date] ==
issues in https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/team/-/issues
=== Active Proposed Policies ===
* Pull Request Guidelines (stalled)
=== Design proposals under discussion ===
315: require more fields in directory documents (still waiting [6/1])
316: flashflow (asn and nickm are reviewing, should schedule discussion
with pastly. [5/18])
317: dns (under discussion on ML [5/18])
318: limit protovers (waiting for more commment; needs discussion [6/1])
319: wide everything (nick replied on ml; waiting for more discussion [6/1])
320: tap out again
- Do we have a consensus to replace this with a "deprecate v2 onion
services" proposal? If so, who writes it? [6/1]
protover rethinking (teor's email to tor-dev) (nick needs to reply [5/18])
321: happy families (need feedback [6/1])
322: dirport linkspec (need feedback [6/1])
== Recommended links ==
== Updates ==
Name:
Week of XYZ (planned):
- What you planned for last week.
Week of XYZ (actual):
- What you did last week.
Week of ABC (planned):
- What you're planning to do this week.
Help with:
- Something you may need help with.
PLEASE DO NOT BULK-DELETE THE OLD ENTRIES!
Leave the "Planned" parts!
Leave the parts for last week and this week!
Nick:
Week of 6 July (planned):
- Revise my working checklists, and distribute them?
- Stable releases-- aim for end-of-week.
- Review and merge
- S55:
- Export statistics
-
- 044 work:
- All "must", all "should".
- Some "can"?
- Release packed cell proposal (fitting multiple relay commands
in a cell)
Week of 6 July (actual):
- Stable releases, 0442-alpha
- Export statistics for S55
- All assigned 044 must and should tickets
- Various CI hacking, trying to make everything pass again.
- Released proposal for packed cells
Week of 13 July (planned):
- Revise my working checklists, and distribute them?
- Keep an eye on blog comments for release posts
- Review and merge stuff, with prioirity for 044 fixes.
- Help with 044 fixes.
- S55 hacking
- Misc tool and technical debt hacking
- Keep an eye on OpenSSL bug status
(https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/12377)
ahf:
Week of 7/6 (planned):
- Windows \r\n issues (#33781, #26316)
- Get profiles done on iOS for memory consumption.
- Work on Android stuff with the Browser Team.
- Help if I can with Gitlab#41.
Week of 7/6 (actually)
- Submitted patches for \r\n Windows/Unix issues.
- Solved Gitlab#41 with Hiro
- Wrote first draft of the Lobby interface for user-signup.
- Merged some issues.
- Played around with reproducible dist builds after our meeting
Thursday.
- Tried to see what low hanging fruits I could collect on iOS
from config changes.
- Rebased my limited patches on Fenix
Week of 13/6 (planned)
- Fenix
- Land \r\n issues.
- Help with merges/reviews on sbws
asn:
Week of 29/06 (planned):
- More PoW work
- A look at v3 metrics.
- More OBv3 hackathon. Someone is hacking on distinct descriptor support.
- Need to adapt the gitlab process to using MRs as discussed on Thurdsay.
- A bunch more reviews & merges.
Week of 29/06 (actual):
- Lots of network team reviews/merges/bugfixes work.
- Some v3 metrics work.
- More OBv3 reviews.
- Triaging gitlab tickets.
Week of 06/07 (planned);
- Going AFK on Friday so biggest priority is to finish all
reviews/merges/044 tickets by then.
jnewsome:
Week of July 6 (planned):
- Get code-coverage PR cleaned up and merged
- Implement phantom memory-marshalling optimization "for real"
and merge
Week of July 6 (actual):
- Got code-coverage tracking merged into shadow
- Reworked CI to move logic from GH proprietary config to shell
scripts,
and added scripts to run it locally via Docker
- More work on memory-marshalling mmap optimization: wrote an
IntervalMap in Rust to track mmap state
Week of July 13 (planned):
- Memory-marshalling mmap optimization
pastly:
Week of 18 May (planned):
- Finish bones of external FlashFlow repo (python?) to control
tor clients
that perform FF measurements
- Finish bones of little-t tor changes s.t. measurement can be
performed
- Discuss FlashFlow with network team devs as they have questions
c:
Week of May 25 (planned):
- close up work on #33609
- get started on other s55 tickets, potentially knock out 'easy'
ones first and take it from there
- update https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/gsoc
with my information
Week of May 25 (actual):
- #33609 ready for review
- started hunting down and working on other Sponsor55-can and
-must issues
- talking in #tor-project about wiki
Week of June 1 (actual):
- opened and made #34381 ready for review
- IPv4 part of #32888
Week of June 8 (planned):
- #33598
- IPv6 part of #32888 <-- do you have a ticket for it?
Week of June 8 (actual):
- #32888 IPv6 PR: https://github.com/torproject/tor/pull/1932
- requested reproducibility info for
https://bugs.torproject.org/33598 -- maybe I'll start thread on tor-dev@
since trac is read-only
- wrote Outreachy blog post explaining Tor's IPv6 goals
Week of June 15 (planned):
- during meeting, poke someone about
https://github.com/torproject/chutney/pull/66
- chutney work with nickm (#34445 - #34448)
- force myself to remain regularly active on tor-dev@ so we can
get things done more efficiently :)
- in general just check behind myself and others to clean up
open issues in need of commentary or review
Week of June 15 (actual):
- started work on more chutney documention
- opened discussions on gitlab about chutney components
Week of June 22 (planned):
- continue chutney discussion/work
- #32888 / work on Address config to support IPv6
Week of July 6 (actual):
- fix up chutney #40002
dgoulet:
Week of 29/06 (actual):
- s55: See #33049 for progress. Most of my week was on IPv6 tickets
both
on code or review.
- Merges and reviews.
- Wrote hs-v2 deprecation blog post. Published now.
- We got the HS-v2 deprecation warning #40003 in.
Week of 06/07 (planned);
- Simply continue s55 work...
- If time allows it, really need to address the fallbackdir situation.
--
she/her are my pronouns
GPG Fingerprint EE3F DF5C AD91 643C 21BE 8370 180D B06C 59CA BD19
Hi!
Metrics Meetings are happening every Thursday at 15UTC in #tor-meeting
in irc.oftc.net
Next meeting will be on July 16th and you are all welcome to come!
Here are the minutes for the meeting of July 9th:
Log:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2020/tor-meeting.2020-07-09-14.59.log…
Public pad URL is: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-metricsteam-2020.1-keep
And here is the pad notes:
-----------------------------------------------------
Agenda Thursday, July 9th, 15 UTC
-----------------------------------------------------
TGen 1.0.0 update and analysis format 3.0 documentation (karsten)
Demo day (karsten)
OnionPerf board:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/metrics/onionperf/-/boards
DRL proposal Objective 1.2 (shadow simulation) and the extra
onionperf instances (Mike)
--
she/her are my pronouns
GPG Fingerprint EE3F DF5C AD91 643C 21BE 8370 180D B06C 59CA BD19
Hi all,
Our MeetBot disappeared halfway through the meeting and was unable to
capture minutes, so I'm attaching our IRC log to this email.
And here is our meeting pad:
Anti-censorship work meeting pad
--------------------------------
Next meeting: Thursday July 9th 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/4
* https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/7
* https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/5
* https://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&…
* Anti-censorship related tickets that we want other teams to fix:
* https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-tickets-keep <-- it will be moved into gitlab with TPO labels
== Announcements ==
*
== Discussion ==
* Any resolution on accepting public bug reports for the anti-censorship team?
* https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
* Last week's discussion: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2020/tor-meeting.2020-07-02-15.58.log…
== Actions ==
*
== Interesting links ==
* Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium 2020 is next week. The censorship session is 16:40–17:55 UTC on Thursday.
* https://petsymposium.org/2020/program_UTC.php
* I skimmed the program for papers that look relevant to us. There's one on VPN usage, two on decoy routing, and one on rendezvous using cryptocurrency.
* Emotional and Practical Considerations towards the Adoption and Abandonment of VPNs as a Privacy-Enhancing Technology
* https://petsymposium.org/2020/files/papers/issue1/popets-2020-0006.pdf
* Running Refraction Networking for Real
* https://benvds.com/papers/refraction2020.pdf
* SiegeBreaker: An SDN Based Practical Decoy Routing System
* https://petsymposium.org/2020/files/papers/issue3/popets-2020-0051.pdf
* MoneyMorph: Censorship Resistant Rendezvous using Permissionless Cryptocurrencies
* https://petsymposium.org/2020/files/papers/issue3/popets-2020-0058.pdf
== Reading group ==
* We will discuss GoodbyeDPI on July 9th
* https://github.com/ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI
* 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.
phw:
This week (2020-07-09):
* Fixed tpo/anti-censorship/bridgedb#40001.
* Registered for RightsCon'20.
* Simplified bridgestrap code and fixed bug in caching system.
* Reviewed tpo/anti-censorship/bridgedb!2.
* Roadmap meeting.
* Wrapped up and blogged monthly report.
* Filed tpo/anti-censorship/wolpertinger#40001.
* Merged tpo/anti-censorship/bridgedb#34260.
* Released and deployed BridgeDB 0.11.0.
* Merged and deployed #31422 and #34260.
Next week:
* Wrap up tpo/anti-censorship/wolpertinger#34259.
Help with:
*
cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2020-07-09
Last week:
- caught up on emails/meetings
- reveiwed and provided feedback on a lot of snowflake mobile tickets
- reviewed some bridgedb tickets
- worked with hc on a gitlab ci script (snowflake#40003)
- came up with list of candidate stun servers and wrote patches to add them to default configs (#30579)
- merged and deployed nat discovery feature (#34129)
- opened and started a build to update snowflake for tor browser (tor-browser-build#40016)
- looked into proxy-go client timeouts for our proxy-go instances (#30498)
This week:
- take a look at #25595
- snowflake sponsor 28 evaluation work
- maybe take a look at snowflake#21314 or some other blockers on #19001
- continue with GetTor + BridgeDB refactor
Needs help with:
- review of #30579 (merge request !5)
- review of snowflake#40003 (hc should look at this)
- soon a review of tor-browser-build#40016 (i'll ping the applications team)
juggy :
This week:
- Dig into the algorithm for how BridgeDB distributes bridges
Next week:
- Implement audio captchas in moat, figure out how to reduce audio captcha request size
- Keep studying BridgeDB to write architectural overview
Help with:
arlolra: 2020-06-11
Last week:
-
Next week:
- follow ups to #33365
- start on #31201
Help with:
-
dcf: 2020-07-09
Last week:
- filed a ticket for bridge port scan usability (bridge-port-scan#1)
Next week:
- find out what went wrong with trying to give cohosh CDN access (snowflake#30510)
- set up an etherpad for public bug reporting and link it from https://snowflake.torproject.org/#bugs (snowflake#34435)
Help with:
Antonela: 2020-06-25
- (S30) planning activities for the user group in HK:
- Run emma
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/ux/research/-/blob/master/scripts%20and%2…
- Discovery issues with Bridges flow - working on the script
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/ux/research/-/issues/4
agix:2020-07-02
Last week:
-Slowly started on #34318 (was occupied with GSoC stuff)
Next week:
-Continue work on #34318 and reviews
Help with:
-
hanneloresx: 2020-06-25
Last week:
- Read existing documentation for BridgeDB. Get acclimated to GitLab.
- Read background information for #32117
- Translate monthly team report and post on forums
Next week:
- Work on #32117
- Work on #33727
Help with:
-
thymbahutymba: 2020-04-02
Last week:
- CI/CD pipeline for multiarch docker images, which has a problem
with the apt tor version even though the apt repository have been
changed into the Dockerfile.
Next week:
Help with:
HashikD: 2020-07-09
Last week:
- Working on Snowflake Docker container.
- Resolving issues on MR #4
- MR (merged) Added read me for the #8
- MR (merged) Added LICENSE for the project #13
- MR for CI for the project #14
Next week:
- #6 Showing users stat about how many clients' they served in the past 24 hours.
Help with: -