Dear Tor contributors,
Next Wednesday, August 25th @ 1600 UTC, we will have a Tor Demo Day! You're invited!
This edition will have presentations about Tor & CAPTCHAs, running relays at universities, helping Tor users, and exit bridges to circumvent blocked pages.
To ensure a safe, friendly, and pleasant experience during the event, we ask all participants to read and follow the Tor Project Code of Conduct: https://community.torproject.org/training/code-of-conduct/
The presentation will be recorded.
Agenda ------
* "CAPTCHA Monitor: Check if websites block Tor or return CAPTCHAs using real web browsers!" by Barkin Simsek (woswos) * "Tor Captcha and Block Monitoring" (GSoC 2021) by Apratim (_ranchak_) * "Help Tor users" (Outreachy 2021) by Kulsoom * "HebTor: Bypassing Tor Exit Blocking" by Micah Sherr * "Operating Tor Relays at Universities" by kantorkel
Meeting room ------------
https://tor.meet.coop/gus-viu-5wr-7cb
Full description ----------------
* "CAPTCHA Monitor: Check if websites block Tor or return CAPTCHAs using real web browsers!" - Barkin Simsek (woswos)
The CAPTCHA Monitor project aims to track how often various websites block or return CAPTCHAs to Tor clients. The project aims to achieve this by fetching webpages via both Tor & other mainstream web browsers and comparing the results. The tests are repeated periodically to find the patterns over time. Collected metadata, metrics, and results are analyzed and displayed on a dashboard to understand how Tor users get discriminated against while using browsing the internet.
* "Tor Captcha and Block Monitoring" - Apratim (_ranchak_)
The Project focuses on tracking top websites from alexa/moz500 ranking and aims to get a detailed knowledge of the websites partially blocking, fully blocking or returning Captchas or even websites limiting functionalities. The results will be then collected and will be used to find the answers to different metric related questions (Example: What percentages of websites are blocked by a certain exit node). Further I hope that the metrics could be useful for the campaign to unblock Tor and even the DBM (DontBlockMe) Project
* "Help Tor Project support our users" - Kulsoom Zahra
During her internship with the Tor Project and Outreachy, Kulsoom Zahra helped Tor users to bypass censorship, fix their Tor Browsers, updated the Tor user documentation and much more. She will share with us her experience on helping Tor users.
* "HebTor: Bypassing Tor Exit Blocking" - Micah Sherr
Tor exit blocking, in which websites disallow clients arriving from Tor, is a growing and potentially existential threat to the anonymity network. We introduce two architectures that provide ephemeral exit bridges for Tor which are difficult to enumerate and block. Our techniques employ a micropayment system that compensates exit bridge operators for their services, and a privacy-preserving reputation scheme that prevents freeloading. We show that our exit bridge architectures effectively thwart server-side blocking of Tor with little performance overhead. https://seclab.cs.georgetown.edu/hebtor/
* "Operating Tor Relays at Universities" by kantorkel
We* report on our experience of operating exit relays at two German universities and provide lessons learned.
(*) https://arxiv.og/abs/2106.04277