I greatly appreciate the email and its format!

-tom

On Mon, 1 Jul 2019 at 22:50, Philipp Winter phw@torproject.org wrote:

Hi everyone,

Here's a summary of the anti-censorship team's progress in June:

BridgeDB

• Blacklisted 53 bridges whose obfs4 port was unreachable. Most of these bridges had no contact info. Some did, but the operators did not respond to our emails.

• Tried to understand why BridgeDB responded to many requests with no bridges: https://bugs.torproject.org/30441

  • Eventually, the problem seems to have fixed itself.
  • We'll keep a close eye on the logs.

• After hearing back from Tor's research safety board, we implemented a new feature that lets BridgeDB export statistics: https://bugs.torproject.org/9316 The feature is currently under review.

• Removed support for Yahoo email accounts: https://bugs.torproject.org/28496

• Published a blog post about BridgeDB's new 0.7.1 release: https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-bridgedb-071

Snowflake

• We released a prototype for snowflake's webextension! For Firefox, you can get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/torproject-snowflake/ We're still working on getting it published in Chrome's web store. By installing the addon, you turn your browser into a circumvention proxy for censored users.

• Working on integrating pion/webrtc to ease builds and reduce dependencies: https://bugs.torproject.org/28942

• We wrapped up a ticket to collect statistics on snowflake's broker: https://bugs.torproject.org/21315

• Brainstormed mechanism for snowflake update versioning: https://bugs.torproject.org/30704

Pluggable transports

• Implemented a patch to reorder PT/proxy phases: https://bugs.torproject.org/28930 The patch is currently under review.

• Brainstormed ideas for obfs4's successor: https://bugs.torproject.org/30716

  • We decided to first study the "long tail" of network traffic because it will allow us to make better design decisions: https://bugs.torproject.org/30986

• We made some progress on improving our PT spec: https://bugs.torproject.org/29285

  • For now, we have been collecting a list of issues with the v1 spec.

• We made some progress with loading shared libraries for PTs into the Tor executable (on Linux for now).

Miscellaneous

• Deployed https://bridges.torproject.org/scan/. The service allows obfs4 operators to test the reachability of their obfs4 port -- at least until we are done with the following ticket: https://bugs.torproject.org/30477

• We wrapped up our "does the GFW block obfs4?" ticket: https://bugs.torproject.org/29279 The answer is: no.

• Published a blog post that introduces our anti-censorship team and our Sponsor 19 report: https://blog.torproject.org/tors-new-anti-censorship-team-defending-open-internet

• Asked tor-relays@ to set up more obfs4 bridges: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2019-June/017419.html

• Worked with a handful operators whose obfs4 bridges were broken. Several operators believed that only a bridge's OR port must be externally reachable. Others forgot to configure port forwarding for their obfs4 port.

---

tor-project mailing list tor-project@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-project