Hi! This is my status report for contract work done in November 2024.
# Snowflake
Snowflake was blocked in Russia in early November. The blocking has since stopped (at least temporarily). I did some analysis using the automatically generated pcaps from our vantage point, and write a few patches to more easily test whether specific proxies or versions of Snowflake can evade the blocking. We'll continue to monitor reachability in case the blocking returns. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...
My main ongoing task on Snowflake is to look at how we can use Snowflake broker metrics to more accurately detect and respond to censorship events. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...
I released version 0.9.2 of the webextension and version 2.10.1 of snowflake this month.
We had a major upgrade of the Snowflake broker at the end of November. This required a few followup tasks and debugging. I worked on getting metrics back up and running. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...
And lastly, a few small logging fixups for Snowflake proxies https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...
# PT library work
After October, there were a few outstanding tasks and issues with the IPtProxy rewrite. This has now been merged and released as version 4.0.0! https://github.com/tladesignz/IPtProxy/tree/4.0.0 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/lyreb...
# Domain fronting
A few of the remaining Fastly front domains renewed their certificates recently, so we had to update all of our settings to use non-Fastly configurations. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/151 https://github.com/guardianproject/orbot/pull/1197
I made some more progress on the meek bridge handover, and updated the bridge to use the new meek.torproject.net and meektm.torproject.net domains. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/133
# Lox
I worked on a few code quality changes last month, including simplifying some Lox tests so they run more easily on laptops. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/merge_requests/281 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/merge_requests/277
# Miscellaneous
All the usual merge request reviews and general project maintenance tasks :)
I helped with some grant writing and planning early this month.
I also helped debug a tor bootstrapping issue with PTs https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40990