Hi all,
Here's what the anti-censorship team has been up to in April:
Snowflake ---------
* Merged Turbo Tunnel features into Snowflake. (Allows persisting a session across separate proxies.) https://bugs.torproject.org/33745 https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2020-April/045571.html
Merging into Tor Browser is pending: https://bugs.torproject.org/34043
* Implemented measures to hand out more restrictive proxies less often. https://bugs.torproject.org/33666
* Split Snowflake into two repositories(one for Go, one for the web-based proxy code). https://bugs.torproject.org/33593
* Updated pion webrtc in Tor Browser. https://bugs.torproject.org/33576
BridgeDB --------
* Moved forward with creating a feedback loop between OONI and BridgeDB. Work-in-progress code is available at: https://gitlab.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/wolpertinger https://bugs.torproject.org/32740
* Removed PGP support from BridgeDB. The feature has been broken for quite a while, is overly complex, and not particularly useful. https://bugs.torproject.org/17548
* Renamed a bunch of source code files in BridgeDB, so they no longer collide on a file system that's case insensitive. https://bugs.torproject.org/29686
* Made BridgeDB's email responder more usable. The instructions are now more clear and it will return with bridges no matter what -- even if the user's request was malformed. https://bugs.torproject.org/30941
* Improved a Python script that tests BridgeDB's email responder by periodically sending email. https://bugs.torproject.org/12802
* Made progress towards improving the robustness of BridgeDB's email autoresponder, so it no longer gets confused by Gmail's quoted-printable responses. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/33835#ticket
GetTor ------
* Fixed a bug caused by malformed email addresses. https://bugs.torproject.org/34027
* Refactored to remove duplicate code. https://bugs.torproject.org/34035
* Cleaned up logs. https://bugs.torproject.org/34061
* Fixed a bug in the service shutdown code. https://bugs.torproject.org/34062
* Removed a bunch of old GetTor code. https://bugs.torproject.org/32912
Miscellaneous -------------
* Reviewed a submission for the Tor Research Safety Board.
* Moved forward with creating a "censorship snapshot" that encodes how each country blocks Tor. Eventually, this snapshot should help Tor Browser figure out how to best circumvent in each country. https://bugs.torproject.org/28531
* Built a prototype of a lightweight censorship analyser that's meant to be run by censored users. It can help us create the censorship snapshot in #28531. https://bugs.torproject.org/30794
* Created a new mailing list for anti-censorship service outage alerts. If this interests you, you can subscribe here: https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/anti-censorship-alerts
* We organised two reading groups, in which we discussed the following two papers: https://censorbib.nymity.ch/#Wang2020a https://censorbib.nymity.ch/#Nasr2020a
Cheers, Philipp