Hi everyone,

Here's our monthly progress in anti-censorship:

Snowflake ---------

* Worked on getting Snowflake working for Onion Browser for iOS. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...

* Set up and debugged a remote probe test to determine NAT compatibility of Snowflakes. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...

* Modified the NAT type classifications of Snowflake clients to distribute proxies more evenly. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...

* Created a patch that orders Snowflake's "snowflake-ips" metrics line by the number of requests. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...

Rdsys -----

* Created a page that shows a bridge's test result. This allows operators to check if their pluggable transports work correctly. You can query your bridge status by visiting: https://bridges.torproject.org/status?id=FINGERPRINT Note that the status page currently only tells you the status of your bridge's obfs2, obfs3, obfs4, and scramblesuit. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/10 Also, the service is still experimental and occasionally offline.

* Made it possible to look up a bridge's status by providing its hashed fingerprint. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/28

* Finished documentation on rdsys's design and architecture. You can take a look at it here: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/blob/master/doc/ar... https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/16

* Researched libraries to do i18n for rdsys. The library go-i18n seems to check all of our boxes. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/11

* Filed an issue to get a Transifex resource to do i18n for rdsys. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/l10n/-/issues/40009

* Made rdsys pool bridgestrap requests to make the interaction between both services more efficient. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/24

* Made rdsys's supported resources configurable. This is important because some bridge operators set up adventurous things like their own meek, and we don't want to distribute those. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/29

Salmon ------

* Spent some time on our privacy-preserving Salmon modifications but haven't yet managed to come up with a clean implementation. More work is needed. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/21

Bridgestrap -----------

* Made bridgestrap export metrics that are now scraped by our Prometheus instance. The raw metrics are publicly accessible at: https://bridges.torproject.org/bridgestrap-metrics https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgestrap/-/issues/4

* Deployed bridgestrap on polyanthum, the host on which BridgeDB and rdsys run. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgestrap/-/issues/5

* Finally merged our SETCONF-based rework of how bridgestrap does its testing. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgestrap/-/issues/3

* Added a field to bridgestrap's test result that informs the requester when a bridge was last tested. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgestrap/-/issues/6

* Spent some time debugging why the number of functional bridges decreases as we test more bridges in parallel. More work is needed. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgestrap/-/issues/7

* Made bridgestrap's cache timeout configurable. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgestrap/-/issues/8

Other -----

* Cecylia presented the anti-censorship team's yearly progress as part of our State Of The Onion presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyWyTypRGWQ

* Added a new obfs4 default bridge. Thanks to Louis-Philippe Véronneau for operating the bridge! https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40212

* Brainstormed ways to stream bridge updates from Serge (our bridge authority) to polyanthum (the host where rdsys and bridgestrap are running). https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgestrap/-/issues/9

* Updated monit configuration to make it monitor Snowflake's probetest service and bridgestrap.

* Worked with Gus to ask a few folks to run emma in countries that we believe block some aspects of Tor.

* Philipp is going to review submissions for the DNSPRIVACY 2021 workshop. https://dnspriv21.hotcrp.com

* Sponsor 28 scrimmage and PI meeting.