Hi all,

Here's the July 2020 report of Tor's anti-censorship team:

Snowflake =========

* Rolled out a feature to match up Snowflake proxies and clients based on their NAT type. This will drastically improve performance for Snowflake clients behind restrictive NATs. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...

* Added more STUN servers to default configuration in Tor Browser. This solves two issues: it allows clients to perform NAT type discovery to be matched up with more compatible proxies, and it unblocks Snowflake in areas that block access to Google's STUN servers. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...

* Adapted Snowflake CI to the new GitLab instance. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...

* Investigated proxy-go timeouts. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...

* Fixed a small bug that could cause infinite hangs in Snowflake proxies and clients. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...

* Worked on a docker container for easy deployment of Snowflake proxies. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...

* Moved forward with our Android app UI. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...

BridgeDB ========

* Fixed a critical bug that prevented BridgeDB from reloading bridge descriptors every 30 minutes, as it's supposed to. This bug significantly delayed the time until a new bridge was handed out to users. Hopefully, the patch will result in bridge operators seeing more users. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgedb/-/issues/40001

* We are spending an increasing amount of time planning and experimenting with a reimplementation of BridgeDB. The reimplementation will make it easier to integrate new components like bridgestrap and new distributors like Salmon. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgedb/-/issues/32900

* Added internal metrics to BridgeDB's metrics. You can find the latest internal metrics here: https://collector.torproject.org/recent/bridgedb-metrics/ https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgedb/-/issues/31422

* Wrote a patch that helps BridgeDB take into account bridge reachability measurements from wolpertinger. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgedb/-/issues/34260

* Fixed incorrect and missing parts in BridgeDB's metrics specification. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgedb/-/issues/40003

* Fixed a broken link in BridgeDB's README and ported BridgeDB's "make pylint" target to Python 3. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgedb/-/issues/33647

* Fixed a bug that would confuse BridgeDB when it dealt with Gmail's quoted responses. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgedb/-/issues/33835

* Made progress on creating a research plan for understanding the issues that users run into when interacting with BridgeDB. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/ux/research/-/issues/4

Miscellaneous =============

* Simplified bridgestrap's code base and fixed a bug in its cashing system. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgestrap/

* Merged a volunteer-provided bridge setup guide for Windows. https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/bridge/windows/