Hello,

Thanks everyone for joining us last Saturday. Here are the meetup notes. Our next online meetup will happen at the end of January 2025. I'll announce it in January.

cheers, Gus

## Tor Relay Operator Meetup - 2024-12-07

### Phase zero, announcements

#### New WebTunnel bridges campaign

In 1 week of campaign, we achieved 50% of our goal of 200 new WebTunnel, i.e., we still need 100 new WebTunnel bridges! Check out our blog post to see how you can contribute: https://blog.torproject.org/call-for-webtunnel-bridges/

### Phase one, Ben's talk

https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5761/TorFrom-the-Dark-Web-to-the-F...

Q: Going into your research, was there any point where you were shocked? A: How open/approachable/nice people were. The "security-through-transparency" part of Tor was both interesting and shocking.

Q: Has writing the book changed the way you use the internet? A: Yes it did, and then it had the opposite effect.

I was at the Cambridge computer lab, with many people who influenced Tor and internet privacy (and who had attended every conference that Tor was presented at in the early days!) But since then, I've stopped using Tor at all. I'm doing research projects on government digital influence, so now I need to attract as much of this govt advertising to my laptop as I can, so I can study it.

Q: Did you decide to run a relay of your own after all your work

A. I think I heard him say he had helped Cambridge computer lab setup a relay.

Q: what's your definition of "Darkweb", now that you wrote a whole book on the ~topic? :P

A: Yeah, there was this chapter, "the dark net rises" (terrible pun sorry). If you look at the media, sometimes they use it to mean Tor; sometimes onion services; sometime social media; sometimes things on the clear web that are illegal. It's gone completely wild -- the iceberg diagram, which includes all the post-it notes ever written, everything not indexable by Google. These days media is describing things on Reddit as the Dark Web. Social media companies are *the* bit of the internet where basically any harm you can name happens -- the dark web name lets them off the hook, focusing the attention away from them and where the real bad stuff is.

Q: You did your PhD on Tor right? Will your professor will follow up on Tor on academic level and share the outcome with the broader public, too? A: I wrote some more papers, particularly on the discussion about whether to add padding traffic to Tor. This is a way in which the military engineering culture and the hacker culture came together. Really, all of the good content is in the book. I tried to turn everything good in the papers into less jargony versions in the book.

Q: You came up with the idea of relay operators as privacy-as-a-service. How did this idea come to you? Looking at what privacy means for different groups inside Tor. A: I have to thank Sarah Jamie Lewis of cwtch. "Privacy as a structure" -- about rewriting the technical structures of the world, the ones that provide centralization or decentralization. Undermining structures of power that underlie technical systems. When people tried to think about the politics of Tor, it comes down to power structures. But then for the operators, a lot of people referenced doing this as a *public service*. WHen you provide something in that context, it's like being a public servant. You yourself should remain neutral, not take a strong view on what people should use the network for. That came from the way relay operators are interacting with the technology day-to-day.

Q: As Tor the organization matures, it focuses on its employees, on its funding projects. There's a tension between a *community*, which values its volunteers and relay operators, vs *company*. Do you have any advice for us, either the company or the relay operators, on how to handle that tension going forward? A: It's very difficult. This tension has definitely come up in Tor's history at various points. Tor has been astonishingly good at it in the past. I think the changes that have happened in Tor in the last 4-5 years, in terms of how the community has grown, are going in the right direction. Continue to foster the community, but also build community advocacy. That produces a group of people who can help each other out -- who can advocate to ISPs, share tips, who have a voice of their own. That voice of the community becoming stronger will have tension with the Tor company, in terms of funding, changes of administration of the US. The relationship between Tor and various crypto[currency] projects lately has been a good example. You need to keep a community that is 'nice' and where people want to participate and be a part of. I can't think of a project that has handled the variety of issues Tor has faced better than Tor.

### Phase one-point-five, Next events

* Splintercon, meskio speaking - https://splintercon.net/berlin/ (December 9 - 11)

* CCC, Gus and Hiro speaking, and also more activities: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2024/hub/en/event/guardians-of-the-onion-ensu...

* There will be an *in person* relay operator meetup at CCC!

### Phase two (time permitting), general Q&A

[Ask your questions here]

Q: When can we have a release/version tag for webtunnel, so that it can be packaged? A: This is the ticket to follow: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/webtu... Q: I know, I was the one who opened it :) The question is "When" <3

Q: I started to run WebTunnel bridges on unused IP addresses. How much memory/CPU usage are expected for good WebTunnel bridges? A: a few good cores and a few gigs of ram should be plenty. A2: half a gig of ram and a single core is plenty already :D A3: be careful about bandwidth usage -- some webtunnels use up a lot of bandwidth these days especially if it's in a data center that isn't blocked in Russia or China, it could get a lot of users.

Q: Can I rate limit my webtunnel bridge? A: I think yes, by setting your usual tor rate limiting parameters. It technically won't limit what your webserver does, but it will slow down the rate at which Tor delivers / receives its data which should be close enough.

Q: Can you run webtunnel behind a CDN / Reverse proxy type setup? And should you? I worry about CDN type stuff that is outside my control storing logs etc. A: If the CDN allows websocketted traffic. (careful of CDN's that put up CAPTCHA screens as this will break things.)

Q: Can I run webtunnel bridges with separated frontend servers (reverse proxy) and backend Tor servers, on separate IP addresses? This means what the users use to connect to the bridges, and what the bridges use to connect to Tor network, would be different. A: The backend tor instance doesn't have to be on the same frontend server at all. The websocket just has to be reachable from the webserver that terminates the websocketted connection.

Q: Any news about tor.foundation? Are they legit or not? I know there was a thread on forum that wanted to post here but i can't find it anymore A: We asked them to change their confusing name. They didn't change it. They stopped answering our emails. So like other confusing projects, their next step is that they need to change their name, and only after that we will be able to engage with them.

Q: Is the webtunnel campaign shirt the same as the donation shirt, or is it a different one? A: It's a different one! The tshirt for the campaign is linked from the wiki for the campaign. You can also see the shirt sizes that we have. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/team/-/wikis/tshirts/#the-roots-...

Q: I think it would be good to have an outreach event in East Asia, where more relays are wanted A: In February some of us are going to Taipei for Rightscon, and in March Roger is going to Bangkok for FOSSASIA. Would you like to help us coordinate an east asia relay event in particular? A2: Part of the challenge there is that the Tor bandwidth authorities concentrate traffic in the "center" of the Tor network, which is Germany and the Netherlands these days, and relays far away from that will get much less use. So yes we need relays in new locations, but also we have some engineering work we need to do on our side to make good use of them. That work is ongoing but has been ongoing for years now.

On Wed, Dec 04, 2024 at 06:18:30PM -0300, gus wrote:

Hello,

Just a friendly reminder that our meetup is happening this Saturday, December 7th, 2024 at 1900 UTC.

## Agenda

1. Announcements

• New WebTunnel bridges campaign - https://blog.torproject.org/call-for-webtunnel-bridges/
• Upcoming in-person events

2. Ben Collier's book presentation & discussion

https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5761/TorFrom-the-Dark-Web-to-the-F...

## How to join

Meetup details:

• Room link: https://tor.meet.coop/gus-og0-x74-dzn
• Date & Time: Saturday, December 7th, 2024 @ 19.00 UTC
• Duration: 60 to 90 minutes
• Tor Code of Conduct: https://community.torproject.org/policies/code_of_conduct/
• Registration: No need for a registration or anything else, just use the

room link above. The room will open 10 minutes before the meetup starts.

Gus

On Thu, Nov 28, 2024 at 07:38:37PM -0300, gus wrote:

...

Dear Relay operators,

Save the date!

Our next online meetup is happening on Saturday, December 7th, 2024 at 1900 UTC[1].

I'm happy to announce that we'll have a special guest, Ben Collier, joining us to discuss his new book:"Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy."[2] (2024)

## Agenda

1. Announcements

   • New WebTunnel bridges campaign - https://blog.torproject.org/call-for-webtunnel-bridges/
   • Upcoming in-person events

2. Ben Collier's book presentation & discussion

## How to join

Meetup details:

• Room link: https://tor.meet.coop/gus-og0-x74-dzn
• Date & Time: Saturday, December 7th, 2024 @ 19.00 UTC
• Duration: 60 to 90 minutes
• Tor Code of Conduct: https://community.torproject.org/policies/code_of_conduct/
• Registration: No need for a registration or anything else, just use the

room link above. The room will open 10 minutes before the meetup starts.

## DON'T MISS SOTO

This month, the Tor team was very busy with State of the Onion (SOTO), and I'd like to invite you all to watch the videos:

• Community Day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EODNtLqD7f8

• Tor Project Teams update:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjPdReNmf_g

cheers, Gus

[1] If you're confused about UTC and your timezone, @anarcat maintains a cool project called undertime - https://gitlab.com/anarcat/undertime [2] "Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy" book is available here: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5761/TorFrom-the-Dark-Web-to-the-F...

-- The Tor Project Community Team Lead

-- The Tor Project Community Team Lead