[tor-project] Anti-Censorship Team Meeting Notes, 14 Feb 2019

[Alexander Færøy]

Hello.

The weekly anti-censorship team meeting took place earlier today. The IRC log
of the meeting can be found at

http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2019/tor-meeting.2019-02-14-19.58.log.txt

We had three discussion topics for the meeting this week, but only managed to
do two of them before we ran out of time:

  - How do we kick off the NGO discussion and what do we want to do
    there: We need to get some help with (among other) how to test for
    connectivity issues with bridges from different locations in the
    world. We decided to do a discussion on IRC before our next
    anti-censorship team meeting and discuss this through about our next
    steps.

  - Snowflake Protocol discussion: cohosh and ahf presented some notes
    from the Brussels network-team meeting about some possible
    enhancements to the Snowflake protocols between bridge and broker as
    well as proxy and broker. We would like to be able to collect some
    usage metrics from the proxies to see which locations people are
    successfully connecting from (like Tor's GeoIP summaries in relay
    descriptors). We had a lot of items on this list and we agreed that
    we cannot do all of them, but we should do some of them to the point
    where the protocol becomes more extensible in the future. Ensuring
    that the system doesn't go down when the broker goes down was also
    something we want to look into (availability of the entire system).

    The aforementioned protocol notes are available at
    https://github.com/ahf/snowflake-notes/blob/master/Protocol.markdown

We postponed the following item to next week:

  - Pluggable Transport Gathering before our next Tor Meeting.

Please read the meeting IRC minutes if you want to read the full
discussion that took place.

Next meeting is going to take place in #tor-meeting on OFTC at the 22nd
of February at 20:00 UTC. See you there!

Weekly Check-Ins:

Gaba:
    Last week (02/07):
    - digitalize roadmap from hackweek

    This week (02/14):
    - finally go through kat's report and add comments

dgoulet:
  This week:
    - Going over BridgeDB infrastructure with sysrqb.
    - Got commit access to bridgedb.git and ssh access to the machine where it 
      is running.
    - Documenting everything in the process!

ahf:
    Last week (2019/02/07):
    - Relax a bit after our meeting.
    - Follow up on everything from the meeting: look at roadmapped tickets, etc.
    - Continue with architecture document.
    - Figure out where we should begin with Snowflake: code reviews, repositories, etc.
    - Do the goptlibext library after discussing with dcf on #28940
    This week (2019/02/14):
    - Sounds like we'll get the Gitlab instance very soon now.
    - Uploaded the goptlibext library to https://github.com/ahf/goptlibext/ and said OK to DCF's Log matches for gotptlib in 28940.
    - Brainstorm with cohosh about the Snowflake protocol: https://github.com/ahf/snowflake-notes/blob/master/Protocol.markdown
    - Broker architecture draft document at https://github.com/ahf/snowflake-notes/blob/master/Broker.markdown (these two will move off GH as soon as we have the GL)
    - Lots of reviews in the network team backlog due to us being AFK to Brussels
    To do:
      - Look at Kat's report #2

kat5:
    Last week (Feb 4, 2019):
       - going over new tickets (since Brussels) to figure out what to integrate into report 2
    This week (Feb 11, 2019):
       - More work on new tickets (since Brussels) for report 2
       - great input from cohosh on some tickets!
       - waiting for some great input from sysrqb :-) 
       - had hoped to be finished with the Snowflake tickets, at least, but I'm not
    - will check in what I have before I go away
    Next week (Feb 18, 2019):
    - away (at FC)
    - will be working part of the time that I'm away
    Help with:
    - private bridge guide for NGOs (hold off until we figure out a strategy for making set-up easy)
    - not sure where this is nor what should heppen next

dcf: 2019-02-14
    Last week:
        - snowflake sysadmin (#29308, thanks cohosh)
        - patch for LOG support in goptlib (#28940, thanks ahf)
        - port of meek-http-helper to WebExtension, no domain fronting or proxy support yet (https://bugs.torproject.org/29347#comment:9 )
        - opened ticket for meek with uTLS in Tor Browser (#29430)
    This week:
        - domain fronting and proxy support for meek-http-helper WebExtension
    Help with:

cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2019-02-14
    Last week (planned):
        - Come up with a definite plan for obfs4 reachability tests
        - Continue getting up to speed on snowflake
        - Start on Snowflake tasks
    Last week (actual):
        - started on Snowflake protocol specification design with ahf
        - started putting together a local networked test environment for snowflake
        - some reviews and getting familiar with snowflake code
    Next week (plan):
        - Continue work on Snowflake protocol specification
        - Finish networked test environment and get other people to test it out
        - read some papers suggested by phw RE obfs4 reachability in China to come up with testing plan

catalyst:
    week of 2019-02-04 (2019-W06) (planned):
        - recovery from travel
        - maybe look at #28925 some more
    week of 2019-02-04 (2019-W06) (actual):
        - recovery from travel
        - mostly no sponsor19 stuff
    week of 2019-02-11 (2019-W07) (planned):
        - reviews
        - #28925

Cheers,
Alex.

-- 
Alexander Færøy