[tor-project] Anti-censorship meeting notes, 30 Apr 2020

Philipp Winter phw at torproject.org
Thu Apr 30 19:28:28 UTC 2020


Hi all,

Here are our meeting minutes:

http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2020/tor-meeting.2020-04-30-17.59.html

And here is our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship work meeting pad
--------------------------------

Next meeting: Thursday April 30th 18:00 UTC

Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 18:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC (channel is logged while meetings are in progress).

== Goal of this meeting ==

Weekly checkin about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor.
Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at Tor.

== Links to Useful documents ==

    * Our anti-censorship roadmap: https://gitlab.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/roadmap/boards
        * Our roadmap consists of a subset of trac tickets. For 2020 Q1, the trac keyword is anti-censorship-roadmap-2020Q1
        * Next planning session: last week of April
    * The anti-censorship team's wiki page: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/AntiCensorshipTeam
    * Past meeting notes can be found at: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/
    * GetTor's roadmap: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/torproject/anti-censorship/gettor-project/-/boards
    * Tickets that need reviews:  from sponsors we are working on:
        * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor30
        * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor28
    * Anti-censorship related tickets that we want other teams to fix:
        * https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-tickets-keep

-------------------------
---  April 30th 2020   --
-------------------------

== Announcements ==

    * We created anti-censorship-alerts at lists.tp.o for service outage alerts.
        * Feel free to subscribe.
            * https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/anti-censorship-alerts
                * Alerts for
                    * gman999's sysmon instance
                    * prometheus instance
                    * nagions instances
                        * gettor's email autoresponder
                        * bridgedb's email autoresponder
        * Also, send email there if any of our services are broken.

== Discussion ==

    * We should monitor indicators that tell us if we're on the right track
        * # of bridge users
            * # of bridge users from bridges that were privately distributed
        * # of bridges/snowflakes
            * volume of traffic on snowflake / meek bridges
                * snowflake https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/5481936581E23D2D178105D44DB6915AB06BFB7F
                * meek https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/8F4541EEE3F2306B7B9FEF1795EC302F6B84DAE8
        * Make it easier for people to report bugs -> gives us an idea of what users are struggling with
        * Blog more and hear from users in comments
        * Read frontdesk emails & get a sense of the variety of questions and how many get resolved
        * Track a project's "activity" by keeping track of its commits
        * Check what other people are tracking, in different contexts, and see if we can apply their indicators
        * Track # of user-reported tickets
        * Number of countries where vanilla Tor Browser works / doesn't work, where Tor Browser + default bridges work/doesn't work, and + obfs4.

== Actions ==

    * Please add your April 2020 work highlights to our monthly team report:
        * https://pad.riseup.net/p/CANAMyvGfb-wtKfzN2R_

== Interesting links ==

    * https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/understanding-and-circumventing-network-censorship
        * Surveillance Self-Defense: Understanding and Circumventing Network Censorship
    * https://protonmail.com/blog/anti-censorship-alternative-routing/
        * Protonmail will introduce a new "alternative routing" feature.
        * No technical details. May be domain fronting.

== Reading group ==

    * We will discuss "MassBrowser: Unblocking the Censored Web for the Masses, by the Masses" on April 30
        * https://censorbib.nymity.ch/#Nasr2020a
        * https://massbrowser.cs.umass.edu/
        * Questions to ask and goals to have:
            * What aspects of the paper are questionable?
            * Are there immediate actions we can take based on this work?
            * Are there long-term actions we can take based on this work?
            * Is there future work that we want to call out, in hopes that others will pick it up?

== Updates ==

Name:
    This week:
        - What you worked on this week.
    Next week:
        - What you are planning to work on next week (related to anti-censorship work).
    Help with:
         - Something you may need help with.

phw:
  This week (2020-04-30):
        * Emailed a bunch of people to get an idea of meek-azure's financial situation.
        * Offboarding activities.
        * Addressed feedback for our lightweight censorship analyser (#30794).
        * Asked for new mailing list for anti-censorship service alerts.
            * Asked for Nagios alerts to be sent there (#34028).
        * Reviewed #33666, #33835, and #34035.
        * Continued work at wolpertinger. Added code to read serge's extrainfo descriptors.
        * Started taking a look at ICLab's measurements of our default bridges.
        * More talking to sysadmins to finally move our monitoring forward.
  Next week:
        *
  Help with:
        * #30794

Gaba: ()
   Last week (2020-03-30):
        * not much related to anti-censorship
    This week (planned):
        * anti-censorship retrospective

cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2020-04-30
Last week:
    - so many reviews
    - refactored some GetTor code (#34035)
    - rebased pion-webrtc update patch in tbb (#33576)
    - looked at datachannel timeout in client (#34042)
    - squished some new snowflake bugs (#34049)
    - update node wrtc package (#34053)
    - updated snowbox to work with new repo setups
    - updated snowflake web proxy
    - started building snowflake for android (#28672)
    - squashed some GetTor bugs (#34061, #34062, #34027)
    - kept up with sponsor 28 evaluation phase
This week:
    - test snowflake for android on mobile device
    - set up some kind of NAT topology testing suite (#25595)
    - figure out what we need to do to revive the twitter responder in GetTor (#33036)
    - look at old GetTor mirrors (#33893)
    - investigate #33669
    - clean out and update any old tickets lying around
    - help with sponsor 28 PI meeting slides
Needs help with:
    - review of GetTor fixes (#34061, #34062)

juggy :
    Temporary hiatus due to finals prep
    This week:
        - Researched XUL and dug into previous conversations around integrating Tor Launcher into Tor Browser, why porting to Web Extensions might not work, etc.
    Next week:
        - Implement audio captchas in moat, figure out how to reduce audio captcha request size
        - Keep studying BridgeDB
    Help with:
    -


arlolra: 2020-04-30
    Last week:
        - some sporadic review
    Next week:
        - follow ups to #33365
        - start on #31201
    Help with:
        - follow up review of #33365


dcf: 2020-04-30
    Last week:
        - merged snowflake turbotunnel branch and redeployed bridge (#33745, thanks arma and cohosh)
        - removed client-side buffering from snowflake, and related refactorings (#33897, #33982, #33984, #33994, #33995, #33996, #33997, #34002, #34049, #34050, thanks cohosh and arlolra)
        - filed a ticket to reduce snowflake client connection timeout (#34042)
        - made a branch for updating to turbotunnel snowflake in Tor Browser (#34043)
    Next week:
        - patch to reduce connection timeout (#34042)
        - convert snowflake turbotunnel merge (#34043) into a Tor Browser ticket
        - check with Kyle about snowflake fingerprinting results
        - share access to the snowflake broker CDN configuration (#30510)
    Help with:

cjb: 2020-04-30
   Last week:
    - gonna be afk with kids
   Next week:
   Help with:


agix:2020-04-30
    Last week:
        - Incoperated phw's feedback on #33835 and #31528
    Next week:
        - finalize #33835 and #31528
        - Pick up a new ticket
    Help with:
        -


catalyst: 2020-04-16
    last week:
        - more work on #5304 (PT outbound bind address)
        - started looking at #29128 (assemble bridge line)
this week:
        - more background research and work on s28/s30 tickets

thymbahutymba: 2020-04-02
    Last week:
        - CI/CD pipeline for multiarch docker images, which has a problem
          with the apt tor version even though the apt repository have been
          changed into the Dockerfile.
    Next week:
    Help with:



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