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

Thu Jan 30 18:46:31 UTC 2020

Here are our meeting minutes:

http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2020/tor-meeting.2020-01-30-17.59.html

And here is our meeting pad:

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

Next meeting: Thursday January 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://dip.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/roadmap/boards
        * Our roadmap consists of a subset of trac tickets.
    * The anti-censorship team's wiki page: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/AntiCensorshipTeam
    * Past meeting's notes can be found at: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/
    * GetTor's roadmap: https://dip.torproject.org/groups/torproject/anti-censorship/gettor-project/-/boards
    * Tickets that need reviews: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=needs_review&component=%5eCircumvention&col=id&col=summary&col=component&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=milestone&col=reviewer&order=priority
    * Projects 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

-------------------------
--- January 30th 2020 ---
-------------------------

== Announcements ==

    *

== Discussion ==

    * Kyle Undergrad Thesis: Fingerprintability of Snowflake
    * Want to be auto-copied on any Circumvention subcategory on trac? Current config:
        * Circumvention:                     cohosh, phw
        * Circumvention/BridgeDB:            cohosh, phw
        * Circumvention/Censorship analysis: cohosh, phw, dcf
        * Circumvention/Obfs4:               cohosh, phw
        * Circumvention/Pluggable transport: cohosh, phw
        * Circumvention/Snowflake:           cohosh, phw, arlolra, dcf
        * Circumvention/meek:                cohosh, phw, dcf

== Actions ==

    * Please add your monthly highlights to our january 2020 report
        * https://pad.riseup.net/p/qSHmkenLXX5yE0pW3_2y

== Interesting links ==

    * NDSS'20 proceedings are out and have several censorship-related papers: https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss2020/accepted-papers/
        * "Decentralized Control: A Case Study of Russia"
            * https://censoredplanet.org/russia
            * https://censoredplanet.org/assets/russia.pdf
            * https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/20
        * "Fingerprinting Network Censorship Boxes at Global Scale"
        * "Detecting Probe-resistant Proxies"
        * "SwarmProxy: Unblocking the Censored Web for the Masses"
        * "SymTCP: Eluding Stateful Deep Packet Inspection with Automated Discrepancy Discovery"
    * ICLab got into S&P'20:
        * https://people.cs.umass.edu/~phillipa/papers/oakland2020.pdf

== 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.

Hiro: (last updated before 2020-01-09)
    Started restoring Twitter Responder.
        When retrieving tweets I need to check for new tweets only otherwise Gettor will end up responding to old back log and already answered messages. <-- is this #27330 ?
    Next Week:
      - Work on gettor specs <-- Is this #3781?
      - More with review of strings and website content and translation

phw:
  This week (2020-01-30):
        * Roadmap post-processing (e.g., formalising goal statements)
        * Asked for letters of support for our NSF TTP grant
        * Worked on bridge campaign retrospective (#33007)
        * More work on porting BridgeDB to Python 3 (#30946)
            * Several issues remained after Damian's great work because some tests are only run in CI env
            * ...and some issues only emerge when you actually run the thing.
        * Worked on Sponsor 30 report
        * Provided simple mockup design for new Relay Search item (#33008)
        * Took a brief look at the location of bridges for Sponsor 28
            * Barely any in traditional cloud infrastructure (Amazon, Google, etc.)
            * Many hosted on VPS systems (Digital Ocean, OVH, Hetzner, ...)
            * Many hosted behind residential connections (long tail)
        * Worked on making BridgeDB CAPTCHAs more usable (#24607)
            * Forked isis's gimp-captcha, made it work with modern APIs, and made CAPTCHAs easier
            * Deployed a batch of new CAPTCHAs to BridgeDB
        * Reviewed OONI's design mockup for its new Tor test
            * Helped Simone figure out what exactly OONI should test
            * https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/967
        * Worked on a bunch of simple BridgeDB documentation fixes (#31427)
        * Fixed a race condition in bridgestrap
  Next week:
        * Take a look at BridgeDB metrics to see if new CAPTCHAs helped users
        * Hopefully finish Python 3 port
        * Write a summary of our current BridgeDB distribution mechanisms and brainstorm new ones
  Help with:
        * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/31872
        * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/31427

Gaba: ()
   Last week (Jan 27nd):
    This week (planned):
            * sponsor 30 report

cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2019-01-30
Last week:
    - grant revising
    - checked in on censorship measurements again
    - implemented snowflake throughput checks (#32938)
    - finish up localization fix for gettor (#33002)
    - started looking at all snowflake measurements collected to measure censorship and throughput and analyzing pcaps for clues of why proxies sometimes don't work (#32545)
    - reviewed snowflake refactors (#33100 and #33040)
    - review #33038, #31872, #31427

This week:
    - UI mock up for snowflake throughput check (#32938)
    - started some recurring throughput tests for snowflake (#32545)
    - Aggregate and write up a report of snowflake throughput changes
    - send grant to some external reviewers
    - maybe pick up gettor email body localization ticket (#28233)

Needs help with:
    - review of #31971 (from tor browser team, in progress)
    - review of #33002

arlolra: 2020-01-30
    Last week:
        - started on #19026
    Next week:
        - read up on turbo tunnel
        - continue with #19026
    Help with:
        -

dcf: 2020-01-30
    Last week:
        - turbo tunnel in Snowflake
        - Snowflake refactoring and code quality improvements (#33040, #33100, thanks cohosh for review)
    Next week:
        - turbo tunnel in Snowflake
        - do Let's Encrypt upgrade for Snowflake bridge (#32964)
    Help with:
        - review of #33038, representation of timeouts

cjb: 2019-01-30
   Last week:
    - put up a patch for #31011
   Next week:
    - would like to find out more about Snowflake + Android + Golang, since I've got some
      experience doing Android + Golang.
   Help with:
    - review of #31011 (perhaps teor)

agix:2020-01-30
    Last week:
        -Started reading up on all the received ressources from phw
        -Started with #31426
    Next week:
        -Work further on #31426
        -Start with #31967
    Help with:
        -I will definitely have some questions and the need for some help next week ^^