[tor-project] Anti-censorship team monthly report: May 2020

Philipp Winter phw at torproject.org
Mon Jun 1 19:35:10 UTC 2020


Hi all,

Here's what the anti-censorship team has been up to in May 2020:

Snowflake
=========

* Tor Browser 9.5a13, released on May 22, has a major usability
  improvement in Snowflake that makes it possible to migrate a
  connection to a new temporary proxy when the one you are using goes
  offline.  This makes it more likely that a Snowflake connection will
  work in the first place, and lets Snowflake be used for a longer time.
  <https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-95a13>
  <https://bugs.torproject.org/34043>

* Started a GSoC project to implement an Android Snowflake proxy app.
  <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/SnowflakeProxyAndroid>

* Started implementing workarounds for NAT incompatibility between
  snowflake proxies and clients.
  <https://bugs.torproject.org/34129>

* Implemented Android reproducible build of snowflake clients.
  <https://bugs.torproject.org/28672>

* Fixed a bug that resulted in Chrome proxies hanging.
  <https://bugs.torproject.org/31278>

GetTor
======

* Fixed a problem where GetTor got into an infinite email loop with
  other autoresponders.
  <https://bugs.torproject.org/34286>

* Fixed some bugs in the GetTor twitter responder, bringing it closer to
  being fixed.
  <https://bugs.torproject.org/27330>

BridgeDB
========

* Made steady progress on wolpertinger, which helps BridgeDB build a
  feedback loop with OONI (and potentially other censorship measurement
  platforms).  OONI finished its part of the implementation, and can now
  request bridges from wolpertinger's API.  Wolpertinger then fetches
  OONI's test results from its S3 bucket and writes them back to
  BridgeDB's SQLite database.
  <https://bugs.torproject.org/32740>
  <https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/wolpertinger>

* Summarised plans for BridgeDB's future:
  <https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2020-May/000096.html>

* Wrote a blog post on our most recent BridgeDB 0.10.1 release:
  <https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-bridgedb-010-1>

* Finished monitoring tool that periodically sends email to BridgeDB's
  autoresponder to make sure that it's still working.
  <https://bugs.torproject.org/12802>

* Removed "chatspeak" references across BridgeDB's UI.
  <https://bugs.torproject.org/31528>

* Extended BridgeDB's minimalistic SQL table for blocked bridges.
  <https://bugs.torproject.org/34154>

* Updated BridgeDB's user interface with the latest translations from
  Transifex.  Thanks to everyone who helped translate BridgeDB to
  different languages!

* Fixed a bug that would break BridgeDB's email autoresponder after a
  while.
  <https://bugs.torproject.org/33945>

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

* Set up a monit instance that now monitors our anti-censorship
  infrastructure.  Outage alerts are sent to the anti-censorship-alerts
  mailing list.
  <https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/monit-configuration>
  <https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/anti-censorship-alerts>

* Updated our bridge setup guide for docker after a user pointed out an
  issue.
  <https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/bridge/docker/>


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