[tor-project] Anti-censorship meeting notes, 14 May 2020

Philipp Winter phw at torproject.org
Thu May 14 18:23:26 UTC 2020


Hi all,

Here are our meeting minutes:

http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2020/tor-meeting.2020-05-14-16.00.html

And here is our meeting pad:

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

Next meeting: Thursday May 14th 16:00 UTC

Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 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

-------------------------
---  May   14th 2020   --
-------------------------

== Announcements ==

    * Set up monit instance on phw's personal VPS. It's now sending outage alerts to anti-censorship-alerts at lists.tp.o
        * Monitoring targets available at: https://gitlab.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/monit-configuration
    * We recently got a batch of censorship measurements from our friends at ICLab. Anyone interested in analysing it? Phw tool a brief look and has some Python code to get started.

== Discussion ==

    * Roger's mail about the overlap between BridgeDB and GetTor and how maybe they should merge
   https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2020-May/000097.html
    * Run a call for testing for Snowflake
        * before or after the stable release? before: we want to ramp up users so we know we can handle a stable release
        * use cases?
            * we want to involve/share with orgas in global south. There is not strict censorship in Colombia nor Chile, but snowflake can help users who don't want to disclose the fact that they are using Tor to their ISP. So may work.
        * Do we want users to do specific tasks like visiting a website or watching a video? Do we want users to use snowflake for a period of time and report back with feedback? What is more useful?
            * Are we looking for breakage? are we looking for perceived performance?
        * lists?
            * tor-qa
            * tor-ux
            * tor-project but with **bolds** on advertising that is an alpha version
    * S30 UX work this week

== Actions ==

    *

== Interesting links ==

    * https://github.com/greatfire/envoy
        * The GreatFire folks developed a library that helps make Android apps resistant to censorship.
        * From what I understand from looking at the sample patches, it provides easy-to-use hooks to do domain fronting and HTTP proxying, generalizing their project FreeBrowser.

== Reading group ==

    * We will discuss "Salmon: Robust Proxy Distribution for Censorship Circumvention" on May 14
        * https://censorbib.nymity.ch/#Douglas2016a
        * 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?

Roger's notes for Salmon design questions:
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2020-May/000100.html

== Updates ==

Name:
    This week:
        - What you worked on this week.
    Next week:
        - What you are planning to work on next week.
    Help with:
         - Something you need help with.

phw:
  This week (2020-05-14):
        * Set up monit on my VPS and configured it to send outage alerts to our list.
            * https://gitlab.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/monit-configuration
            * Tests everything except BridgeDB's and GetTor's autoresponders.
        * Some interaction with OONI to move forward with BridgeDB feedback loop.
            * Syncing MetaDB is too involved; will download raw measurements from S3.
        * Reviewed onionperf Python 3 port.
        * Sponsor 30 roadmap maintenance.
        * Reviewed #33835.
        * Filed #34154 to extend BridgeDB's BlockedBridges SQLite table.
        * Attended DARPA PI meeting (RACE) remotely.
        * Deployed #33945 test branch on BridgeDB.  No sirens so far.
        * Quite a bit of progress with wolpertinger.
            * API end point live at https://bridges.torproject.org/wolpertinger/fetch
        * Summarised future plans with BridgeDB and posted them to anti-censorship team list.
        * Updated our docker bridge setup guide after a user in #tor pointed out an issue.
  Next week:
        *
  Help with:
        * Let me know your smart thoughts on BridgeDB's future:
            * https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2020-May/000096.html
        * #34212

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

cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2020-05-14
Last week:
    - GSoC things
        - work on broker documentation (#34198), snowbox, snowflake READMEs
    - read dcf's plans for multiplexing (#25723)
    - started on using STUN servers for NAT type discovery (#34129)
    - writing up a funding proposal for GetTor
    - so many sponsor 28 meetings (all day Monday, Tuesday, part of Wednesday)
    - created ticket to make new snowflake repo for Hashik's GSoC work (#34222)
This week:
    - Continue work on STUN servers (#34129 and #25591)
    - More work on reviving the twitter responder in GetTor (#33036, #27330)
    - look at old GetTor mirrors (#33893)
    - investigate #33669
    - Follow up on discussions of debian obfs4proxy package
    - translations?
Needs help with:
    - review of GetTor twitter fixes (#27330)
    - creation of snowflake repo (#34222) from git-admin

juggy :
    This week:
        - Dig into the algorithm for how BridgeDB distributes bridges
    Next week:
        - Implement audio captchas in moat, figure out how to reduce audio captcha request size
        - Keep studying BridgeDB to write architectural overview
    Help with:


arlolra: 2020-05-07
    Last week:
        - webext repo versioning / publishing #34140, #34126, #34132, #34127
    Next week:
        - follow ups to #33365
        - start on #31201
    Help with:
        -


dcf: 2020-05-14
    Last week:
        - reviewed fix for Chrome proxy hang (#31278)
    Next week:
        - check with Kyle about snowflake fingerprinting results
        - share access to the snowflake broker CDN configuration (#30510)
    Help with:



agix:2020-05-14
    Last week:
        - Started work on #27984
    Next week:
        - Submit a fix for #27984
    Help with:
        - Review of #31528


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:



More information about the tor-project mailing list