[tor-project] Anti-censorship meeting notes, 2021 November 11

[Cecylia Bocovich]

Hi everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:

http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2021/tor-meeting.2021-11-11-15.59.html

and our meeting pad:

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

Next meeting: Thursday November 11th 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.

== Announcements ==

     we will be posting monthly reports on the new discourse forum

     https://forum.torproject.net/


== Discussion ==

     Staging and deployments of rdsys/BridgeDB

     there are a lot of big changes coming to our deployment of 
BridgeDB, we want to make sure it's thoroughly tested in a production 
environment

     polyanthum (the machine that hosts BridgeDB) is sort of a mess 
right now

     decision to talk to sysadmin team about container-based deployment 
solutions

     Blocking of shadowsocks in China

     some background info: https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/69

     blocking happens by port

     we should check whether our bridges are being blocked by port 
instead of by IP like we assumed

     if so we might be able to simply change bridge ports instead of IPs 
for our rotating bridge idea


== Actions ==



== Interesting links ==

 
https://ooni.org/post/2021-investigating-internet-shutdowns-mozilla-telemetry/

     https://aclanthology.org/venues/nlp4if/

     Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom (NLP4IF)


== Reading group ==

     We will discuss "Measuring QQMail's automated email censorship in 
China" on 2021-11-11

     https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3473604.3474560

     https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/95 summary

     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.
     Help with:

          - Something you need help with.


cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2021-11-11
Last week:
     - updated snowflake docker image on Dockerhub
     - looked into policy updates for addons (snowflake-webext#34)
     - prep for SOTO
     - onboarding tasks
     - bumped snowflake library version
     - more work on snowflake + shadow simulations
     - onboarding tasks
This week:
     - automate blocking detection for rotating IP bridges 
(censorship-analysis#40020)
     - more snowflake performance work (snowflake#40026)
     - post monthly report on new forum + mailing list
Needs help with:

arlolra: 2021-08-12

     Last week:

     - Migrate to v3 of the webextension manifest

     Next week:

     - Maybe get back to snowflake-webext #10

     - Write up the pitch for our use case for supporting creating 
PeerConnections in background service workers 
https://github.com/w3c/webrtc-extensions/issues/77

     Help with:

     -


dcf: 2021-11-10 (will be absent 2021-11-11)

     Last week:

     - posted graphs of users in Turkmenistan 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40030#note_2759213

     - started a discussion on upcoming changes to Mozilla add-ons 
policy and how it might affect the Snowflake WebExtension 
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2021-November/000198.html 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake-webext/-/issues/34

     Next week:

     Help with:


agix:2021-11-04

     Last week:

     -

     Next week:

     -Adjust BridgeDB Patch to Gitlab

     -Start with rdsys issue#40 (twitter gettor distributor)

     Help with:

     -


hanneloresx: 2021-3-4

     Last week:

     - Submitted MR for bridgestrap issue #14

     Next week:

     - Finish bridgestrap #14

     - Find new issue to work on

     Help with:

     -


maxb: 2021-09-23

     Last week:

     - Worked on 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40054 
re: utls for broker negotiation

     - Had conversation with someone about upstream utls http round 
tripper https://github.com/refraction-networking/utls/pull/74

     - Too busy with work :/

     Next week:

     - _Really_ want to get a PR for utls round tripper


meskio: 2021-11-11

     Last week:

     - local testing and final fixes bridgedb using rdsys (bridgedb!23)

     - many rdsys fixes on how bridge authority files are used (rdsys!17)

     - review snowflake periodic nat check (snowflake!62)

     - mentoring a new contributor for BridgeDB (bridgedb#40030)

     - snowflake proxy docker test in rpi (docker-snowflake-proxy#2)

     Next week:

          - Improve bridgedb email for people who type their bridges 
(bridgedb#40028

     - improve bridgestrap manage of the cache (bridgestrap#27)


Shelikhoo: 2021-11-11
    Last Week:
        - [Merge Request] Add S3 backend support for gettor updater 
(rdsys!18)
        - [Merge Request] Periodic NAT Type Measurement Support 
(snowflake!62)
        - [Discussion] Add callbacks in the client for key events during 
snowflake connections (snowflake#40076)
        - [Discussion] Nondetermterisic Unit Testing Result Created by 
TestImapExistingInbox (snowflake#68)
        - [Discussion] Is there a better moat/snowflake SNI than 
cdn.sstatic.net? (rdsys#40068)
    Last Week:
        - Add Google backend support for gettor updater