[tor-reports] Trip Report: GSoC Mentor Summit

[Jacob Appelbaum]

Damian Johnson:
> * Adriano and Luis from Umit
> 
> Last year Adriano showed me Open Monitor
> (http://www.openmonitor.org/), a censorship detector written in
> python. Sounds familiar? I thought so too, and tried a few times to
> get them to talk with Ooni Probe and vice versa without success. My
> impression is that they're UI developers (a skillset we sorely lack in
> the tor project) with a rather unscalable backend, while Ooni Probe's
> backend is far more mature but lacks any sort of UI for rendering real
> time censorship information.
> 

I keep hearing that but I haven't seen any code - their website still
says a release is on the way. Did you see working code?

I agree that we need some UI love - but I think it depends on the user
audience - that is - in an ideal world, they'd just code to OONI specs
and output in a file format that is OONI friendly. Heck, they could even
send it to MLab in an ideal world. Or first to their own servers and
then to MLab. The goal is that we have unified test *definitions* and a
common taxonomy. It doesn't matter if ten people implement the same
thing - other than the obvious argument of wasted effort, which does not
apply here. Specifically, I think it doesn't apply because *if ten
people confirm that X is happening* - we're better off! It sure sucks to
have to waste that effort at all but well, censorship - what a
frustrating waste, right? :)

> I made another stab at getting the two projects to talk, after which
> the meeting took a weird turn with Adriano arguing that 'some
> censorship is good'. Evidently they decided that Open Monitor won't
> look for censorship concerning 'porn or terrorism'. I argued that this
> was a slippery slope and that censorship monitoring shouldn't try to
> pass a moral judgment on the content being censored, but after a time
> it was clear that we were talking past each other.
> 

Good thing it will be free software! Overall, I find your report back on
this topic utterly depressing.

It really just makes me sad that people working on these kind of issues
have failed to consider these core issues in a human rights frame work.
To make a specific moral judgment here without considering that we have
no idea what makes porn or terrorism in Uganda, the US, Iraq, Australia,
Brazil, Iceland, etc, is just... gah.

Thanks for presenting a reasonable case and I'm sorry that it didn't go
so well.

> I still think that we should leverage their UI expertise, but that's
> up to the Ooni Probe devs.
> 

I generally agree but well, where is the code? Also - their license is
unclear as I can't see which licenses they're using specifically for
which component, etc.

All the best,
Jake