[tor-reports] oct, nov, dec status reports

[Isis]

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Isis' Status Report October 2012
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I went to Brussels, Belguim, with the other ooni devs to meet with several
people from Mlab, Google, and the EU Commission. Our talks with the Mlab
people were particularly constructive, and we managed to work out the things
which ooni and Mlab each needed from each other to move forward with
deployment. Jake and Arturo and I managed to get a bit of time to ourselves as
well to talk.

Most of my ooni development work this month went to sorting out bugs in the
new twisted.trial-based API, including: a bug where ooniprobe.runTest returned
too early in certain cases, re-porting the sections of code which handle
backwards compatibility with the old API and separating the very generic parts
out into a utils file, a bit of utilities for nicer logging (and fixing a
thing where the logger logged everything twice on stdout) like making scapy's
excessive warning shut up, a problem with oonicli's
twisted.python.usage.Options parser not recognizing the test suboptions. Other
than that, my time was mostly spent testing and doing research into API design
to make sure that we weren't making any terrible mistakes with the new one.

For the bridge tests I did not put as much time into them as I have in the
past couple months, honestly mostly because I was frustrated. I did put some
work into porting the portions of the tests which were already finished, and
debugging. I also did research into NAT penetration tricks, as well as the
best current ssl/tls libraries (this has historically been a bit of a problem
in python) and settled on Jake's recommendation for tlslite after looking over
the code.

<(A)3
isis agora lovecruft



Isis' November 2012 Status Report
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I spent a few hours in a meeting with folks from GA Tech as part of the
Censorship Detection working group, discussing our different tools which we're
all developing, and various skills and data formats and interfaces and such
which we can offer to each other to make all them work together more easily. I
wasn't able to make it to Atlanta, and so we scheduled another meeting for
January which looks like it'll be in Paris or Amsterdam.

For dev work I finished porting, testing, and debugging the remainder of the
previously finished bridge tests, wrote a Makefile for dealing with getting
those of ooni's dependencies which are not available from pypi, wrote some
additions to the API to present a clean interface to test writers for
specifying within a test that for whatever reason that test should be
skipped/aborted, or that all future iterations of that test (or ones within
the same class) should be skipped. There was a bug where the inputProcessor
was only taking inputs given to it from the commandline, and I fixed that to
make sure that it would correctly take cmdline and/or file inputs.

I also went to Tunisia to attend OITP's Censorship Circumvention Summit, at
the end of the month, which I was really excited about going to because I
really wanted to hear from tech-saavy activists on the ground in N. Africa and
the Middle East what ooni and Tor could do to help them, what problems they
have, what their networks look like, how they communicate, how they would like
to communicate, security concerns they have, and anything else that they could
tell me that I might neglect to think of because I am sitting in a hackerspace
with a rodent infestation (not sure if that counts as an ivory tower...)
rather than having hellfire missiles dropped on my head.

<(A)3
isis agora lovecruft



Isis' December 2012 Status Report
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After Tunisia, I went to the University of Edinburough, Scotland, to speak
with and visit a friend who is a Professor in Economics, and is currently
researching incentivisation strategies for whistleblowing.

Most of my development time went into the template for making ooni tests which
use scapy (a packet library) and various utilities for packet generation,
cleaning up results reporter and logger, and adding a general timeout feature
for connection builds. I also made a unittests for several things I had
previously worked which did not yet have them. We seem to be about ready for
deployment on Mlab, and Dominic from Mlab set up a slice to test for any
troubles and everything went well. It shouldn't be too long before we can
start using the Mlab servers and also using them for data collection, and thus
begin the next phase of ooni's development. :D

I decided to not go to CCC...and I went to visit my dad on the day of his
surgery. When I got off the plane, I had a text saying it was cancelled and
that he's having radiation therapy instead. He seems in good spirits,
though. I hate holidays. It would have been better for my own sake to go and
see everyone I miss at CCC and have fun, and I very much regret not
going...but I think I helped my dad by visiting. He has a Tor sticker on his
refridgerator, and he said he's proud of the work I'm doing.

<(A)3
isis agora lovecruft

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