[tor-project] Cross-team OONI and Tor Browser project: default bridge checking

[Roger Dingledine]

On Sat, Nov 19, 2016 at 07:17:41PM -0800, David Fifield wrote:
> There's also this recent ticket for reachability-only testing of default
> bridges:
> https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe/issues/652

Ah ha, right, your experiments with measuring blocking of default bridges
totally tie into this one.

I think the things that I want beyond what you want are:

* Actually seeing if Tor works using the obfs bridge. In this case,
the bridge address is accepting the TCP connection and then immediately
hanging up -- it's like there's some proxy in front of the obfsproxy,
so *something* answers, but it sure isn't obfsproxy. The goal here would
be to learn if it's broken, rather than to learn if it's being interfered
with, so maybe that will make measurement less complicated.

* I want the Tor Browser team to get involved with knowing how the tests
work, knowing that they're happening, and having some way of noticing
when the tests say that something has broken. Otherwise there will be
knowledge inside some OONI data set somewhere that says a bridge stopped
working, but we won't have anybody in place to close the loop and *do*
something about it.

Though actually, there's some room for us to realize that it should
instead be the Network team that steps in here. Or perhaps for both the
Tor Browser team and the Network team to say that this topic isn't in
their area. That outcome would be great to recognize and tackle too,
since it needs to be in *somebody's* area.

--Roger