[tor-project] Anti-censorship meeting notes, 27 June 2019

Thu Jun 27 17:45:18 UTC 2019

Here are our meeting logs:

http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2019/tor-meeting.2019-06-27-17.00.html

And here is our meeting pad:

ANTI-CENSORSHIP work meeting pad
--------------------------------

Next meeting: Thursday June 27th 17:00 UTC

Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 17:00 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://storm.torproject.org/shared/knaG2lEzepdsCC21DYk4dD4hRtwcUGnXQvalH1sKEAM
        * Our roadmap consists of a subset of trac tickets.
        * Note that there's a bug that causes the roadmap to load slowly.  To work around it, first click on "All boards", and then on "ROADMAP Anti-censorship team"
    * The anti-censorship team's wiki page: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/AntiCensorshipTeam
    * GetTor's roadmap: https://dip.torproject.org/anti-censorship/gettor/boards
        * Hiro is currently experimenting with gitlab.
    * Tickets that need reviews: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=needs_review&component=%5eCircumvention&col=id&col=summary&col=component&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=milestone&col=reviewer&order=priority

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----   27th June 2019  ----
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== Announcements ==

    * Sponsor 28 (RACE) next meeting will be on June 27th 1800 UTC at #tor-meeting Agenda/Notes: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-censorship-S28-keep
    * Please add your June 2019 highlights for our monthly reports here: https://pad.riseup.net/p/h4FrASe8pVEaAfmUs_IG

== Discussion ==

    * Problems with bridges. BridgeDB unusable?
        * what tickets people are working on right now?
            * 9316 BridgeDB should export statistics
            * 30441 Stop BridgeDB from handing out offline bridges
        * what needs to be done to have it usable?

    * Let's test our obfs4 setup guide by asking people on tor-relays@ to set up new obfs4 bridges?

    * snowflake webextension update? #30931 ?

== Actions ==

    *

== Interesting links ==

Censorship-Resilient Proxy Distribution Using Game Theory https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/enemy-at-the-gateways-censorship-resilient-proxy-distribution-using-game-theory/

== Updates ==

FORMAT!

Name:
    This week:
        - What you worked on this week.
    Next week:
        - What you are planning to work on next week (related to anti-censorship work).
    Help with:
         - Something you may need help with.

hiro: (gettor days are Thursday)
    This week:
    Next week:
    Past week:

phw:
  This week (2019-06-27):
        * Sent "call for new obfs4 bridges" email to tor-relays at tp.o.
            * One person contacted me directly after setting up a new bridge.  They thought the instructions worked very well.
        * Worked on #30931 so arlo, dcf, cohosh, and I can all manage our snowflake webextension
            * Arlo already submitted the extension to Firefox and Chrome!
        * Worked with more operators of broken obfs4 bridges.
        * Sent ten of BridgeDB's unallocated obfs4 bridges to activist for manual distribution.
        * Lots of work on #30441, to stop BridgeDB from handing out offline bridges.
            * The problem may have fixed itself?
            * Blacklisted 53 broken obfs4 bridges.
            * Added debug log messages and discovered bot that's scraping bridges.
        * Brainstormed obfs4 improvements over at #30716.
            * For now, we decided to understand the "long tail" of network traffic first (#30986)
            * Once we have a better understanding of the long tail, we'll continue with obfs5
            * Attended RACE call in which we discussed all of this.
        * Filed #30946 to port BridgeDB to Python 3.
        * Published blog post that introduces the anti-censorship team and our Sponsor 19 report.
            * https://blog.torproject.org/tors-new-anti-censorship-team-defending-open-internet
            * Lots of help from gaba and stephw!
        * Had a brief look at the popularity of an active probe's cipher suite over at #30500.
            * Caught two probes that had a different cipher suite; one quite common, but not the other
        * Pushed a feature branch for our BridgeDB metrics (#9316) which is now in 'needs_review'.
  Next week:
        * More RACE work (PT spec and network trace "long tail")
  Help with:
        * Try requesting different types of bridges from bridges.torproject.org and let me know if you got 0 bridges.

Gaba: (updated 2019-06-20)
   Last week:
            * tor meeting schedule intil the meeting
    This week (05/30):
            * bridgedb plan
            * sponsor 28 update

ahf
    Last week:
        - Worked on #28930
    This week:
        - Finished refactoring parts of #28930. Trying to figure out if we should begin the discussion on how PT's can report back on bootstrap info.
        - Continued to work on a tool to convert Trac tickets into Gitlab tickets.

kat5:
      Last week (May 20):
    This week (May 27):

dcf: 2019-06-27 (will miss today's meeting)
    Last week:
    Next week:
        - try the Snowflake WebExtension
        - publish post-sanitization broker logs (#30731)
    Help with:

cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2019-06-27
    Last week:
        - got snowflake client to use pion/webrtc (#28942)
        - continued investigating the fixes we need in pion for the large message drops
        - addressed dcf's feedback on the sequencing layer (#29206)
        - worked on Turn On/Off toggle for web extension (#30934)
    Next week: (AFK on Monday)
        - try to figure out if there are any popular STUN servers in places where googles are blocked
        - move forward with sequencing layer (#29206)
        - continue work on improvements to pion/webrtc (#28942)
        - webextension translations (#30310)
        - some serious snowflake dogfood
        - familiarize self with PT spec
    Help with:
            - broker stats (#21315) code review
            - review of #30934
            - review of fixes in #29206 but i can keep moving forward with it
            - review of work so far with #28942

catalyst:
    week of 06/13 (planned):
        - mostly focusing on sponsor31
    week of 06/13 (actual):
        - cleaned up (and relinquished) more of my owned tickets
        - mostly sponsor31 stuff (control.c refactoring)
    week of 06/20 (planned):
        - mostly sponsor31
    week of 06/20 (actual):
        - mostly sponsor31
        - helped ahf with some bootstrap stuff
    week of 06/27 (planned):
        - mostly sponsor31

arlolra: 2019-06-27
    Last week:
        - a bit of snowflake webextension
    This week:
        - getting the webextension published (#30931)
    Next week:
        - review #30934
    Help with:
        - fixing our websocket server implementation (#30998)