[tor-project] Anti-censorship meeting notes, 30 Apr 2020
Philipp Winter
phw at torproject.org
Thu Apr 30 19:28:28 UTC 2020
Hi all,
Here are our meeting minutes:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2020/tor-meeting.2020-04-30-17.59.html
And here is our meeting pad:
Anti-censorship work meeting pad
--------------------------------
Next meeting: Thursday April 30th 18:00 UTC
Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 18:00 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://gitlab.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/roadmap/boards
* Our roadmap consists of a subset of trac tickets. For 2020 Q1, the trac keyword is anti-censorship-roadmap-2020Q1
* Next planning session: last week of April
* The anti-censorship team's wiki page: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/AntiCensorshipTeam
* Past meeting notes can be found at: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/
* GetTor's roadmap: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/torproject/anti-censorship/gettor-project/-/boards
* Tickets that need reviews: from sponsors we are working on:
* https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor30
* https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor28
* Anti-censorship related tickets that we want other teams to fix:
* https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-tickets-keep
-------------------------
--- April 30th 2020 --
-------------------------
== Announcements ==
* We created anti-censorship-alerts at lists.tp.o for service outage alerts.
* Feel free to subscribe.
* https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/anti-censorship-alerts
* Alerts for
* gman999's sysmon instance
* prometheus instance
* nagions instances
* gettor's email autoresponder
* bridgedb's email autoresponder
* Also, send email there if any of our services are broken.
== Discussion ==
* We should monitor indicators that tell us if we're on the right track
* # of bridge users
* # of bridge users from bridges that were privately distributed
* # of bridges/snowflakes
* volume of traffic on snowflake / meek bridges
* snowflake https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/5481936581E23D2D178105D44DB6915AB06BFB7F
* meek https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/8F4541EEE3F2306B7B9FEF1795EC302F6B84DAE8
* Make it easier for people to report bugs -> gives us an idea of what users are struggling with
* Blog more and hear from users in comments
* Read frontdesk emails & get a sense of the variety of questions and how many get resolved
* Track a project's "activity" by keeping track of its commits
* Check what other people are tracking, in different contexts, and see if we can apply their indicators
* Track # of user-reported tickets
* Number of countries where vanilla Tor Browser works / doesn't work, where Tor Browser + default bridges work/doesn't work, and + obfs4.
== Actions ==
* Please add your April 2020 work highlights to our monthly team report:
* https://pad.riseup.net/p/CANAMyvGfb-wtKfzN2R_
== Interesting links ==
* https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/understanding-and-circumventing-network-censorship
* Surveillance Self-Defense: Understanding and Circumventing Network Censorship
* https://protonmail.com/blog/anti-censorship-alternative-routing/
* Protonmail will introduce a new "alternative routing" feature.
* No technical details. May be domain fronting.
== Reading group ==
* We will discuss "MassBrowser: Unblocking the Censored Web for the Masses, by the Masses" on April 30
* https://censorbib.nymity.ch/#Nasr2020a
* https://massbrowser.cs.umass.edu/
* 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 (related to anti-censorship work).
Help with:
- Something you may need help with.
phw:
This week (2020-04-30):
* Emailed a bunch of people to get an idea of meek-azure's financial situation.
* Offboarding activities.
* Addressed feedback for our lightweight censorship analyser (#30794).
* Asked for new mailing list for anti-censorship service alerts.
* Asked for Nagios alerts to be sent there (#34028).
* Reviewed #33666, #33835, and #34035.
* Continued work at wolpertinger. Added code to read serge's extrainfo descriptors.
* Started taking a look at ICLab's measurements of our default bridges.
* More talking to sysadmins to finally move our monitoring forward.
Next week:
*
Help with:
* #30794
Gaba: ()
Last week (2020-03-30):
* not much related to anti-censorship
This week (planned):
* anti-censorship retrospective
cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2020-04-30
Last week:
- so many reviews
- refactored some GetTor code (#34035)
- rebased pion-webrtc update patch in tbb (#33576)
- looked at datachannel timeout in client (#34042)
- squished some new snowflake bugs (#34049)
- update node wrtc package (#34053)
- updated snowbox to work with new repo setups
- updated snowflake web proxy
- started building snowflake for android (#28672)
- squashed some GetTor bugs (#34061, #34062, #34027)
- kept up with sponsor 28 evaluation phase
This week:
- test snowflake for android on mobile device
- set up some kind of NAT topology testing suite (#25595)
- figure out what we need to do to revive the twitter responder in GetTor (#33036)
- look at old GetTor mirrors (#33893)
- investigate #33669
- clean out and update any old tickets lying around
- help with sponsor 28 PI meeting slides
Needs help with:
- review of GetTor fixes (#34061, #34062)
juggy :
Temporary hiatus due to finals prep
This week:
- Researched XUL and dug into previous conversations around integrating Tor Launcher into Tor Browser, why porting to Web Extensions might not work, etc.
Next week:
- Implement audio captchas in moat, figure out how to reduce audio captcha request size
- Keep studying BridgeDB
Help with:
-
arlolra: 2020-04-30
Last week:
- some sporadic review
Next week:
- follow ups to #33365
- start on #31201
Help with:
- follow up review of #33365
dcf: 2020-04-30
Last week:
- merged snowflake turbotunnel branch and redeployed bridge (#33745, thanks arma and cohosh)
- removed client-side buffering from snowflake, and related refactorings (#33897, #33982, #33984, #33994, #33995, #33996, #33997, #34002, #34049, #34050, thanks cohosh and arlolra)
- filed a ticket to reduce snowflake client connection timeout (#34042)
- made a branch for updating to turbotunnel snowflake in Tor Browser (#34043)
Next week:
- patch to reduce connection timeout (#34042)
- convert snowflake turbotunnel merge (#34043) into a Tor Browser ticket
- check with Kyle about snowflake fingerprinting results
- share access to the snowflake broker CDN configuration (#30510)
Help with:
cjb: 2020-04-30
Last week:
- gonna be afk with kids
Next week:
Help with:
agix:2020-04-30
Last week:
- Incoperated phw's feedback on #33835 and #31528
Next week:
- finalize #33835 and #31528
- Pick up a new ticket
Help with:
-
catalyst: 2020-04-16
last week:
- more work on #5304 (PT outbound bind address)
- started looking at #29128 (assemble bridge line)
this week:
- more background research and work on s28/s30 tickets
thymbahutymba: 2020-04-02
Last week:
- CI/CD pipeline for multiarch docker images, which has a problem
with the apt tor version even though the apt repository have been
changed into the Dockerfile.
Next week:
Help with:
More information about the tor-project
mailing list