[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes 27 February 2020

Thu Feb 27 18:40:32 UTC 2020

Here is our meeting log:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2020/tor-meeting.2020-02-27-17.59.html

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship work meeting pad
--------------------------------

Next meeting: Thursday February 27th 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://dip.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

    The anti-censorship team's wiki page:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/AntiCensorshipTeam

    Past meeting's notes can be found at:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/

    GetTor's roadmap:
https://dip.torproject.org/groups/torproject/anti-censorship/gettor-project/-/boards

    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

    Projects 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

-------------------------
--- February 27th 2020 --
-------------------------

== Announcements ==

== Discussion ==

    - We want to run a session during IFF to get people to circumvent
censorship. We were thinking of getting people to connect to a censored
network, e.g by providing a router that censors in different way; and
try to access the internet or some sites or something. We would need
some advice/help to set something like this up -- Pili & Gus

    - Source code from 2017 experiment (few hundred users, Windows only,
simulated censorship with a local firewall, used an instrumented Tor
Browser to record mouse clicks):

    - https://github.com/lindanlee/PETS2017-paper

    - see experiment/firewall.bat and experiment/gen-firewall

    - see the screenrecording directory

    - see the session/pre/videos directory for videos and detailed notes
of a pre-study

    - see the setup directory for other setup notes (don't remember what
exactly)

    - paper: https://censorbib.nymity.ch/#Lee2017a

    - Source code from 2015 experiment (5 users, one on one, no
censorship, just browser usability):

    - git clone
https://www.bamsoftware.com/repo.eecs.berkeley.edu/tor-ux.git/ (see
README and tasks.html)

    - videos: https://people.torproject.org/~dcf/uxsprint2015/

    - blog post: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/ux-sprint-2015-wrapup

== Actions ==

== Interesting links ==

    NDSS 2020 PDFs are online
https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-program/2020-program/

    "Detecting Probe-resistant Proxies"

https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/detecting-probe-resistant-proxies/

    https://sfrolov.io/papers/ndss20-frolov.pdf

    "Decentralized Control: A Case Study of Russia"

https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/decentralized-control-a-case-study-of-russia/

    https://censoredplanet.org/russia

    https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/20

    "Measuring the Deployment of Network Censorship Filters at Global Scale"

https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/measuring-the-deployment-of-network-censorship-filters-at-global-scale/

    "SymTCP: Eluding Stateful Deep Packet Inspection with Automated
Discrepancy Discovery"

https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/symtcp-eluding-stateful-deep-packet-inspection-with-automated-discrepancy-discovery/

    "MassBrowser: Unblocking the Censored Web for the Masses, by the Masses"

https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/massbrowser-unblocking-the-censored-web-for-the-masses-by-the-masses/

== 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.

Hiro: (last updated before 2020-01-09)
    Started restoring Twitter Responder.

        When retrieving tweets I need to check for new tweets only
otherwise Gettor will end up responding to old back log and already
answered messages. <-- is this #27330 ?

    Next Week:
      - Work on gettor specs <-- Is this #3781?
      - More with review of strings and website content and translation

phw:
  This week (2020-02-20):

    Will be gone until our Mar 12 meeting.

    Merged and deployed BridgeDB's Python 3 port (#30946).

    Retired scramblesuit, obfs3, and fte from BridgeDB.

    Refactored email distributor check tool for #12802.

    Wrote OONI patches for new default bridge.

    Reviewed #23225.

  Next week:

    Write a summary of our current BridgeDB distribution mechanisms and
brainstorm new ones

  Help with:

Gaba: ()
   Last week ():

    This week (planned):

cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2020-02-27
Last week:
    - sent grant to some external reviewers
    - even more grant revisions
    - worked on debugging proxy-go CPU issues (#33211)
    - refactored and debugged snowflake throughput check (#32938)
    - snowflake + turbotunnel dogfood
    - merged and deployed gettor refactor (#33191)

This week:
    - finish up snowflake throughput check (#32938)
    - take care of go module for snowflake (#33330)
    - Aggregate and write up a report of snowflake throughput changes
    - write up snowflake scaling thoughts for mailing list
    - work on gitlab issues with gettor (#33034)

Needs help with:
    - are we good with #33211? dcf: yes

arlolra: 2020-02-13

    Last week:

    - merged the client part of #19026

    Next week:

    - maybe the proxy parts of #19026

    - pick another task?

    Help with:

    -

dcf: 2020-02-27

    Last week:

    - used snowflake-turbotunnel bundles and fixed problems (#33336, #33401)

    - wrote invitations to test the revised snowflake-turbotunnel bundles

    -
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2020-February/045499.html

    -
https://ntc.party/t/invitation-to-test-turbo-tunnel-snowflake-packages/378

    - merged the fix to ignore 0.0.0.0 client addresses (#33385)

    - filed a pull request to deprecate the go-webrtc repo
https://github.com/keroserene/go-webrtc/pull/110

    - investigated a required upgrade of the App Engine reflector (#33429)

    - helped debug high CPU usage in proxy-go (#33211)

    - helped debug a reported failure to connect in China (#33219)

    Next week:

    - DNS-over-HTTPS prototyping

    Help with:

cjb: 2019-02-27
   Last week:
    - got feedback on #31011!
   Next week:
    - #31011 grew into "get tor to parse extra-info docs and their
transport lines", am
     learning how to do that with help from teor
    - poke at golang snowflake proxy Android app
   Help with:
    - perhaps it makes sense to split out the bridge-side change in
#31011 from the
      bridgeauth-side change, since the bridgeauth-side change will take
longer, and
      the bridge-side one will take time to ship and get people updated
to..?

agix:2020-02-20

    Last week:

    - Submitted fix for #31967

    - Worked on #31876

    Next week:

    - Submit first draft of #31876

    Help with:

    -