[tor-project] Anti-censorship meeting notes, 07 May 2020

Philipp Winter phw at torproject.org
Thu May 7 18:30:21 UTC 2020 

Hi all,

Here are our meeting minutes:

http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2020/tor-meeting.2020-05-07-17.58.html

And here is our meeting pad:

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

Next meeting: Thursday May 7th 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

-------------------------
---  May    7th 2020   --
-------------------------

== Announcements ==

    * We have a GSoC student, Hashik, who is joining the team starting this week and working on building a Snowflake proxy app for Android

== Discussion ==

    * Shall we move our anti-censorship meeting time to 17:00 or 16:00 UTC?
        * Will make it easier to attend for folks in Asia
        * What works or doesn't work for you?
    * Any beginning circumvention developers want experience implementing a pluggable transport? David posted a roadmap for a DNS transport.
        * https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2020-May/000089.html

== Actions ==

    *

== Interesting links ==

    * https://jewlscholar.mtsu.edu/bitstream/handle/mtsu/6199/Sheffey_mtsu_0170N_11305.pdf
        * MSc thesis on "Adversarially Enhanced Traffic Obfuscation"
        * By the author of "Improving Meek With Adversarial Techniques" from FOCI 2019, https://censorbib.nymity.ch/#Sheffey2019a
            * https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/13

== Reading group ==

    * We will discuss "Salmon: Robust Proxy Distribution for Censorship Circumvention" on May 14
        * https://censorbib.nymity.ch/#Douglas2016a
        * 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 (2020-05-07):
        * Read Salmon paper.
        * Reviewed #34061, #34062, and #34089.
        * Wrapped up #30794 (lightweight censorship analyser) for now because it's working and usable so far.
        * More work on wolpertinger.
            * Filed #34089 to expose bridges.torproject.org/wolpertinger/
            * Filed #34116 to look into setting up OONI's MetaDB on polyanthum (to get OONI's test results)
            * Wrote code to read cached-extrainfo docs and bridges stored in SQLite DB.
        * Some coordination with Sina regarding meek-azure.
            * Things are not looking good; currently no funding in sight.
        * A little bit of GSoC coordination.
        * Improved BridgeDB's email autoresponder test in #12802.
        * Looked into #33945 to figure out why BridgeDB's email autoresponder fails after a while.
            * Still not sure. Will deploy work-in-progress fixes, which may help.
        * Attended onionperf call. Will probably be working one day per week on it.
  Next week:
        *
  Help with:
        * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/12802

Gaba: ()
   Last week (2020-03-30):
        * not much related to anti-censorship
    This week (planned):
        * anti-censorship retrospective

cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2020-05-07
Last week:
Last week:
    - android reproducible build for snowflake (#28672)
    - GetTor twitter responder fixes (#27330)
    - Reproduced chrome proxy hang (#31278)
    - Discussed transifex issues with snowflake
    - snowflake webextension reviews
    - Investigated running a STUN server at the broker (#25591)
    - Created a ticket for using RFC5780 to determine the NAT type of peers (#34129)
    - Made PI meeting slides for next week
    - Onboarding Hashik (our new GSoC student)
    - fix for chrome idle proxy hang (#31278)
This week:
    - sponsor 28 PI meeting (Monday, Tuesday)
    - More work on reviving the twitter responder in GetTor (#33036, #27330)
    - look at old GetTor mirrors (#33893)
    - More work on NAT type discovery (#34129)
    - Take a look at the multiplexing design for Snowflake (#25723)
    - investigate #33669
    - Follow up on discussions of debian obfs4proxy package
Needs help with:
    - review of GetTor twitter fixes (#27330)
    - review of chrome idle proxy hang fix (#31278)

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: 2020-05-07
    Last week:
        - webext repo versioning / publishing #34140, #34126, #34132, #34127
    Next week:
        - follow ups to #33365
        - start on #31201
    Help with:
        -


dcf: 2020-05-07
    Last week:
        - merged patch to reduce Snowflake client connection timeout (#34042)
        - converted snowflake turbotunnel merge (#34043) into a Tor Browser ticket
    Next week:
        - review fix for Chrome proxy hang (#31278)
        - check with Kyle about snowflake fingerprinting results
        - share access to the snowflake broker CDN configuration (#30510)
    Help with:



agix:2020-05-07
    Last week:
        - Incoperated some more feedback on #33835
    Next week:
        - Started work on #27984
    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:

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