[tor-project] Anti-censorship meeting notes, 8 October 2020

Thu Oct 8 16:55:00 UTC 2020

Here are our meeting notes:

http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2020/tor-meeting.2020-10-08-15.58.html

and our meeting pad:

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

Next meeting: Thursday October 8th 16:00 UTC

Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 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:

    Roadmap:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/boards

    The anti-censorship team's wiki page:

    https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/home

    Past meeting notes can be found at:

    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/

    Tickets that need reviews:  from sponsors we are working on:

    All needs review tickets:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/merge_requests?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=opened&assignee_id=None

    Sponsor 30

    https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/4

    https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/7

    https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/5

    https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/6

    Sponsor 28

    must-do tickets:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/10

    possible tickets:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=opened&label_name%5b%5d=Sponsor%2028&milestone_title=None

    Anti-censorship related tickets that we want other teams to fix:

    https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-tickets-keep <-- it
will be moved into gitlab with TPO labels

    Public bug-reporting pad:

    https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-bugs-keep

== Announcements ==

    Kyle MacMillan, Jordan Holland, and Prateek Mittal published a
report on Snowflake distinguishability.

    https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.03254

== Discussion ==

    We're still having a lot of issues making snowflake work for clients
behind symmetric NATs (snowflake#33666). I'd like feedback on some
solutions like snowflake#40013

== Actions ==

    Please add your September 2020 highlights to our monthly report:

    https://pad.riseup.net/p/1lE-JDUjauoQL6lAGd5t

== Interesting links ==

    Pluggable Transports Implementer's Meeting schedule:

    https://www.pluggabletransports.info/ptim2020/

== Reading group ==

    We will discuss "" on

    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.
    Help with:

         - Something you need help with.

phw:
  This week (2020-10-08):

    Lots of refactoring and unit tests of rdsys's domain logic.

    Reviewed snowflake-webext!4.

    Set up Salmon demo to give Antonela and Matt an impression of what
it looks like.

    Lots of refactoring in the process.

    Started working on September 2020 monthly report.

    Summarised plan for bridge testing in tpo/core/tor#30477.

    Meeting with my old college in Austria; proposed projects for BSc
student.

    Refactored bridgestrap to make it faster by using SETCONF instead of
spawning a Tor process each time.

    https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgestrap/-/issues/3

  Next week:

    Hopefully wrap up bridgestrap.

  Help with:

cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2020-10-08
Last week:
    - set up account for Georgetown ppl to run raven tests on our VPS
    - revised and deployed snowflake#33157
    - updated snowflake webextension, badge, and standalone proxies
    - updated tor browser binaries for gettor
    - worked on writing up snowflake stats
    - started a review of new rdsys code
    - took a brief look at telegram bot for gettor
    - snowflake-webext#17
This week:
    - revisit NAT-punching problems for symmetric NATs by doing a probe
test to determine whether proxies will work with symmetric NATs
(snowflake#40013)
    - more review of rdsys
    - finish a write up of collected snowflake data from last month
    - follow up with the guardian project on their issues with snowflake
    - follow up on progress towards a telegram bot for gettor
    - plan improvements motivated by kyle et al.'s snowflake report
Needs help with:
    - review of snowflake-webext!5
    - fixing our snowflake-webext mirror (gitlab admin team)

juggy :
    This week:
        - Got very basic "suggested readings" list up and running here :
https://jugheadjones10.github.io/anti-censorship-reading/
    Next week:
        - Keep studying BridgeDB to write architectural overview
    Help with:
        - Open issues here
(https://github.com/jugheadjones10/anti-censorship-reading ) for
papers/resources/readings that you think might be useful for newcomers

arlolra: 2020-06-11

    Last week:

    -

    Next week:

    - follow ups to #33365

    - start on #31201

    Help with:

    -

dcf: 2020-10-08

    Last week:

    - reviewed patch for Snowflake client IP inference
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/12

    - archived snowflake-webextension-0.4.2

    - ported the Snowflake fingerprinting page from the old wiki
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/wikis/Fingerprinting

    - reviewed patch to shorten Snowflake web proxy polling interval
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake-webext/-/issues/17

    Next week:

    - update English translations strings
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake-webext/-/issues/15

    Help with:

    - how does one make changes to translation/messages.json?
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake-webext/-/issues/15

Antonela: 2020-08-27

    This week:

    - Wrapping Babatunde's research on the use of circumvention tools
during internet censorship in Africa. Wrapping Personas for s30 with it.

    For september:

    - We are planning interviews with users in China to run our bridges
discovery issues script in real time. We discussed to include TBA +
snowflake as a task for users to run over a week or two and report back.

    https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/ux/research/-/issues/4

    - I still have bridges.tpo to lektor issue open

    - More work on UX/UI for TB 10.0/10.5

    - Review Salmon related tickets (im late with it!)

agix:2020-10-08

    Last week:

    -Finished patch for #34218

    -Started with #5 (rdsys) but didn't quite finish it yet

    Next week:

    -Definetly finnish rdysy #5

    -Dig deeper into Pluggable Transports/HTTPT/Issues/#4

    Help with:

    -Review of #34218

hanneloresx: 2020-09-17

    Last week:

    - Start on #33727

    - Continue investigating and respond to comments on #32117

    Next week:

    - Continue last week's work.

    Help with:

    -

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:

HashikD: 2020-10-06

    This week:

    -

    Next week:

    - Will be back shortly

    Help with: -