[tor-project] Anti-censorship meeting notes, 2021 October 21

Thu Oct 21 18:02:36 UTC 2021

Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:

http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2021/tor-meeting.2021-10-21-16.00.html

and our meeting pad:

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

Next meeting: Thursday October 21st 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.

== Announcements ==

== Discussion ==

    Unifying bridge/broker domain names? All these different names point
to the same place

    proxy uses snowflake-broker.bamsoftware.com and
snowflake.bamsoftware.com

    webext uses snowflake-broker.freehaven.net and snowflake.freehaven.net

    client uses snowflake-broker.torproject.net

https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/59

https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake-webext/-/merge_requests/22

    This is merged, not deployed yet.

    New 'Run a Bridge' campaign - November 2021 (S96):
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/relays/-/issues/24

    will offer T-shirt rewards

    One positive outcome of such a campaign would be to encourage people
to join discussion groups and support one another in bridge operation

    in november forum.torproject.net will be official

    we have already met the goal for new snowflakes, > 12,000 unique
snowflake ips per day

    what is the status of non-nat snowflake bridges?

    from the prometheus metrics it looks like we're doing okay

    we have many more idle snowflakes for clients with restrictive NATs
than denials

    ggus will need help tracking, testing, and counting new obfs4
bridges during the campaign

    What happened in the presentation yesterday, "How to Make a
Blizzard: Recruiting Snowflake Proxies and Rewarding Resource Sharing"?

    Calyx ran a campaign to recruit snowflakes (~50) with T-shirt incentives

    PT spec standardization discussion from Pluggable Transport
Implementers' Meeting this week

https://github.com/Pluggable-Transports/Pluggable-Transports-spec/blob/70bc1c5115639411cf05eec300c52645c174312b/proposals/
proposals that are candidates for being added to the next version

    The EVENT proposal is an older version of what became STATUS in
Tor's spec

    PT spec maintainers may get in touch for discussion and updating

    The logging proposal is for a different purpose, a common API and
log levels

    PT standardization and Tor

    discussion at PTIM about the difficulty of fitting diverse
transports into one mold, is it necessary?

    "at some point when we do PT's for Arti, i think we should take a
bit of a brutal look of how the interaction between the host and its PT
can be made better, but in a way such that we can still execute PT
processes, but also load them as libraries"

== Actions ==

== Interesting links ==

https://github.com/Pluggable-Transports/Pluggable-Transports-spec/blob/70bc1c5115639411cf05eec300c52645c174312b/proposals/0011%20-%20Improve%20Logging%20in%20APIs.pdf

    proposal for a logging interface in the PT API, somewhat relevant to
the discussion about STATUS from
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2021-October/003194.html

https://github.com/Pluggable-Transports/Pluggable-Transports-spec/blob/70bc1c5115639411cf05eec300c52645c174312b/proposals/0004-ClientEventMessage.pdf

    proposed EVENT message, this is actually an earlier version of what
became STATUS in Tor's pt-spec

    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2018-October/013512.html

    https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/28181#note_2487268

https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/pt-spec.txt?id=1ecf3f66586816fc718e38f8cd7cbb23fa9b81f5#n663

== Reading group ==

    We will discuss "Characterizing Transnational Internet Performance
and the Great Bottleneck of China" on 2021-10-28

    https://censorbib.nymity.ch/#Zhu2020a

    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.

cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2021-10-21
Last week:
    - mostly PTIM
    - looked at some bridgestrap issues (bridgestrap#27)
    - s96 report and indicators
This week:
    - automate blocking detection for rotating IP bridges
(censorship-analysis#40020)
    - finish up snowflake library changes for v2 (snowflake#40063)
    - more snowflake performance work (snowflake#40026)
    - catch up on reviews
Needs help with:

arlolra: 2021-08-12

    Last week:

    - Migrate to v3 of the webextension manifest

    Next week:

    - Maybe get back to snowflake-webext #10

    - Write up the pitch for our use case for supporting creating
PeerConnections in background service workers
https://github.com/w3c/webrtc-extensions/issues/77

    Help with:

    -

dcf: 2021-10-21

    Last week:

    - reviewed broker domain name normalization
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/59
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake-webext/-/merge_requests/22

    Next week:

    Help with:

agix:2021-07-15

    Last week:

    -Off due to final exams

    Next week:

    -Work on bridgebox for rdsys

    -More research on httpt #4

    Help with:

    -

hanneloresx: 2021-3-4

    Last week:

    - Submitted MR for bridgestrap issue #14

    Next week:

    - Finish bridgestrap #14

    - Find new issue to work on

    Help with:

    -

maxb: 2021-09-23

    Last week:

    - Worked on
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40054
re: utls for broker negotiation

    - Had conversation with someone about upstream utls http round
tripper https://github.com/refraction-networking/utls/pull/74

    - Too busy with work :/

    Next week:

    - _Really_ want to get a PR for utls round tripper

meskio: 2021-10-21

    Last week:

    - update gettor links (gettor#82)

    - fix the gitlab gettor links (gettor!18)

    - circumvention map/settings moat API redesign (bridgedb#40025)

    - digg into bridgedb bridge storage to replace it by rdsys
(bridgedb#40031)

    - PTIM

    Next week:

    - make bridgedb a rdsys distributor (bridgedb#40031)