[tor-project] Joydeep's Monthly Status Report for February 2022

[Joydeep Sen Gupta]

Hello everyone!

This is my monthly report for the month of February. Last month we saw a
uptick in the number of requests for unlisted obfs4 bridges. This
resulting in a lot of troubleshooting with the users ranging from bridge
lines not being parsed by Tor because of line breaks to issues with Tor
not bootstrapping because of firewalls and VPNs. With increased usage of
Snowflake, I also helped a lot of users with questions about setting up
a proxy, using Snowflake and other general questions about Snowflake.

With the latest tor release [1], I received a few queries as to how to
verify the signature. We now have the new instructions documented on the
Support Portal [2].

There were three Tor Browser releases last month, namely, 11.0.5
(Android only), 11.0.6, 11.5.a4. We are still receiving a number of
queries from users using macOS < 10.12 for which Tor Browser 11.0.x is
not compatible [3]. And a few users raised the issue [4] about 11.0.6
Windows bundles signed with an old certificate which was reported to and
fixed by the Applications Team.

We maintain a set of templates on our Request Tracker to improve our
workflow and easily respond to recurring queries. I reviewed and updated
all of the articles that we maintain. This exercise is very important
and I intend to do this every quarter at the very least.

That pretty much sums up the highlights from last month and following
are some quick stats and highlights from our official support channels.

# Frontdesk

Timeline : 01 Feb - 28 Feb 2022

Tickets:

new: 38
open: 21
resolved: 852

Breakdown of number of RT tickets received with respect to operating
system:

(Note: This includes tickets where the user mentioned the operating
system or it was evident from the issue they were running into and/or
enclosed screenshots.)

Windows - 6
macOS - 11
GNU/Linux - 1
Android- 4

Breakdown of most frequent tickets (at least 3 RT tickets):

1. 613 RT Tickets - How to use Tor Bridges in Russia. [5]

2. 38 RT Tickets - Private Bridge requests. This is not related to the
.ru censorship but requests from Tor users in China, Iran, etc. [6]

3. 6 RT Tickets - Tor Browser 11 incompatible with older versions of
macOS. [3]

4. 4 RT Tickets- How to verify little-t-tor signature? [2]

5. 3 RT Tickets - Youtube inaccessible over Tor.


# Tor Forum

Most popular topics (in terms of no. of views) in February:

1. "File signature could not be verified 11.0.6_en-US.exe [32-bit]". [7]

2. (Onion) Sites do not work after transfer to another server. Details:
0xF2 - dating [date] error. [8]

3. "Torrc, unit files, confusion" (conflict between the recursive
function of %include and the AppArmor profile) [9]

4. "Login button (on Udemy.com) does not work". [10]

5. "High-speed relays on Windows - not great, not terrible". [11]

Thanks,

-- Joydeep

[1]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/release-0-4-5-12-and-0-4-6-10/2024
[2]: https://support.torproject.org/little-t-tor/verify-little-t-tor/
[3]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/version-of-tor-browser-compatible-with-macos-10-11/1038/3
[4]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/40434
[5]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-blocked-in-russia-how-to-circumvent-censorship/982
[6]: https://support.torproject.org/censorship/connecting-from-china/
[7]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/file-signature-could-not-be-verified-11-0-6-en-us-exe-32-bit/2181
[8]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/sites-do-not-work-after-transfer-to-another-server-details-0xf2-dating-error/2105/
[9]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/torrc-unit-files-confusion/2217
[10]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/login-button-does-not-work/2224/12
[11]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/high-speed-relays-on-windows-not-great-not-terrible/2056/10