[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2023-02-02

meskio meskio at torproject.org
Thu Feb 2 17:09:15 UTC 2023


Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-02-02-15.58.html 

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship team meeting pad
--------------------------------

Next meeting: Thursday, February 9 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 check-in about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor.
Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at the Tor Project and Tor community.

== 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 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
		* Sponsor 96
			* https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/24
		* Sponsor 139 <-- hackerncoder, irl, joydeep, meskio, emmapeel working on it
			* https://pad.riseup.net/p/sponsor139-meeting-pad

== Announcements ==
	* 

== Discussion ==

	* is there any proposal to encode bridges into human-memorable form? like a list of words?
		* people have trouble pasting in the bridge lines (fail to get the entire line for example), and support wants either:
			* something that is easier to copy and paste, or
			* and easy way to verify that the line was pasted correctly (visual checksum or similar)
				* bridgemoji are meant to serve this role
		* gus will open an issue for user research of different options (QR code, sequence of words, others)

	* snowflake fallback from domain fronting to amp cache, how/whether/when/etc to implement (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40250)
		* arma is going to check how hard would be to change c-tor to only connect to two bridges instead of all of them at once. So maybe we can duplicate bridges with domain fronting and amp cache.
		There is a patch which implements this idea:
		https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40578
		But see also the caveats on
		https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40250#note_2874378
		* we need to check the consecquences of using amp cache, and if we are ok having half of our users using it
		* Three possible options:
			* multiple bridge lines with different configurations, having multiple bridges with different fingerprint or fixing tor to allow multipe bridgelines with one fingerprint
			* different definitions in TB for domain-front and amp-cache so users can pick
			* snowflake client does control the fallback, maybe by passing flags with what to fall back to

	* use ampcache for snowflake in IR?
		* https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/115
		* https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys-admin/-/merge_requests/13
		* our domain front for both snowflake and circumvention settings was blocked in Iran for 9 days

	* Packet loss resulted in performance issue for snowflake in China
		* https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40251
		* snowflake fails to bootstrap in the vantage point due to packet lost
		* shellikhoo is investigating it
	
	* (from ahf): do we have an idea about how many C tor modifications that needs to be reviewed before s28 is wrapped up? Purely so we can plan this for take-in.

for next week:
	* Conjure is in nightly versions of Tor Browser now, an update on how it's going and the roll out plan

== Actions ==

	* We should make a ticket for pion to cache its stun answers when possible, because right now it surprises us by asking way more stun questions than it actually needs to.
	* We might want to be able to spin up our own stun servers, on our own ip/port, for debugging. We should talk to TPA about that goal at some point (not urgent).
	* Roger will look more at https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40578 ("only contact the first few working bridges on your bridge list") and plan to have a sense of whether it will be an easy hack or a hard one, for next week.

== Interesting links ==

	* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_(software)

== 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.

cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2023-02-02
	Last week:
	    - found and fixed bug in rdsys where pruned resources weren't propagating (rdsys#151)
	    - finished writing a rust library for rdsys backend distributors
	        https://gitlab.torproject.org/cohosh/rdsys-backend-api
	    - wrote up Jack's documentation for the wireguard setup between stations and bridge in Gitlab
	        https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/conjure/-/wikis/wireguard-setup
	    - partially debugged issue with conjure hanging from some stations (conjure#22)
	    - reviewed snowflake!35
	    - FOCI workshop prep
	This week:
	    - FOCI workshop prep
	    - debug potential issue with some stations hanging (conjure#22)
	    - debug wireguard setup (conjure#15)
	    - detect and recover from conjure hangs better (conjure#23)
	    - more work on lox integration
	Needs help with:

dcf: 2023-02-02
	Last week:
		- recast the Snowflake fundraising 2022 update into a form for the Tor blog https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/blog/-/merge_requests/154
		- documented the roughly one-week blocking of cdn.sstatic.net in Iran https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/115
	Next week:
		- migrate goptlib to gitlab https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/86#note_2823122
		- try Conjure PT development version https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-dev-introducing-a-conjure-pt-for-tor/4429
	Help with:

meskio: 2023-02-02
   Last week:
       - clean up gettor locale support code
       - distribute android apk's in gettor (rdsys#42)
       - use the new tor browser pt_config.json builtin bridges in moat (rdsys#146)
       - give support to bridgesanner (rdsys#143)
       - review rdsys fix to pruned resources bug (rdsys!70)
       - review whatsapp gettor integration (rdsys!69)
   Next week:
       - support internationalization in rdsys (rdsys#11)

Shelikhoo: 2023-02-02
   Last Week:
		- [Merge Request Awaiting] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support to snowflake (snowflake!64)
		- [Discussion & Deployment] Rollout of Distributed Snowflake Support
		- [Coding & Deployment] Proposal: Centralized Probe Result Collector (anti-censorship/team#54)
		- [Research] HTTPT Planning https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/httpt/-/issues/1
		- [Merge Request Done] Automated Container Image Building in Continuous integration (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/connectivity-measurement/probeobserver/-/merge_requests/2)
		- research snowflake's performance issue in China(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40251)
		- push the chunked upload raw data upload change to vantage points
   Next Week:
		- [Research] WebTunnel planning (Continue)
		- Have a download link for raw vantage point packet capture files
		
		

Itchy Onion: 2023-1-26
    Last week:
	  - Investigate whether stun over TLS is beneficial to us (issues#40240)
	  - Looking at options for standalone proxy runners to specify an interface (issue#40108)
    This week:
		- Lunar New Year break
		- Continue working on issue #40108 (standalone proxy bind specific IP)
		- Review MRs

hackerncoder: 2023-02-02
    last week:
    Next week:
        - getting ooni-exporter to work with torsf (snowflake)
        - work on monitoring bridges health
        - work on "bridgetester"?
        - setting up snowflakes?

cece: 2022-12-22
    This week:
        - working on creating a dummy WhatsApp bot
    Next week:
        - My bot is not yet working as expected s still trying to figure that out
    Help with:
	     - resources



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meskio | https://meskio.net/
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