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

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: Development · Boards · Anti-censorship · GitLab
  * The anti-censorship team's wiki page:
    * Home · Wiki · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Team · GitLab
  * Past meeting notes can be found at:
    * The tor-project Archives
  * Tickets that need reviews: from sponsors, we are working on:
    * All needs review tickets:
      * Merge requests · Anti-censorship · GitLab
    * Sponsor 28
      * must-do tickets: Sponsor 28: Reliable Anonymous Communication Evading Censors and Repressors (RACECAR) · The Tor Project · GitLab
      * possible tickets: Issues · The Tor Project · GitLab
    * Sponsor 96
      * Sponsor 96: Rapid Expansion of Access to the Uncensored Internet through Tor in China, Hong Kong, & Tibet · The Tor Project · GitLab
    * Sponsor 139 <-- hackerncoder, irl, joydeep, meskio, emmapeel working on it
      * Riseup 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 (Broker side channel fallback mechanism (#40250) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab)
    * 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:
    Let bridge users choose to only reach their first working bridge (#40578) · Issues · The Tor Project / Core / Tor · GitLab
    But see also the caveats on
    Broker side channel fallback mechanism (#40250) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
    * 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?
    * Blocking of cdn.sstatic.net by SNI in Iran, 2023-01-16 to 2023-01-24 (#115) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Team · GitLab
    * Use ampcache for snowflake in Iran (!13) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / rdsys-admin · GitLab
    * 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
    * Analysis of speed deficiency of Snowflake in China, 2023 Q1 (#40251) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
    * 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 Let bridge users choose to only reach their first working bridge (#40578) · Issues · The Tor Project / Core / Tor · GitLab ("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 ==

  * Snowflake (software) - Wikipedia

== 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
          Cecylia Bocovich / rdsys-backend-api · GitLab
      - wrote up Jack's documentation for the wireguard setup between stations and bridge in Gitlab
          wireguard setup · Wiki · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / conjure · GitLab
      - 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 Snowflake 2022 year in review and Open Collective (!154) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Web / blog · GitLab
    - documented the roughly one-week blocking of cdn.sstatic.net in Iran Blocking of cdn.sstatic.net by SNI in Iran, 2023-01-16 to 2023-01-24 (#115) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Team · GitLab
  Next week:
    - migrate goptlib to gitlab migrate away from git.torproject.org (#86) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Team · GitLab
    - try Conjure PT development version [tor-dev] Introducing a Conjure PT for Tor
  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 Add HTTPT as a pluggable transport to Tor Browser (#1) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / HTTPT · GitLab
    - [Merge Request Done] Automated Container Image Building in Continuous integration (Automated Container Image Building in Continuous integration (!2) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Connectivity Measurement / probeobserver · GitLab)
    - research snowflake's performance issue in China(Analysis of speed deficiency of Snowflake in China, 2023 Q1 (#40251) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab)
    - 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

--
meskio | https://meskio.net/
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My contact info: https://meskio.net/crypto.txt
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Nos vamos a Croatan.
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