Hello everyone,

I'm Apratim (irc: _ranchak_), and I'm from Haldia Institute of Technology, India, studying Computer Science Engineering. I'll be working this summer on the GSoC project: "Alexa Top Sites Captcha and Tor Block Monitoring" with my mentors Barkin, Pili, Gerog and Roger guiding me through the irc. I'm very excited to be a part of Tor and am interested in working on this project!

Briefing about the project: As of now "The Captcha Monitoring" project tracks how often CDN (for ex. Cloudflare, Akamai, Amazon Cloudfront, etc.) fronted webpages return CAPTCHAs to Tor clients. My project will be focussed on tracking the The Alexa Top 500 Websites, to give a detailed perspective of websites mentioned in the Topsites, blocking or returning Captchas to Tor clients. The project aims to do so by fetching webpages over a period of time from both Tor clients/browsers and the non-tor browsers thereby comparing the results. The results will be then collected and provide answers to the different metrics, and also form an understanding of how websites are blocking Tor and affect Internet freedom. Also one could visit: https://gitlab.torproject.org/woswos/CAPTCHA-Monitor/-/wikis/GSoC-2021 for detailed info.

As planned and discussed by my mentor, I'll be creating more issues, which could be seen from the sidebar along the wiki page, to record my progress. As of now one could reach out with suggestions and advises in the irc (#tor-dev) as well as here: tpo/community/support/#40013. I also plan to update my wiki page frequently and have all the information required.

Hope to have a great learning ahead and enjoy this summer!

Regards,

Apratim