tor-project October 2022

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13 participants
18 discussions

Joydeep's Monthly Status Report for September 2022
by Joydeep Sen Gupta 06 Oct '22

06 Oct '22

Hello everyone! These are my updates from September. In the past month our support channels have received a unprecedented number of user support requests from Iran. Across our official support channels - email, Telegram and Signal - we have resolved more than 4000 support tickets! With help and inputs from my fellow community team members and the localization team, I drafted a user guide on how to circumvent censorship with Tor in Iran[1]. This is very much ongoing work and we are actively monitoring the situation and will keep updating the user guide. With such large volume of support requests there have been some challenges as well. Our cdr.link (Telegram and Signal support channel) has been running into some issues with message reception and delivery through the @TorProjectSupportBot on Telegram and I have been in touch with the cdr.link support team about this (massive shout-out to them for the prompt response to this!) More details in the ticket[2]. While the questions have been mostly around using pluggable transports with Tor Browser, Orbot and Onion Browser in Iran, I have helped a number of users with instructions to verify their Tor Browser install, setting up F-Droid to download Tor Browser for Android (as a result of our main website and mirrors being blocked) and as part of our campaign[3] to run more snowflake proxies, to setup snowflake proxies for folks where internet is not censored. Apart from this, with two Tor Browser Alpha releases I have been involved with testing and overall quality assurance and added documentation about the Telegram GetTor bot to the Tor Browser Manual[4]. That pretty much sums up the highlights from last month and following are some quick stats and highlights from our official support channels. Timeline: 01 - 30 September 2022 # Frontdesk Tickets: open: 58 resolved: 1273 Breakdown of number of RT tickets received with respect to operating system: Breakdown of most frequent tickets by numbers: 1. 1059 RT Tickets - Circumventing Censorship with Tor in Iran. 2. 172 RT Tickets - Private Bridge requests from China[5] 3. 69 RT Tickets - How to use a Tor Bridge in Russia[6] # Telegram and Signal Support channel (cdr.link) tickets resolved: 2925 Most of these tickets have been about circumventing censorship in Iran. The other most frequent ticket we received have been about: 101 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Russia 9 tickets - Using unlisted obfs4 bridges in China 9 tickets - Help with setting up snowflake and other general questions about the pluggable transport # Tor Forum Most popular topics in the Support category (in terms of no. of views): 1. "Iran: Circumventing Censorship with Tor"[1] 2. "Snowflake Chrome extension doesn’t seem to be working for me"[7] 3. "Two-layered access"[8] 4. "Snowflake standalone proxy: NAT behaviour"[9] 5. "Your server has not managed to confirm reachability for its ORPort(s)"[10] Thanks, -- Joydeep [1]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/iran-circumventing-censorship-with-tor/4590 [2]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40092 [3]: https://twitter.com/torproject/status/1573670895696183303 [4]: https://tb-manual.torproject.org/downloading/ [5]: https://support.torproject.org/censorship/connecting-from-china/ [6]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-blocked-in-russia-how-to-circumvent-cens… [7]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/snowflake-chrome-extension-doesnt-seem-to-be… [8]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/two-layered-access/4783 [9]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/snowflake-standalone-proxy-nat-behaviour/4885 [10]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/your-server-has-not-managed-to-confirm-reach…

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Rhatto's Monthly Status Report, September 2022
by rhatto 06 Oct '22

06 Oct '22

Hi all :) This is my monthly status report for September 2022. Main activities during the period: 0. The Onion Plan: * Research on existing proposals for enhancing the Onion Service experience. * Results were presented during the Tor Meeting: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/team/-/wikis/202209MeetingOnionPlan https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/team/-/wikis/202209MeetingOnionPlan/intro… * Collected feedback and started the next iteration, hopefully towards a concrete roadmap :) 1. Deployments for Sponsor 123 (Onion Launchpad landing pages and Onion Services). I would also like to thank @luciole for the work towards an Onionprobe Arch Linux package: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/onionprobe/-/issues/16 -- Silvio Rhatto pronouns he/him

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Marco's Status Report September 2022
by msim 06 Oct '22

06 Oct '22

Hi o/ This month I continued the WebRTC work for Sponsor 131. To recap, S131 is base browser (tor browser, without tor), and as part of base browser, S131 wants WebRTC enabled. This month I continued debugging issues with WebRTC at runtime. Most of this testing was done with WebRTC Samples[1], and some more was done with Mozilla's test page[2]. Various weird issues were encountered, and trying to figure out what Mingw is doing that's breaking it is, well, a challenge :). Ticketed issues are visible on my fork of Tor Browser[3], and after some testing, PieroV also investigated (thanks!) and provided some super helpful information. Unfortunately, due to being busy with some other commitments, I won't be able to continue working on this until the last week of November. At some point in the near future, I will try to write some more comprehensive notes on what's breaking in case anyone wishes to have a look between now and the end of November :) All the best! -Marco [1]: https://webrtc.github.io/samples/ [2]: https://mozilla.github.io/webrtc-landing/ [3]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/msimonelli/tor-browser

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Cecylia's monthly status report, September 2022
by Cecylia Bocovich 05 Oct '22

05 Oct '22

Hi everyone, This is my status report for contract work done in September 2022 1. Help with snowflake development * worked on updating the snowflake webextension for manifest v3 * answering questions on the forum * code reviews * fixed a bug in the snowflake badge where the icon doesn't turn green * worked on tuning the proxy pool for clients with restrictive NATs Cecylia

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[l10n] Updates - moving to Weblate
by emma peel 05 Oct '22

05 Oct '22

ey there friends: We have started the move to weblate. As Tor Project maintains lots of translations, we will take a bit on moving all the projects. For the moment you can already translate some resources in weblate, our project is: https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/tor/ Slowly I will remove the projects in transifex. The repository at https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/translation/ will still be holding the translations for your branches, although there is going to be only one branch for each project. Please make sure you are using that repository, and NOT https://gitweb.torproject.org/translation.git/ - https://git.torproject.org/translation.git/ which is being moved. There were some issues with the way weblate deals with the translation formats, especially JSON files. Let me know if you have any trouble, as I may be able to configure weblate better to suit your needs. You can report any problems by using the 'Weblate Migration' label in gitlab, or you can also contact me. If you want to follow the saga of the move you can see our bugtracker: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/boards?label_name[]=Weblate%20Mi… And of course let me know if you have any issues in weblate. With your comments I mean to improve https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/l10n/-/wikis/Localization-for-d… while I update it for weblate as well. Thanks! emmapeel P/S: if you are a reviewer in transifex, let me know when you open an account in weblate so i can give you reviewer status.

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minutes from the sysadmin meeting
by Antoine Beaupré 04 Oct '22

04 Oct '22

A short and sweet meeting, not much to see here I am afraid. # Roll call: who's there and emergencies anarcat, kez, lavamind, no emergencies. # Dashboard review We did our normal per-user check-in: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/boards?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&… * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/boards?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&… * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/boards?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&… And reviewed the general dashboards: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/boards/117 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/web/-/boards * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/tpa/-/boards # Estimates workshop We worked on what essentially became [TPA-RFC-40][]. Some notes were taken in a private issue, but most of the work should be visible in the above. [TPA-RFC-40]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/policy/tpa-rfc-40-cymru-… # Next meeting We should look at OKRs in November to see if we use them for 2023. A bunch of TPA-RFC (especially TPA-RFC-33) should be discussed eventually as well. Possibly make another meeting next week. # Metrics of the month * hosts in Puppet: 98, LDAP: 98, Prometheus exporters: 168 * number of Apache servers monitored: 31, hits per second: 704 * number of self-hosted nameservers: 6, mail servers: 10 * pending upgrades: 59, reboots: 1 * average load: 1.21, memory available: 4.55 TiB/5.88 TiB, running processes: 737 * disk free/total: 35.19 TiB/93.28 TiB * bytes sent: 405.23 MB/s, received: 264.06 MB/s * planned bullseye upgrades completion date: 2022-10-15 * [GitLab tickets][]: 186 tickets including... * open: 0 * icebox: 144 * backlog: 23 * next: 8 * doing: 4 * needs information: 6 * needs review: 1 * (closed: 2882) [Gitlab tickets]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/boards Upgrade prediction graph lives at https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/howto/upgrades/bullseye/ Now also available as the main Grafana dashboard. Head to <https://grafana.torproject.org/>, change the time period to 30 days, and wait a while for results to render. -- Antoine Beaupré torproject.org system administration

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Nina’s Monthly Status Report, September, 2022
by Nina 04 Oct '22

04 Oct '22

Hi, this is my status report for September. This month was challenging due to the unprecedented amount of user requests from Iran. With my colleagues, I took part in dealing with censorship in this country, keeping up with the Russian-speaking users' requests. So in September, I resolved 2341 tickets: On Telegram (@TorProjectSupportBot) - 2020 On RT (frontdesk@tpo) - 321 It is almost four times more than in August. These requests were mostly from users in Iran - the country which faces the huge unrest and severe internet censorship restrictions. Users mostly requested about using Tor Browser and Orbot, the web-sites where they can download the apps, and asked for bridges and settings for censorship circumvention. However, I was still in contact with users in Turkmenistan, where the censorship situation was worsening. I also collected feedback on possible upcoming censorship events in Kazakhstan [1]. I also helped users in Russian with troubleshooting, mostly related to Android issues. Thanks to our users - I've managed to gather some info on the bug that sometimes happens with Tor Browser for Android[2] and found some issues with bridgeDB email distributor (bridges@tpo) not replying to users with Gmail account[3]. [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/onion-support/-/issues/155… [2] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41289#n… [3] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgedb/-/issues/40060

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PieroV's Monthly Status Report, September 2022
by Pier Angelo Vendrame 03 Oct '22

03 Oct '22

Hi everyone! Here is my status report for September 2022. This month I have worked on refactoring tor-launcher and moving it to the main Tor Browser patchset [0]. It took me a long time, but I am sure it will help the Arti transition, too. Apart from that, I added a patch to mitigate a font fingerprinting vector [1] and managed to get another patch upstreamed to Firefox [2]. Finally, last week I started to unify the GeckoView patch set that we use for Android with the patch set we use for the desktop version of Tor Browser [3]. Best, Pier [0] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests… [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41116 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1768907 [3] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41308

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tor-project October 2022