Hey everyone!
Here are our meeting logs:
https://paste.debian.net/1311523/
(meetbot was not around)
And our meeting pad:
Anti-censorship
--------------------------------
Next meeting: Thursday, March 28 16:00 UTC
Facilitator: onyingyang
Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC
(channel is logged while meetings are in progress)
This week's Facilitator: meskio
== 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?s…
* Sponsor 96 <-- meskio, shell, onyinyang, cohosh
* https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/24
* Sponsor 150 <-- meskio working on it
* https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/issues/?label_na…
== Announcements ==
== Discussion ==
* use snowflake's RoundedCounter in rdsys
* https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
* duplicate the code? extract it to it's own library? import snowflake?
* lets extract it to it's own library
* meskio will open an issue to discuss the naming for it
* Inconsistent release policy for containers between DockerHub and Gitlab
* the latest in Dockerhub is the most recent stable release
* the latest in Gitlab is the most recent commit on main(bleeding edge / nightly)
* let's rename gitlab's latest to nightly and use latest for the latest stable image
== Actions ==
== Interesting links ==
*
== 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): 2024-03-21
Last week:
- released snowflake v2.9.2
- https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
- modified webext source prep to work with mozilla's new requirements
- https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
- released version 0.7.5 of webextension
- https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
- upgraded tor on conjure bridge
- deployed snowflake sqs fixes
- https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
- debugged some sqs errors
- https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
- https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
This week:
- open MR to change front domain for OONI tests (waiting on Go 1.21 support)
- work on reproducing some reported SQS errors and open a public issue for it
- compile a list of next-steps for lox
- update wasm-bindgen fork to fix some bugs and hopefully upstream changes
- tor-browser-build updates for lox wasm + bindings generation
Needs help with:
dcf: 2024-03-21
Last week:
- reviewed a snowflake-webext README fix https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
- merged some missing commits from meek gitolite into gitlab https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/meek…
Next week:
- review draft MR for unreliable data channels https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
- open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors is nonzero https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
- parent: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
- open issue to disable /debug endpoint on snowflake broker
- move snowflake-02 to new VM
Help with:
meskio: 2023-03-21
Last week:
- captcha moat in rdsys (rdsys#182)
- prometheus metrics for moat in rdsys (rdsys#124)
- deploy rdsys and bridgestrap testing bridges every hour (bridgestrap#39)
- fix and publish obfs4-bridge docker image for armv7 (docker-obfs4-proxy#18)
- fix bugs introduced by me in bridgestrap (bridgestrap#41)
Next week:
- persistency for resources in rdsys (rdsys#56)
Shelikhoo: 2024-03-21
Last Week:
- [Merge Request] Add WebTunnel Client Support Integration to lyrebird (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/lyre…)
- [Merge Request WIP] Add Container Image Mirroring from Tor Gitlab to Docker Hub(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/…
- Prepare for 3-min presentation
- Prepare for the discussion session
- Merge request reviews(a lots of them!)
Next Week/TODO:
- [Research] Inspect Snowflake Situation In China
- [Merge Request] Add WebTunnel Client Support Integration to lyrebird (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/lyre…)
- [Merge Request WIP] Add Container Image Mirroring from Tor Gitlab to Docker Hub(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/…
- Prepare for 3-min presentation
- Prepare for the discussion session
onyinyang: 2023-03-14
Last week(s):
- continued prep for HACS/DRL meeting
- Sync-test rebase
This week:
- continue prep for HACS/DRL meeting
- Attend HACS, then RWC, then DRL meeting
(later things)
- improve metrics collection/think about how to show Lox is working/valuable
- sketch out Lox blog post/usage notes for forum
- attempt hyper upgrade again
(long term things were discussed at the meeting!): https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-ac-community-azaleas-room-keep
- brainstorming grouping strategies for Lox buckets (of bridges) and gathering context on how types of bridges are distributed/use in practice
Question: What makes a bridge usable for a given user, and how can we encode that to best ensure we're getting the most appropriate resources to people?
1. Are there some obvious grouping strategies that we can already consider?
e.g., by PT, by bandwidth (lower bandwidth bridges sacrificed to open-invitation buckets?), by locale (to be matched with a requesting user's geoip or something?)
2. Does it make sense to group 3 bridges/bucket, so trusted users have access to 3 bridges (and untrusted users have access to 1)? More? Less?
theodorsm: 2023-03-14
Last weeks:
- Created a setup for extracting fingerprints from DLTS handshakes and analyzed the previous webrtc/dtls data sets from https://github.com/kyle-macmillan/snowflake_fingerprintability. Found more fingerprints than presented in the original paper, but the fingerprints are not present in newer snowflake versions.
- Contacted Sean DuBois at Pion, he is very supporting of the project and happy to merge features related to anti-censorsip
- Started on a setup for collecting DTLS handshakes to be used for mimicking
- Exploring and planning features for anti-fingerprinting techniques to implement in the Pion lib.
Next weeks:
- Creating a setup for generating DTLS handshakes of web-browsers with selenium/playwright. This will hopefully generate common handshakes/fingerprints
Help with:
--
meskio | https://meskio.net/
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
My contact info: https://meskio.net/crypto.txt
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Nos vamos a Croatan.
*Tails report for February 2024* <https://tails.net/news/report_2024_02/>
Highlights
Despite the bonus day this year, February flew by pretty quickly! Here's
what we were up to:
*
We ended February more resilient and collaborative than when we
started. We have new tooling to make it easier to work on shared
documents, and use XMPP more effectively. We also worked to
strengthen our front-end services and set up the back-end
infrastructre to build redundancies into our services.
*
In 2021 and 2022, our usability tests with human rights defenders in
Mexico and Brazil
<https://tails.net/news/improving_in_latam/index.en.html> prompted
several improvements in the installation instructions for Tails.
Fixing 16 of the identified usability issues were remaining, and we
fixed them all this month. These tests, experiences, and
improvements will greatly shape our future trainings.
*
We finished updating our website for Tails 6.0. Check out the
rewritten recommendation on secure deletion
<https://tails.net/doc/encryption_and_privacy/secure_deletion/index.en.html>.
Releases
📢 Tails 6.0 is out <https://tails.net/news/version_6.0/index.en.html>!
Tails 6.0 is the first version of Tails based on Debian 12 ("bookworm"),
and is the sexiest, slickest, and sleekest Tails yet. It brings:
*
several important security updates: more robust error detection for
the Persistent Storage, protections against malicious USB devices,
and Diceware word lists in Catalan, German, Italian, Portuguese, and
Spanish
*
some more usability features: new light modes—dark, night, and a
combination of both; easier screenshoting and screencasting; and
easier Gmail configuration in Thunderbird
*
and, updated version of most of the applications in Tails
To know more, check out the Tails 6.0 release notes
<https://tails.net/news/version_6.0/index.en.html> and the changelog
<https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/blob/master/debian/changelog>.
Thank you to everyone who helped us out by testing the release candidate
<https://tails.net/news/test_6.0-rc1/>.
Metrics
Tails was started more than 806,714 times this month. That's a daily
average of over 27,817 boots.
Hey everyone!
Here are our meeting logs:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2024/tor-meeting.2024-03-14-15.57.html
And our meeting pad:
Anti-censorship work meeting pad
--------------------------------
Anti-censorship
--------------------------------
Next meeting: Thursday, March 21 16:00 UTC
Facilitator: meskio
Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC
(channel is logged while meetings are in progress)
This week's Facilitator: shelikhoo
== 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?s…
* Sponsor 96 <-- meskio, shell, onyinyang, cohosh
* https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/24
* Sponsor 150 <-- meskio working on it
*
https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/issues/?label_na…
== Announcements ==
- Elections in Russia (March 14 - 17)
== Discussion ==
Last week:
* should we deprecate docker-snowflake-proxy?
* There is now a snowflake Dockerfile for the proxy in the main
snowflake repo
*
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
* do we need to do something to integrate it in our release
process?
* yes, we will deprecated
* shelikhoo will move that forward in this issue:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
* Fastly domain fronting updates
* https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/309
*
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/135
New:
* PTs removed from ios onionbrowser because of RAM constraints
* https://github.com/guardianproject/orbot/issues/1106
* snowflake-webextension still (2024-03-12) being rejected from
Mozilla add-ons? https://paste.mozilla.org/Vh9jKk5g
* Error: Command failed: git submodule update --init -- translation
* fatal: not a git repository (or any of the parent
directories): .git
*
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
== Actions ==
== Interesting links ==
* https://github.com/getlantern/broflake Lantern's new
Snowflake-like, uses QUIC, WASM, WebTransport
== 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): 2024-03-14
Last week:
- reviewed Lox MRs
- refactored Lox's bridge_replace function
-
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/merge_requests/143
- improved error types for lox-library::proto::*::request functions
-
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/merge_requests/144
- removed fixed length fields from Lox's BridgeLine struct
-
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/merge_requests/147
- responded to mozilla addon store rejection
This week:
- open MR to change front domain for OONI tests
- deploy snowflake sqs fix
- followup on web extension rejection from mozilla
- compile a list of next-steps for lox
- update wasm-bindgen fork to fix some bugs and hopefully
upstream changes
- tor-browser-build updates for lox wasm + bindings generation
- Conjure bridge maintenance
Needs help with:
dcf: 2024-03-14
Last week:
- azure CDN bookkeeping
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/Snowflake-co…
- answered a question about Snowflake proxies
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
Next week:
- review draft MR for unreliable data channels
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
- open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors
is nonzero
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
- parent:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…
- open issue to disable /debug endpoint on snowflake broker
- move snowflake-02 to new VM
Help with:
meskio: 2023-03-14
Last week:
- make obfs4-bridge docker image work in armv7
(docker-obfs4-bridge#18)
- publish bridgestrap collector metrics every hour (bridgestrap#39)
- export bridge tests results on assignments.log (rdsys!280)
- document new assignments.log format on the metrics website
(metrics/website!71)
- fix moat not distributing bridges config problem (rdsys#190)
Next week:
- captcha moat in rdsys
Shelikhoo: 2024-03-14
Last Week:
- [Merge Request Done] Remove translation for Tor
Project URL
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/merge_requests/278
- Write WebTunnel Blog Post Draft
- Prepare for 3-min presentation
- Merge request reviews(a lots of them!)
Next Week/TODO:
- [Research] Inspect Snowflake Situation In China
- Prepare for 3-min presentation
onyinyang: 2023-03-14
Last week(s):
- continued prep for HACS/DRL meeting
- Sync-test rebase
This week:
- continue prep for HACS/DRL meeting
- Attend HACS, then RWC, then DRL meeting
(later things)
- improve metrics collection/think about how to show Lox is
working/valuable
- sketch out Lox blog post/usage notes for forum
- attempt hyper upgrade again
(long term things were discussed at the meeting!):
https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-ac-community-azaleas-room-keep
- brainstorming grouping strategies for Lox buckets (of
bridges) and gathering context on how types of bridges are
distributed/use in practice
Question: What makes a bridge usable for a given user, and
how can we encode that to best ensure we're getting the most appropriate
resources to people?
1. Are there some obvious grouping strategies that we
can already consider?
e.g., by PT, by bandwidth (lower bandwidth bridges
sacrificed to open-invitation buckets?), by locale (to be matched with a
requesting user's geoip or something?)
2. Does it make sense to group 3 bridges/bucket, so
trusted users have access to 3 bridges (and untrusted users have access
to 1)? More? Less?
theodorsm: 2023-03-14
Last weeks:
- Created a setup for extracting fingerprints from DLTS
handshakes and analyzed the previous webrtc/dtls data sets from
https://github.com/kyle-macmillan/snowflake_fingerprintability. Found
more fingerprints than presented in the original paper, but the
fingerprints are not present in newer snowflake versions.
- Contacted Sean DuBois at Pion, he is very supporting of
the project and happy to merge features related to anti-censorsip
- Started on a setup for collecting DTLS handshakes to be
used for mimicking
- Exploring and planning features for anti-fingerprinting
techniques to implement in the Pion lib.
Next weeks:
- Creating a setup for generating DTLS handshakes of
web-browsers with selenium/playwright. This will hopefully generate
common handshakes/fingerprints
Help with:
Hi Everyone!
We have a new job opening for a System Administrator!
https://www.torproject.org/about/jobs/system-administrator/
If you are or know someone who would be a good fit and wants to join our
team, please apply/share.
Have a great weekend and thanks for helping us spread the word! :)
Cheers,
Patricia Robinson
Hello all,
Last month, I worked on some small documentation updates to the Tor
Browser User Manual[0], Support Portal[1] and the support documentation
that we maintain on our user support channels. With some exciting new
updates to Tor Browser Alpha, I was involved with some testing apart
from the usual user support work around any Tor Browser releases.
We saw a slight uptick in support requests from Chinese and Farsi
speaking users - involving instructions and help with using pluggable
transports that works best for them and general troubleshooting.
The current Snowflake domain fronting issue with Fastly will be reported
on the next user support report (April 2024).
Following is a thorough breakdown of tickets our user support team
handled in February:
# Frontdesk (email support channel)
* 427(↓) RT tickets created
* 461(↑) RT tickets resolved
Tickets by numbers:
1. 218(↑) RT tickets: private bridge requests from Chinese speaking
users.
2. 105(↓) RT tickets: circumventing censorship in Russian
speaking countries.
3. 13 RT tickets: private bridge and help with
circumventing censorship requests from regions where Tor is not blocked.
The issues were mostly resolved by troubleshooting and analysing Tor
logs and the issues ranged from - firewall, VPN & antivirus interrupting
the connection to having an incorrect system clock.
4. 7(↑) RT tickets: circumventing censorship with Tor in Farsi.
5. 3 RT tickets: Help with installing Tor Browser on Android.
6. 2 RT tickets: Help with GPG signature verification while installing Tor Browser[2].
7. 3 RT tickets: Reports of website blocking Tor users.
Highlighting some other topics we received questions and feedback:
8. Google showing up in foreign language[3].
9. Help with installing Tor on Fedora and PopOS (Linux)
10. Question about the "New Identity"[4] feature in Tor Browser - what it does
and how it can be used.
11. ExoneraTor suffering from possible denial of service[5].
12. Question about where to find Tor Browser's source code.
13. Modifying Tor circuit to exit from a specific country (the country had no exits
running and, in general, we highly discourage users to modify their Tor circuit)
# Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal Support channel
* 508(-) tickets resolved
Breakdown:
* 485(-) tickets on Telegram
* 17(↑) tickets on WhatsApp
* 6(↓) tickets on Signal
Tickets by numbers:
1. 315(↓) tickets: circumventing censorship in Russian speaking
countries.
2. 50(↑) tickets: circumventing censorship with Tor in Farsi.
3. 26(↑) tickets: private bridge requests from Chinese speaking users.
4. 4 tickets: help with installation and troubleshooting of Tor Browser
on Windows.
5. 4 tickets: Questions about which Tor app to install on
iOS (Onion Browser and Orbot).
Highlighting some other topics we received questions about:
6. 2 tickets: Help with GPG signature verification while installing Tor
Browser.
7. 2 tickets: Reports of onion services (not maintained by us)
being offline. We asked the users to kindly contact the concerned onion
service maintainers.
8. 2 tickets: Help with using pluggable transports with little-t-tor.
9. Help and instructions to install Tor Browser for Android.
# Highlights from the Tor Forum
1. New Tor Browser Alpha Release: Tor Browser 13.5a5[6]. Please help us
test Connection Assist on Android!
2. Installing Tor Browser on Linux[7]
3. Building and installing lyrebird to use pluggable transports with Tor
on Alpine[8]
4. Modifying Tor circuit to exit from a particular
country[9]. Please check metrics before modifying torrc for similar
configurations.
Thanks!
e.
Note: (↑), (↓) and (-) are indicating if the number of tickets we
received for these topics have been increasing, decreasing or have been
the same from the previous month respectively.
[0]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/manual/-/merge_requests/89
[1]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/support/-/merge_requests/198
[2]: https://support.torproject.org/tbb/how-to-verify-signature/
[3]: https://support.torproject.org/tbb/tbb-43/
[4]: https://tb-manual.torproject.org/managing-identities/
[5]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41507
[6]: https://forum.torproject.org/t/new-alpha-release-tor-browser-13-5a5/11724
[7]: https://forum.torproject.org/t/linux-i-cant-find-start-tor-browser-desktop/…
[8]: https://forum.torproject.org/t/where-to-find-source-of-obfs4proxy-files-to-…
[9]: https://forum.torproject.org/t/i-cant-use-indian-exit-node-are-there-techni…
Hi all :)
This is my monthly status report for February 2024 with the main relevant
activities I have done during the period.
## 0. Research
* No research activities in this month.
## 1. Development
* Onionspray:
* Discovered and fixed a security issue:
https://tpo.pages.torproject.net/onion-services/onionspray/security/advisor…
* Did the 1.6.0 release:
https://tpo.pages.torproject.net/onion-services/onionspray/changelog/
* Onion Services Ecosystem Portal:
* Unified many Onion Services documentations in a single place (temporary address):
https://tpo.pages.torproject.net/onion-services/portal/
* It's probably going to be hosted inside the Tor Community Portal, as being
planned at https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/portal/-/issues/1
## 2. Support
* Ongoing sponsored work with deployment, maintenance and monitoring of Onion
Services.
* Did some support related to setting up Onion Services.
## 3. Organization
Time spent (from the total available for Tor-related work):
| Category | Percentage
|---------------|------------
| Research | 0
| Development | 30
| Support | 30
| Organization | 40
|---------------|------------
| Total | 100
--
Silvio Rhatto
pronouns he/him
I sent this message during my active hours, which might be different from
yours. I'm fine if you take your time to answer, and usually takes some time
for me to answer.
Hi! Below is my February’24 report!
In February, I resolved 514 tickets:
On Telegram (@TorProjectSupportBot) - 374
On RT (frontdesk@tpo) - 120
On WhatsApp (+447421000612) - 16
and on Signal (+17787431312) - 4.
During February I have been doing regular user support activity:
1. Helped Russian-speaking users to bypass censorship: shared bridges
and assisted with using them and troubleshooting;
2. Collected users feedback;
3. Helped to solve issues like:
* Orbot does not work.
* antivirus software blocks tor.
* wrong system time on the user's PC.
4. Continued following the issue with bridge requests from unusual
locations, where Tor connections aren't blocked.
I also helped with localisation activity on WebLate, checking, fixing
and approving the Russian translation. Also this month I conducted a
training on how to use Tor Browser.
In February, I reviewed and updated existing user support templates in
Russian[2]. With the help of our users I reported thisissue with
@gettor_bot on Telegram[1].
[1]
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/gettor-project/OnionSprou…
[2]
https://forum.torproject.org/t/tor-blocked-in-russia-how-to-circumvent-cens…