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Notes from March 11, 17, 24, and 31 2016 Vegas team meetings
by Karsten Loesing 01 Apr '16

01 Apr '16

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi everyone, you have probably heard about the Vegas Plan, the team-based structure that we're trying to establish in Tor. If you're unsure what that is, take another look at Roger's recent posting to this list to help Alison get up to speed as new community team lead: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2016-March/000196.html What you may not have heard yet is that Vegas team leads started holding weekly IRC meetings to discuss any team-related issues with the other teams. The idea is that team leads bring problems and questions to this meeting and report back answers and relevant discussion results to their respective teams. Today we're also starting to publish notes that we're collaboratively taking at these meetings on this list as a step towards more transparency. These notes are edited lightly in order not to embarrass organizations or people who were not present at the meeting. Bear with us if these notes contain something that might have been said differently in public. We want to avoid censoring these notes too heavily or misguide Vegas team leads towards self-censoring their words at future Vegas team meetings. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them. All the best, Karsten Notes from March 11 2016 meeting: Shari #1: Job descriptions for office admin and hr person Shari #2: grant proposal for general funding Shari #3: hiring framework Nick #1: i think i need a new time for team meetings Nick #2: work on q1 and 028 stuff, not just on the fun stuff Isabela #1: support situation - Isabela would like to review what happened and see how we can avoid confusions in the future. Also, would like to propose a summary of support work last year so people can understand what has been done in the support/translation front. Also, what is the orientation I should have in relationship to support work right now. Isabela #2: design guidelines - https://storm.torproject.org/shared/Nt4Vf6bsQlYk56gSnfBdMPTdPMhKjKhMvbr3QeI… Roger #1a: need a consensus for how to do user support best. is it writing documentation? better website? relaunching the helpdesk? Roger #1b: In Valencia, we identified that we should have a full-time user support person, to triage our support channels and do support in as scalable a way as possible. We still need that person I think. Roger #2: press team? Should it be moved to Shari's Vegas module? -- make plan for publicizing change in community team lead; Plan: Kate will move into Shari's "org" team. Roger #3: ooni team: what Vegas module should it be in? Metrics? Applications? Its own? Plan: Karsten is going to check in with Arturo periodically, to see if he needs anything, and so there's a person in the Vegas world who is paying attention to it. Roger #4: NSF proposal due EOM, Yawning helps, who else? Roger #5: little-t-tor code/design/etc. audits Karsten: contract for iwakeh working on collector dev Mike: blog $5k, hosting option for $100/mo. Answer is yes, let's do it. Mike will put together a deliverable description, Shari will put together a contract. We should be sure that they understand our privacy hopes for hosting. Roger will plan to be in the loop as we implement the actual plan. - ---------- Notes from March 17 2016 meeting: Shari: no new topics from me Nick #1: it would be good for us to make sure to succeed at paying Yawning for his work. [Isabela is following up with accounting and shari on this / said would do so to Yawning and will keep people updated] (And good to make sure we succeed in commiting to pay yawning for a certain amount of work, even though he hasn't got his company set up yet) Nick #2: wants to talk to Isa, Shari about personnel thing. Nick #3: I still need to bug Mike to get his healthcare info to Sue. Roger #1: execdir@ and press@ and others got busy since we removed the help link from the website contact page. Unclear quite how to address. Roger #2: we need a calendar. (See https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=dt92shou5q1ooe1kptubhclo4s%4… ) Roger #3: arma is still wearing too many hats. what should he actually do? first step, finish the list with all the things arma is doing; otherwise it is hard for others to come up with particular things they can help with Roger #4: on my very long plane flight last night i sat next to the US ambassador to the UN for human rights. and taught him a lot about privacy tech. if anybody wants to make use of that somehow. Isabela #0: We have a written plan for the helpdesk, it will be ready shortly Isabela #1: We need to keep at the Internews contract. If Nima can't start now, maybe we need to put out a job description and find another person. Or maybe we can get away with not needing a new person at all. Isabela #2: the bugs on tor labs: kevin fixed them. Isabela #3: I sent the design guidelines to folks (ux meeting is next) Karsten #1: can we pay iwakeh? Answer from Shari, yes, send her the contract details. Plan is 8 to 12 hours/wk, for Q2. Karsten #2: OONI and the metrics team are interacting a little bit. They will remain separate dev teams though. Karsten #3: I look forward to announcing the community team change. Georg: we are heading slowly to the esr45 transition. We dealt with an emergency this week due to yet another Firefox update. No help needed from other teams at the moment. Alison #1: Somebody needs to tell me what this vegas team thing is. Roger will send her the original vegas team emails, then Alison #2: Announcing me as new team person? Shari will draft a mail to tor-internal about it today. Alison #3: What's the scope for the community team? Roger mentions outreach, advocacy, trainings. Mike wonders about relay operators. Roger says that we, the vegas team, need to put energy into helping Alison get the right scope. Mike #1: Greatly distracted by latest Firefox update. Mike #2: Still working with Collin et al to make a Cloudflare meeting happen at RightsCon. It looks like it might be falling apart. Mike #3: I will mail Kevin a candidate list of blog deliverables today. (Also, the logging question looks resolvable, since they host things for ACLU, etc.) - ---------- Notes from March 24 2016 meeting: Shari: How should we communicate personnel changes? People who became employees recently, people who were let go recently. Conclusion is Shari should mention it in a mail to tor-internal, either for this specific purpose or in one of her periodic emails. Karsten #1: we need to redo the contract with iwakeh, since it confuses USD and EUR. Karsten #2: which sponsor letter should iwakeh use? Answer: Roger suggests M, but Karsten should check with Sue to be sure she thinks that's ok. Isabela #1: Internews contract (shari to sign and wondering if nima got back about it) Isabela #2: OTF contract for OONI. We should sign it too. Isabela #3: Here's the report on user support from last year: https://storm.torproject.org/shared/vvVKJbRiXovB37OmNWY37Ad8fCh5kOGkfMh6_u1… Isabela #4: https://github.com/simplysecure/tor/blob/master/CreativeBriefforTorProjectS… is scout's draft for a creative brief for design guidelines Isabela #5: It would be great to get Tor stickers to Rightscon. Roger #1: we should juggle people-to-sponsor-letters to start spending down the grants we should spend down. How to proceed? Roger #2: I'm going to be less consistently online from tomorrow through Apr 7. Nick #1: I am deep in Tor 028 and 029 work. Nick #2: The Network Team has a new meeting time. I encourage everybody to drop by. Nick #3: My Nick #2 from last week (personnel thing) remains. Georg: We are making progress on our esr45 transition. Still on schedule. Alison #1: I am now up to speed on the Vegas structure. I'll ask questions as needed. Alison #2: Behold: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/CommunityTeam Alison #3: We had a community team meeting yesterday. Now we have an initial todo list. Alison #4: Once the wiki page is up, and the initial todo list is done, I'll start work on a Roadmap for the team, perhaps starting from https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2016WinterDevMee… Roger #3: Progress on picking dates for Seattle2016 meeting? - ---- Notes from March 31 2016 meeting: Alison #1: I wrote to the community team mailing list about further developing the wiki, making the list public/deleting the archives, and our agenda for meeting next week which includes talking about the purpose and scope of the team. I haven't heard anything back yet. Alison #2: This week I will start reaching out to folks individually and perhaps en masse on tor-project@tpo to develop team membership. Shari #1: Three job descriptions are done. Two are posted, the third will be posted today. Shari #2: Need Nick and Isa's help on a performance plan Shari #3: Let's get Roger or Nick or Mike to attend the Monday board meeting and summarize the Cloudflare situation. First plan is to get Mike, since he is most involved. Roger #1: Working on NSF proposal, due todayish. Roger #2: Nima and others speak of a "UX team", which is a vibrant group of Tor people who are doing neat things. Yet they have no Vegas interaction. We should think about when to turn them into a first-class Vegas team. In the mean time Isabela is their de facto advocate. Roger #3: The EU Parliament wants a briefing on Wednesday. Unclear if I can make it. Or if Jake can. Roger #4: We should take these vegas notes we have and get them to tor-project. Karsten agrees to take next steps: clean them up, write an intro that explains what's going on. Nick #1: isabela is doing great work at making sure 0.2.9 triage happens, and finding people to help finish SponsorS Q1 stuff. Nick #2: We put out an 028 alpha. Next step there is in mid April, when the next Tor Browser alpha comes out with it. Nick #3: I have some tentative plans with Isa and Shari for getting funded network team people to have more flexibility in what they're supposed to work on (right now too many people are funded to work on too narrow a scope). Nick #4: I recycled the hardware from the cambridge office and am working on getting the hard drives shredded. Isabela #1: Rightscon is this week! Isabela #2: I had a meeting with nima and micah lee on fundraising infra. I'll get notes to Shari soon. Isabela #3: Trying to get sponsorT work organized since we signed the contract with them and they want a retro report in mid april :( Isabela #4: April will be exciting, since it's Q1 reporting month, and also we need to start on the proposals for the next OTR and DRL work. Isabela #5: I'm also presenting in April at DRL. Review on slides would be welcome. Mike #1: I met with the head of trust and security cloudflare yesterday at Access. Mike #2: I'll be meeting with funders-in-this-space on Friday. Mike #3: brave.com wants to know if we want to write an extension for them. Mike #4: Mozilla assigned 2 more engineers to help Dave Huseby merge our patches. We should help them succeed. Mike #5: Tor blog hosting concerns. Matt is checking to see what they can do about the logging situation. Roger asks to make it clear that we want a "pretty good" comment spam handler that is very privacy friendly. Mike #6: I'm still worried that FPF is going to charge forward on the website fingerprinting topic without proper thought to hiring or development process. Georg #1: We will shortly move to ESR45 in our Tor Browser nightlies, and after that in an alpha. (ESR45 will land in a stable in June.) Georg #2: The OS X signing thing exists in the latest nightlies. We should try using it. Georg #3: We took over maintenance of archive.tp.o, but we don't want to do it long term. Karsten: Everything going smoothly. Iwakeh's contract is moving forward. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJW/sMjAAoJEC3ESO/4X7XBtVwH/25VHvDIidUOgC+LPcPTolhi vdJP01odB3pFg6udUNZkF1wMsx2UfmsWwuY7mS2TPrytR2TkuO8KDWLBZY/qdg75 Yq+HVnVFeMh5411jDKqlhyMw60eAGcRuTnhP8SL+KXtGhyLk8UJLBPHzHg83f+FF Ber+0U0K+MUFSzPwWuCFYItTKqjWc5qA5Hzm65SIwtCiEwamTYQ04Ht7SSxNT4uU pQLcL+9Hpab00P0gw92yU58ID/HZ/8HKEZRwgEjcmzBEwqM3rdV6ZWMeSvGXcBxK l9iV1nYkcXs8GcvUlpn2hAybaJX4kBq9z/AJ0+8Wyr/1DTb+WeqHJXIGTZFTS28= =14nu -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Messages for Twitter about Tor blocking?
by David Fifield 30 Mar '16

30 Mar '16

I was invited to go to Twitter and talk about Sheharbano's, Sadia's, Mobin's, Srikanth's, Vern's, Steven's, Damon's, and my research about web sites blocking Tor users: https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2016/02/23/do-you-see-what-i-see/ I'm not a Twitter user, beyond sometimes reading the web interface, so I haven't experienced blocking myself. But I've heard of Tor users being blocked by Twitter. Is there anything you'd like me to say to or ask of them? I know about the #dontblocktor hashtag (which is more often directed at CloudFlare than Twitter); I know that Leif was off Twitter for a while; I know about Marie's survey of users at https://pad.systemli.org/p/twitterdontblocktor. Anything else?

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Technical Innovation grants for the Asia Pacific
by Virgil Griffith 30 Mar '16

30 Mar '16

If you're based in the Asia Pacific, I have some nice grants for you: * http://isif.asia/Grants_TechnicalInnovation * http://isif.asia/ISOC_CybersecGrant * http://www.isif.asia/researchgrant In particular, I think any research about BGP routing in Tor, or otherwise increasing security of BGP or Tor would be lovely research project that I suspect they'd accept. It would also have the side benefit of bringing Asian funders more into the Tor community. -V

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Fwd: Deadline - Call for Papers Toronto - March 31
by Kate Krauss 29 Mar '16

29 Mar '16

FYI-- -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Deadline - Call for Papers Toronto - March 31 Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2016 16:41:56 +0000 (GMT) From: Illena Armstrong | SC Magazine | VP Editorial <info(a)mail.scmagazineus.com> Reply-To: info(a)mail.scmagazineus.com To: kate(a)torproject.org Deadline- March 31 June 1 – 2, 2016 8:15 am - 6:00 pm ** CALL FOR PAPERS Open: January 25, 2016 Closed: March 31, 2016 ------------------------------------------------------------ Are you interested in participating as a presenter/speaker this June at SC Congress Toronto 2016? Do you have any unique insights you can share with the IT security community? After many highly successful years of SC Congress across seven cities (www.sccongress.com ( http://www.sccongress.com/, SC Congress Toronto 2016 – our fifth installment - will feature cutting-edge sessions and must-hear dialogue coming from North America’s thought leaders in IT security – with an audience consisting of up to 1,200 information security and technology professionals and business decision makers from the country’s private and public sectors. SC Congress is an ideal platform for industry luminaries to share their perspectives and experiences with the IT security community around the globe through our live Congress events in seven cities and via webcasts available for download following our events. We love new ideas, or even new ways at looking at old ideas, but what we are not interested in are submissions advocating your organization, product or service. It is also worth noting that we have a finite number of sessions, so willingness to be part of a panel and/or suggestions for the creation of panels greatly improve one’s likelihood of being chosen. The team at SC Congress is seeking practical solutions, advice and suggestions that our delegates can take back and put to work inside their businesses immediately. Only submissions that meet this mission will be considered. Please also be advised that we will not consider standalone vendor sessions for this or any Congress program. If you are a vendor sending in papers, think of a customer, a vendor-neutral analyst or another kind of vendor-neutral practitioner to be a part of your recommended session. Unique, out of the box thinking makes for great content. For ideas on topics that have gained traction in the past, please see SC Congress Toronto 2015’s agenda ( http://www.sccongress.com/toronto/agenda/section/4501/ . Please click this link and fill out the online form to enter a submission. SC CONGRESS TORONTO CALL FOR PAPERS FORM ( https://scmagazineus.wufoo.com/forms/sc-congress-toronto-call-for-papers/ Submission deadline is March 31, 2016 As well, please take care to fill out all fields in your submission. Thank you for your interest in SC Congress Toronto 2016. http://www.scmagazine.com/ ------------------------------------------------------- You are subscribed as kate(a)torproject.org To unsubscribe from promotional messages please click here http://www.pages05.net/haymarketus-scmagazineus/Forms/SCunsubscribe?spMaili… For unsubscribe problems, please reply to this e-mail All SC Magazine promotional emails are sent from the domain "mail.scmagazineus.com". When configuring e-mail or spam filter rules, please use this domain name. © 2016 Haymarket Media Inc 114 West 26th St 4th floor New York, NY 10001

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Future of media and archive.tpo
by Peter Palfrader 28 Mar '16

28 Mar '16

Hey you in the To: line! You are a member of the torarchive or the tormedia unix group. Yet https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/operations/Infrastructure lists no maintainer for either archive.torproject.org or media.torproject.org. We will soon have to change the master host for both of these from aroides to some place else. This needs a person or persons who is responsible for the service. If this turns out to be nobody, this will probably mean we have to shut down these services. Please let me know if you think you are the owner of that service. Cheers, -- | .''`. ** Debian ** Peter Palfrader | : :' : The universal https://www.palfrader.org/ | `. `' Operating System | `- https://www.debian.org/

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Summary of meek's costs, February 2016
by David Fifield 28 Mar '16

28 Mar '16

Here's the summary of meek's CDN fees for February 2016. App Engine + Amazon + Azure = total by period all 2014 $600.63 + $917.89 + $0.00 = $1518.52 January 2015 $464.37 + $669.02 + $0.00 = $1133.39 February 2015 $650.53 + $604.83 + $0.00 = $1255.36 March 2015 $690.29 + $815.68 + $0.00 = $1505.97 April 2015 $886.43 + $785.37 + $0.00 = $1671.80 May 2015 $871.64 + $896.39 + $0.00 = $1768.03 June 2015 $601.83 + $820.00 + $0.00 = $1421.83 July 2015 $732.01 + $837.08 + $0.00 = $1569.09 August 2015 $656.76 + $819.59 + $154.89 = $1631.24 September 2015 $617.08 + $710.75 + $490.58 = $1818.41 October 2015 $672.01 + $110.72 + $300.64 = $1083.37 November 2015 $602.35 + $474.13 + $174.18 = $1250.66 December 2015 $561.29 + $603.27 + $172.60 = $1337.16 January 2016 $771.17 + $1581.88 + $329.10 = $2682.15 February 2016 $986.39 + $977.85 + $445.83 = $2410.07 -- total by CDN $10364.78 + $11624.45 + $2067.82 = $24057.05 grand total https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-transport.html?graph=userst… In February 2016, meek reached its highest heights ever in terms of number of users--15,000 concurrent--before settling back down to about 10,000, where it started the month. For a few days, when obfs3 was on the way down and obfs4 was on the way up, meek was the #1 most used pluggable transport. obfs4 is a story of its own: it exploded from 3,000 to 15,000 users, probably aided by the many new default high-bandwidth bridges added to Tor Browser recently. It's possible that the increased capacity of obfs4 has taken some of the pressure off meek. We moved over 13 TB of traffic over all three services combined. Reminder that if you configure your own CDN or App Engine account and point it at https://meek.bamsoftware.com/, you will be using a completely unlimited bridge, which will go faster and help save money. == App Engine a.k.a. meek-google == Here is how the Google costs broke down: 5829 GB $699.50 5737 instance hours $286.89 Compared to the previous month: 4274 GB $512.86 5166 instance hours $258.31 https://globe.torproject.org/#/bridge/88F745840F47CE0C6A4FE61D827950B06F9E4… == Amazon a.k.a. meek-amazon == We didn't have the unusually high charge for HTTPS requests this month that we had last month. December had 142M requests in the EU (Ireland) region; January had 805M; and February is back to 156M. I set up additional pricing alarms. Apparently I crossed some kind of threshold for number of alarms, because they started charging for them, for the first time. The alarms cost $0.50. Asia Pacific (Singapore) 247M requests $296.50 952 GB $141.52 Asia Pacific (Sydney) 1M requests $1.95 6 GB $0.91 Asia Pacific (Tokyo) 29M requests $35.42 225 GB $29.68 EU (Ireland) 156M requests $188.05 1222 GB $96.31 South America (Sao Paulo) 9M requests $20.47 77 GB $18.33 US East (Northern Virginia) 94M requests $94.06 687 GB $54.13 -- total 538M requests $636.45 3171 GB $340.88 charge for alarms $0.50 https://globe.torproject.org/#/bridge/F4AD82B2032EDEF6C02C5A529C42CFAFE5165… == Azure a.k.a. meek-azure == Zone 1 4103 GB $357.00 Zone 2 644 GB $ 88.83 -- total 4747 GB $445.83 https://globe.torproject.org/#/bridge/AA033EEB61601B2B7312D89B62AAA23DC3ED8… Earlier reports in this series: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek#Costs

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Re: [tor-project] BWAuth Relay Count Declining
by starlight.2016q1＠binnacle.cx 27 Mar '16

27 Mar '16

At 16:58 3/27/2016 +0000, nusenu wrote: >Hi, > >> For the past several days the number of relays >> measured by my bwuath (whose data is given my >> maatuska) have been slowly declining. Originally >> I had an alert when it was below 8800, a few days >> I noticed it going below that. By today it's >> decreased to below 8700 to 8664. >> >> It's not the lowest bwauth measuring, but I don't >> see anything obviously wrong with my bwauth to >> indicate the decline. (The number I mentioned is >> number of lines in the bwscan.V3BandwidthsFile >> file, not the measured relays that make it into >> the consensus - but the comparison I just made did >> use the consensus count.) > > >If "past several days" matches with "since >2016-03-24", then I would not be surprised if the >Global Frag Networks group [1] caused this - at >least partially. > >Many of the unmeasured relays are from the global >frag group (since they just joined the network) > >https://github.com/ornetstats/stats#stats-on-measured-and-recommended-flag > >Many new relays means a rise in unmeasured relays >and if at the same time a few relays leave then >that would explain the decline even for absolute >values. > > >[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.network.onion-routing.ornetradar/1135 > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.network.onion-routing.ornetradar/1132 Interesting. Perhaps the arrival of bunches of new relays is a trigger for or exacerbates the bug where BWauths skip measurements, scanner/band #1 esp.

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Re: [tor-project] BWAuth Relay Count Declining
by starlight.2016q1＠binnacle.cx 27 Mar '16

27 Mar '16

At 09:12 3/27/2016 -0500, you wrote: >For the past several days the number of relays >measured by my bwuath ... have been slowly declining. . . I've noticed the problem as one of my relays has been radically overrated for eight days and is clearly not being measured. The relay currently has consensus of 200% of normal and the link limit is saturated at all times. I might have to shut it down for a couple of days to avoid going over the ISP traffic allocation. Yesterday Faravahar measured it at close to zero (typical after overrating), but the four other BWauths haven't budged. I still plan on launching a project to run a passive BWauth and to fix bugs, eventually restructuring the scanning scheme. But life has not cooperated and I haven't been able to make time for it yet. With luck I should be able to get it underway by May.

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BWAuth Relay Count Declining
by Tom Ritter 27 Mar '16

27 Mar '16

For the past several days the number of relays measured by my bwuath (whose data is given my maatuska) have been slowly declining. Originally I had an alert when it was below 8800, a few days I noticed it going below that. By today it's decreased to below 8700 to 8664. It's not the lowest bwauth measuring, but I don't see anything obviously wrong with my bwauth to indicate the decline. (The number I mentioned is number of lines in the bwscan.V3BandwidthsFile file, not the measured relays that make it into the consensus - but the comparison I just made did use the consensus count.) I wanted to send this email as a potential advance notice; but also ask if there had been any discussion of the bwauth system in Valencia, and if there is any current planned improvements in it. -tom

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Moar Project Ideas!!
by Damian Johnson 25 Mar '16

25 Mar '16

Hopefully the exclamation marks work. Thanks Sebastian for kicking us off! We have just twelve project ideas at present and many of those will go poof due to being outdated. We need moar!!! Please, please give thought to if there's something you'd care to mentor this summer. This is a great opportunity to kickstart development and get a new community member at the same time! We're a bit behind the eight ball right now since Google is evaluating our proposal as we speak, and if selected students will be checking us out on Monday (2/29). Got something? Then just shoot us text like the following and Sebastian or I would be happy to add it... https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#Coding Cheers! -Damian

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