Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:

http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2022/tor-meeting.2022-10-06-15.58.html

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship work meeting pad --------------------------------

Next meeting: Thursday Oct 13 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: 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?sc...         * Sponsor 28             * must-do tickets: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/10             * possible tickets: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%...         * Sponsor 96             * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/24

== Announcements ==

*

== Discussion ==

* loss of bandwidth at snowflake-01 bridge         * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...         * the cause is unknown, but it may be something outside our immediate control, like a network issue at the hosting center. operators are investigating it.         * will try a reboot later today         * low bandwidth at the broker could be the cause of connection failures from Iran             * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/96#note_2841...         * (but there are still users from Iran, still the largest single contingent)             * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...     * Snowflake Enable Distributed Snowflake Support at broker src shell         * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/95         * old proxies were rejected starting monday of this week         * everything seems smooth, we saw a drop in polls as expected, but we still seem to be mostly in capacity and it looks worth it to move forward.         * plan to make a community announcement about the rejection of old proxies     * Iran:         * Anything (resources, work, support) that may be needed to help circumvent censorship in Iran right now?         * There are multiple reports of snowflake not working in Iran in some ISPs, but so far we didn't receive a more detailed report.         * Should we try out new PTs? dnstt, etc?         * Get snowflake in Tor Browser updated to support utls         * meskio will explore if orbot has support for uTLS in snowflake or if that could be added to be able to see if uTLS solves the problem of snowflake

* telegram download bot         * apart from a minor issue that needed a one-line fix, launch went well         * external contributors have also participated         * heavy focus on building new features (especially android builds without downloads.json), which in turn either requires a lot of refactoring         * lots of issues concerning third-party libraries again, most bug reports/feature requests have been made to upstream developers             * logging has been replaced with aiologger to protect the bot from "hugs of death"             * aiologger does not show dates in files. hacky solution: obtain the date when methods of the logger are called, maintainers are not very active             * we depend on undocumented behavior. after doing research, it seems OK here             * are new versions with regressions OK?         * translations             * a recent change in how exceptions are communicated to the user has pushed the readiness of translations back             * will be expanded once development (mostly) stagnates             * existing translations will not be touched until that happens             * comments are still a TODO     * new experimental gettor backend         * authored in go, could potentially be merged together with rdsys         * makes sharing large files through platforms with download limits under 100 MB (unless if you pay, or not) possible (by splitting them and providing the users with an app to put it back together)         * relies on commands like the other gettor implementations         * uses mongodb as a backend         * android versions work too         * currently private     * built-in bridgdes vs 'settings' pool: do we need more built-in obfs4 bridges?

== Actions ==

== Interesting links ==

* https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/onion-support/-/issues/155#...         * Draft campaign to download Tor in Kazakhstan (preparing for elections)     * https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/128         * The Great Firewall of China has blocked google.com and all its subdomains     * https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/129         * Large scale blocking of TLS-based censorship circumvention tools in China

== 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 2022-10-06     Last week:         - Published an update to the web extension that will cause unrestricted proxies to poll more often (snowflake-webext#58)         - Fixed translations for snowflake.torproject.org and the extension (snowflake-webext#61)         - responded to a few other issues         - talked with UX and applications teams about reputation-based bridge distribution     This week:         - continue monitoring snowflake proxy pool and implement some improvements         - resume Conjure work         - wrap up manifest v3 candidate     Needs help with:

dcf: 2022-10-06     Last week:         - more performance optimization and debugging on snowflake-01 bridge https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2022-October/000...         - investigated as-yet unexplained drop in bandwidth at snowflake-01 bridge https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...         - archived snowflake-webext-0.6.2 https://archive.org/details/snowflake-webextension-0.6.2     Next week:         - upgrade memory capacity of broker VPS https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...         - disable non-WireGuard SSH access to snowflake-02         - migrate goptlib to gitlab https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/86#note_2823...         - try Conjure PT development version https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-dev-introducing-a-conjure-pt-for-tor/4429     Help with:

meskio: 2022-10-06    Last week:        - deploy rdsys-gettor        - investigate gettor misterious freezee (rdsys#129)        - refresh captchas for BridgeDB (still in progress) (bridgedb#40061)        - update imap libraries in rdsys (rdsys!54)        - update obfs4proxy package in debian (obfs4#40008)        - create 'First contribution' tickets in rdsys for Outreachy        - rdsys updates now signal if they are full update (rdsys!53)        - a proposal to refresh builtin bridges in TB (tor-browser-build#40630)    Next week:        - get uTLS back on obfs4proxy meek (obfs4#40008)

Shelikhoo: 2022-10-06    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 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/httpt...         - [Research] Generate Charts for presention: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/92#note_2836...         - [Research] Investigate Distributed Snowflake Rollout Issue (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/95)         - [Merge Request] Add upload connection info to rdsys in WebTunnel(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/webtu... https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/40920#note_2840555)         - [Deployment] Setup Webtunnel at njalla VPS(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/97)         - [Deployment] Distributed Snowflake Rollout (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...)    Next Week:         - [Research] WebTunnel Planning (Continue)         - Generate Charts for presention: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/92#note_2836... (Continue)         - [Research] Add upload connection info to rdsys in WebTunnel         - [Research] Fix vantage point summary upload in China

Itchy Onion: 2022-10-06     Last week:             - continue debuging message dropping issue                 - study why Tor's use of snowflake doesn't exhibit similar problems and tried to do something similar)     This week:         - continue debugging the message dropping issue             -learning about how to properly trace a connection with the tools provided by RACE)                 - testing caching connections