Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:

http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-11-30-15.57.html

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship --------------------------------

Next meeting: Thursday, Dec 7 16:00 UTC Facilitator: onyinyang

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?sc... * 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_nam...

== Announcements ==

== Discussion ==

* as expected snowflake ampcache is not working in china * the domain used for domain front is blocked, maybe other domains will fix the problem

* shelikhoo is running experiments on kcp performance with packet loss * https://jsfiddle.net/Sheilkhoo/s9kx4h8m/1/ * x=packetloss, y=delay, z=speed * tcp seems to be faster then udp here * wondering if there is some tunning possible to improve that * previous discussions on kcp tunning: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... * https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2021-July/000178...

will wait for cohosh to be around: * manifest v3 deprecation in browsers and snowflake webextension * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... * https://developer.chrome.com/blog/resuming-the-transition-to-mv3/ * google chrome will stop supporting mv2 June 2024 * will the snowflake webextension stop working? do we want to do something? or just recommend firefox?

== Actions ==

== Interesting links ==

* https://www.cs-pk.com/papers/3/ "NetShuffle: Circumventing Censorship with Shuffle Proxies at the Edge" S&P 2024 * https://petsymposium.org/popets/2024/popets-2024-0027.php "Communication Breakdown: Modularizing Application Tunneling for Signaling Around Censorship" PETS 2024 * https://splintercon.net/ "the first conference dedicated to identifying and beginning to challenge connectivity restrictions of the splinternet." * https://bitwarden.com/open-source-security-summit/ meskio giving a talk: "Bypassing Online Censorship: Open-Source Tools as a Critical Lifeline"

== Reading group == * We will discuss "NetShuffle: Circumventing Censorship with Shuffle Proxies at the Edge" on December 14 * https://www.cs-pk.com/papers/3/ * 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): 2023-11-09 Last week: - conjure bridge maintenance - caught a bug in safelog library - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... - caught problem with domain front in conjure - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/conju... This week: - lox tor browser UX integration - lox distributor testing - look into alternative domain fronting providers Needs help with:

dcf: 2023-11-30 Last week: - did some review of SQS rendezvous merge request https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... - answered a question about AMP cache rendezvous in China https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... Next week: - open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors is nonzero https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... - parent: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... - open issue to disable /debug endpoint on snowflake broker Before EOY 2023: - move snowflake-02 to new VM Help with:

meskio: 2023-11-30 Last week: - deploy rdsys with secret config params separated (rdsys#92) - setup rdsys staging server (rdsys#170) - make rdsys release Next week: - prepare settings anti-listing logic to be reused by HTTP distributor (rdsys#181) - setup rdsys staging server (rdsys#170)

Shelikhoo: 2023-11-30 Last Week: - Work on snowflake performance improvement (WIP): https://gitlab.torproject.org/shelikhoo/snowflake/-/tree/dev-speedwithudp?re... A first glance of what a performance comparsion would look like: https://jsfiddle.net/Sheilkhoo/s9kx4h8m/1/ is it not great and udp like transport looks like slower than tcp. Maybe KCP settings need to be updated? - Updated probeobserver to support both snowflake bridges and updated communication system between China's vantage point and log collector https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/connectivity-measurement/p...) - Merge request reviews Next Week/TODO: - Write Tor Spec for Armored URL (continue) - Work on snowflake performance improvement (WIP): https://gitlab.torproject.org/shelikhoo/snowflake/-/tree/dev-speedwithudp?re... - Merge request reviews

onyinyang: 2023-11-30 Last week(s): - Finished up remaining docs tasks for crates.io publishing -published all relevant Lox crates to crates.io - SOTO anti-censorship team presentation preparation - looked into Telegram bot - attempted hyper upgrade, many breaking changes so this will take some work This week: - continue Telegram bot dev - attempt hyper upgrade again - Splintercon

(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?