[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2023-06-29

meskio · June 29, 2023, 4:41pm

Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:

http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-06-22-15.57.html

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship

···

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Next meeting: Thursday, July 6 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: Development · Boards · Anti-censorship · GitLab
  * The anti-censorship team's wiki page:
    * Home · Wiki · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Team · GitLab
  * Past meeting notes can be found at:
    * The tor-project Archives
  * Tickets that need reviews: from sponsors, we are working on:
    * All needs review tickets:
      * Merge requests · Anti-censorship · GitLab
    * Sponsor 96 <-- meskio, shell, onyinyang, cohosh
      * Sponsor 96: Rapid Expansion of Access to the Uncensored Internet through Tor in China, Hong Kong, & Tibet · The Tor Project · GitLab
    * Sponsor 139 <-- hackerncoder, irl, joydeep, meskio, emmapeel working on it
      * Riseup Pad

== Announcements ==

  * rdsys is ignoring the running flag now
    * To hide your bridge's ORPort:
      ORPort 127.0.0.1:auto
      AssumeReachable 1

  * No meeting July 13 or 20

== Discussion ==

  * do we want to activate renovate bot in snowflake?
    * conjure and rdsys have being using it for a while
    * Perform more regular dependency updates (#40194) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
    * meskio will enable it

  * do we want to use the triage bot to warn on stalled issues?
    * common/02-stale.yaml · main · The Tor Project / TPA / Triage Ops · GitLab
    * so issues are reminded if they get stalled for too long
    * meskio will enable it for snowflake and rdsys to try it out

  * Conjure call for testers: are we done here? can we wrap up? (--gus)
  🔍 Call for Testers: Help the Tor Project to test Conjure on Tor Browser Alpha!
    * we can close the call for testers after 28 days
    * there was a lot of good feedback
    * now we need to work on reliability and testing it from vantage points

  * should we cancel this meeting during PETS??
    * let's cancel July 13 and 20 meetings

  * WebTunnel soft release update
    * Webtunnel soft release strategy (#94) · Issues · The Tor Project / Community / Team · GitLab
    * [tor-relays] (Announcement) WebTunnel, a new pluggable transport for bridges, now available for deployment
    * the user support eam will start asking folks to test webtunnel

== 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.

dcf: 2023-06-29
  Last week:
    - tried an encapsulation.ReadData performance improvement Try reducing allocations in encapsulation.ReadData (#40276) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
  Next week:
    - open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors is nonzero Deploy snowflake-server for QueuePacketConn buffer reuse fix (#40260) (#40262) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
      - parent: Improve bug discovery process (#40267) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
    - open issue to disable /debug endpoint on snowflake broker
  Help with:

meskio: 2023-06-29
   Last week:
    - Distribute webtunnel bridges in the HTTPS distributor without enabling IPv6 flag (bridgedb!56)
    - review what projects are missing license (team#110)
    - update rdsys grafana dashboard
    - update rdsys alerts in prometheus (tpa/prometheus-alerts!32)
    - release and deploy a new version of rdsys
    - make rdsys take into account the bandwidth ratio (rdsys!135)
    - triage down why gettor is not updating to TB 12.5 to a bug on TB release (rdsys#166)
    - update wiki links to gitlab.tpo instead of .onion (rdsys#127)
    - add a generic metric with resources by their testing status to rdsys (rdsys!134)
    - ignore the running flag in rdsys (rdsys!134)
    - build snowflake 2.6.0 docker image
   Next week:
    - test i18n support in rdsys (rdsys#11)
    - finish the migration to git.tpo (team#86)

Shelikhoo: 2023-06-29
   Last Week:
    - [Merge Request Awaiting] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support to snowflake (snowflake!64) (stalled)
    - [Research] HTTPT Planning Add HTTPT as a pluggable transport to Tor Browser (#1) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / HTTPT · GitLab
    - Presentation "Call for webtunnel bridges" @ Relay Operator Meetup
    - Email "(Announcement) WebTunnel, a new pluggable transport for bridges,
    now available for deployment" to relay operator mailing list. Thanks ggus!
    - logcollector alert system - ongoing
   Next Week/TODO:
    - logcollector alert system <- immediate todo
    - [Research] WebTunnel planning (Continue)
    - Try to find a place to host another vantage point
    - Snowflake Performance Analysis

onyinyang: 2023-06-29
  Last week:
     - Finished changing vectors to maps
    - Started looking into db for Lox structures
    - Started working on Lox presentation for PETS
  This week:
    - fix up indexing of hashmaps for Lox bridgetable
     - Working on Lox presentation for PETS (to include some details about Tor integration)
     - Decide between databases to back the Lox structures (poloDB, redb, surrealdb seem like reasonable candidates)
     If time:
         - work on syncing Lox with rdsys given Change labelling of resources failing tests from `gone` (#168) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / rdsys · GitLab
         - start thinking about metrics to add
  (long term things were discussed at the meeting!):
       Riseup Pad
      - 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?

Itchy Onion: 2023-06-08
    Last week:
    - fixed snowflake pipeline due to outdated Debian image
    - continue working on rdsys#56 implementation. Still need to do the following:
      - finish up computing bridge distribution in Kraken
       - does it have to be deterministic?
       - does the disproportion have to be strictly followed
     - finish writing tests
     - refactor code because some functions are getting extremely long
     - what to do with stencil package?
    This week:
    - review MRs
    - continue working on rdsys#56 implementation. Still need to do the following:
    - fixed a problem with vanilla bridges not being added properly to the database
    - still working on tests
    - adding a migaration patch (Consider persistent storage of bridge information (#56) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / rdsys · GitLab)

hackerncoder: 2023-04-20
    last week:
        - (py-)ooni-exporter torsf (snowflake)
        - (py-)ooni-exporter web_connectivity
    Next week:
       - work on "bridgetester"?
       - how does Iran block bridges?

--
meskio | https://meskio.net/
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