[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2024-09-26

Shelikhoo · September 26, 2024, 5:12pm

Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2024/tor-meeting.2024-09-26-16.00.html

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship work meeting pad

···

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Anti-censorship
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Next meeting: Thursday, Octember 03 16:00 UTC
Facilitator: shelikhoo
^^^(See Facilitator Queue at tail)

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 projects, we are working on:
* All needs review tickets:
* Merge requests · Anti-censorship · GitLab
* Project 158 <-- meskio working on it
* Issues · Anti-censorship · GitLab

== Announcements ==

 \* bridges@torproject\.org is now served by rdsys, bridgedb is down now

== Discussion ==

 \* drop in unrestricted proxies
     \* https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40386
     \* not urgent, but something to invetigate early next week
     \* since last week&#39;s \(2024\-09\-12\) meeting: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40386#note_3077527
         \* &quot;The count is down to 2090\. Whoever has historical Prometheus data, could you please check the drop in unrestricted NAT type per proxy type? See https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40384#note_3077291. I wonder if only iPtProxy is affected\.&quot;
         \* Currently there are virtually no unrestricted iptproxy proxies, but maybe there were more in the past \(before 2024\-09\-13\)?
             \* https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40384#note_3077291
             \* cohosh will provide WofWca with prometheus data starting from a few days before the drop

(Sep 26 New:)
* probetest delay-before-disconnect to reduce incorrect "restricted" measurements
* fix(probetest): wrong "restricted" sometimes (!397) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
* shelikhoo will deploy next week, maybe Monday 2024-09-30

== 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): 2024-09-26
Last week:
- worked with meek bridge operator to update domain names
- dove into family support for bridges (tor#40935)
- TROVE-2024-012
- merged and then unmerged kcp library update
This week:
- take a look at WofWca's big changes to snowflake
- finish snowflake dependency upgrades that were causing problems
- take a look at snowflake web and webext translations and best practices
- make changes to Lox encrypted bridge table
- Simplify BridgeLine struct and make it variable length (!147) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / lox · GitLab

meskio: 2023-09-19
Last week:
- fail to recover github gettor (rdsys#189)
- switch email from BridgeDB to rdsys (rdsys#218)
- deploy bridgedb metrics producer (rdsys#218)
- review and fix X-Forwarded-From header handling in https and moat (rdsys!390 rdsys!388)
- start a conversation with TPA on contanerizing rdsys (tpa/team#41769)
Next week:
- investigate if bridges are still jumping distributors (rdsys#232)

Shelikhoo: 2024-09-26
Last Week:
- snowflake broker update/reinstall(cont.):

- Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (cont.)( Draft: Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (!315) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab ) improvements
- Merge request review: docs: improve proxy CLI param descriptions (docs: improve proxy CLI param descriptions (!370) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab)
- Merge request reviews
Next Week/TODO:
- Merge request reviews
- snowflake broker update/reinstall(cont.):
Upgrade snowflake broker machine from Debian 10 (#40349) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
- Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (cont.) ( Draft: Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (!315) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab ) improvements

onyinyang: 2023-09-19
Last week(s):
- started looking into troll-patrol integration for Lox bridge blockage detection
Next week:
- Global Gathering
- continue troll-patrol integration for Lox bridge blockage detection
- update lox protocols to return duplicate responses for an already seen request
- Work on outstanding milestone issues:
in particular: Increase the acceptable time for bridgeline failure (#69) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / lox · GitLab
- key rotation automation

     Later:
     pending decision on abandoning lox wasm in favour of some kind of FFI? https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/43096):
         \- add pref to handle timing for pubkey checks in Tor browser
         \- add trusted invitation logic to tor browser integration:

- improve metrics collection/think about how to show Lox is working/valuable
- sketch out Lox blog post/usage notes for forum

 \(long term things were discussed at the meeting\!\): 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&#39;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 \(to be matched with a requesting user&#39;s geoip or something?\)
             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: 2024-09-12
Last weeks:
-
Next weeks:
- Update Snowflake to use latest pion upstream releases, waiting for WebRTC v4 beta.
- Test Snowflake fork with covert-dtls
- Condensing thesis into paper
Help with:
- Feedback on thesis

Facilitator Queue:
onyinyang meskio shelikhoo
1. First available staff in the Facilitator Queue will be the facilitator for the meeting
2. After facilitating the meeting, the facilitator will be moved to the tail of the queue