[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2026-04-16

Hi everyone,

Here is our meeting log: #tor-meeting: anti-censorship team meeting

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship

···

--------------------------------

Next meeting: Thursday, Apr 16 16:00 UTC
Facilitator:meskio

^^^(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:Issue Boards · Issues by Assignee · 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:

  https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/merge_requests?scope=all&utf8=✓&state=opened&assignee_id=None

== Announcements ==

== Discussion ==

     Draft short paper about using fountain codes for rendezvous, comments welcome

  Making sure you're not a bot!

  Making sure you're not a bot!

     Recent snowflake proxy updates for DTLS fingerprinting (randomizemimic by default)

  Set covertdtls setting to "randomizemimic" by default for standalone proxies (#40530) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab

     We haven't reached out to operators yet

     cohosh offers to send a tor-relays email

     The snowflake default bridge lines in Tor Browser were updated with a new set of STUN servers

== 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?

     Next in the Reading Group Queue:

== 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): 2026-04-16

     Last week:

         - added bloco to KnownProxyTypes for broker metrics (snowflake#40534)

         - implemented a way to manually update poll intervals without restart (snowflake!701)

         - responded to IPtProxy issue to expose GetCurrentNATType for the snowflake proxy (snowflake#40536)

             - https://github.com/tladesignz/IPtProxy/issues/86

         - worked on proxy fairness proposal writeup

     Next week:

         - keep following up with fingerprinting in Russia

         - make proxy-bridge reachability checks robust to bridge outages (snowflake#40504)

         - more work on letting broker inform proxies how often to poll

             - have proxies honour the NextPoll message

         - follow up about running shadow simulations for snowflake performance

         - revisit conjure integration with lyrebird

         - take a look at potential snowflake orbot bug

             - [BUG] 20% CPU overhead in kindness mode · Issue #1183 · guardianproject/orbot-android · GitHub

dcf: 2026-04-16

     Last week:

     Next week:

     - comment on dynamic poll rate adjustment Let the broker inform proxies how often to poll (#25598) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab

     Help with:

meskio: 2026-03-26
     Last week:
         - split translation strings in the telegram distributor to make it easier to translate (rdsys#299)
         - stop sharing windows7 TB in Telegram gettor, as there is no releases anymore (onionsproutsbot#77)
         - assignments log scrambled on our side (rdsys!638)
         - grant work
     Next week:
         - give it a try to gorelease to produce debian packages

Shelikhoo: 2026-04-16
     Last Week:
          - [Testing] 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 ) testing environment setup/research

     - Merge request Reviews

     - [Research] proxy pool overload and potential blocking in Iran ( Add three NAT type buckets to the snowflake broker (#40077) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab )

     - [Research] Add three NAT type buckets to the snowflake broker ( Add three NAT type buckets to the snowflake broker (#40077) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab )

     - Writing Socks5 UDP proxy for nat type simuation

     - [Done] Update Snowflake STUN servers at Tor browser ( Bug 41775: Update STUN Server List for Snowflake Default Bridge Line (!1462) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Applications / tor-browser-build · GitLab )

     Next (working) Week/TODO:
         - Merge request reviews
         - [Deployment]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 ) Building custom Tor Browser with patch applied
         - Vantage point maintaince

     - [Research] proxy pool overload and potential blocking in Iran ( Add three NAT type buckets to the snowflake broker (#40077) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab )

     - [Research] Add three NAT type buckets to the snowflake broker ( Add three NAT type buckets to the snowflake broker (#40077) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab )

     - Writing Socks5 UDP proxy for nat type simuation

onyinyang: 2026-04-09

     Last week(s):

     - Started background work for project #170

     Next week:

        - Start on tasks for project #170

    Switch back to some of these:
        As time allows:
           - Continue work on rdsys#196

     - Continue Investigating rdsys#248 i.e., why dysfunctional webtunnel bridges are being distributed

     - Troubleshooting conjure not connecting in China

     - waiting for more information from conjure authors/maintainers

     - Lox still seems to be filling up the disk on the rdsys-test server despite changes made to delete old entries, look into what's going wrong

                Blog post for conjure: Set up a more permanent Conjure bridge (#46) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / conjure · GitLab
               - review Tor browser Lox integration Bug 43096: Move to Rust for the Lox integration (!1300) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab
               - add TTL cache to lox MR for duplicate responses:

  Enable repeat responses to successful Lox requests (!305) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / lox · GitLab

     - Work on outstanding milestone issues:

     - key rotation automation

     Later:

     pending decision on abandoning lox wasm in favour of some kind of FFI? Consider dropping Lox's WASM (#43096) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab):

     - add pref to handle timing for pubkey checks in Tor browser

     - add trusted invitation logic to tor browser integration:

  Lox module doesn't include trusted invitation redemption (#42974) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab

     - 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!):

     - 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?

theodorsm: 2026-04-16

     Last weeks:

     - MR fixing silent errors of fingerprint parse failure in covert-dtls: Improve covert-dtls error handling (!705) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab

     - Researching possible DTLS blocking in Russia

     - Implementing DTLS 1.3 in pion

     Next weeks:

     - Implementing DTLS 1.3 in pion

     Help with:

     -

Facilitator Queue:

     meskio onyinyang cohosh 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
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