[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2026-07-16

Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs: #tor-meeting: tor anti-censorship meeting

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship

···

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Next meeting: Thursday, July 16 16:00 UTC
Facilitator: cohosh

^^^(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:

  Merge requests · Anti-censorship · GitLab

     Projects the TPI anti-censorship team is working on:

     Project 146: Expanding access to digital media through the use of secure communications, infrastructure, tools, and techniques

  Work items · Anti-censorship · GitLab

     Project 170: Monitoring and reporting on censorship against the Tor network

     epic: Project 170: Monitoring and reporting on censorship against the Tor network: (#17) · Epics · The Tor Project · GitLab

     Project 201: Signaling channels

     board Issue Boards · Development Kanban Board · Boards · The Tor Project · GitLab

== Announcements ==

== Discussion ==

     Snowflake Daily Operations (snowflake-01 bridge) is making a decision about what to do about Mullvad donations, which have been the largest source of funding for the bridge.

  Snowflake Daily Operations - Open Collective

     We will likely be making a statement soon.

== Actions ==

== Interesting links ==

     PoPETs Proceedings — Obscura: Enabling Ephemeral Proxies for Traffic Encapsulation in WebRTC Media Streams Against Cost-Effective Censors

     "Obscura: Enabling Ephemeral Proxies for Traffic Encapsulation in WebRTC Media Streams Against Cost-Effective Censors"

     PETS 2026 paper that is relevant to Snowflake and WebRTC

     Other FOCI/PETS papers: FOCI and PETS 2026 papers · Issue #636 · net4people/bbs · GitHub

== 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): 2026-07-16

     Last week:

         - updated documentation on proxy poll-interval options (snowflake!715)

         - worked on rate limiting implementation (snowflake#40506)

         - closed issue on FIFO vs LIFO priority queue (snowflake#40473)

     Next week:

         - continue to review PT spec implementation in UAT

         - more work on rate limiting proxy polls

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

dcf: 2026-07-16

     Last week:

     -worked with Snowflake Daily Operations on a response to Mullvad funding

     Next week:

     Help with:

meskio: 2026-07-16
     Last week:
         - research how to add orbot to telegram gettor (onionsproutsbot#74)
         - start looking into options for DNS transports (team#199)
         - review TPA steps to include PTs in deb.tpo (tpa/team#42591)
         - reports
     Next week:
         - add orbot to telegram gettor (onionsproutsbot#74)

Shelikhoo: 2026-07-02
     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 )

     - [Research] Request for Comment: Rust Library for TLS Fingerprint Imitation with Delegation Route Usage in Tor Browser) Request for Comment: Rust Library for TLS Fingerprint Imitation with Delegation Route Usage in Tor Browser (#45056) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab (Done)

     - [Deployment] Release Webtunnel server v0.0.5 (Update version to v0.0.5 (!45) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / WebTunnel · GitLab)

     - [Research] Consider support of static file distribution(like Tor cached states) over amp cache to allow full Tor bootstrap over amp cache (Consider support of static file distribution(like Tor cached states) over amp cache to allow full Tor bootstrap over amp cache (#198) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Team · 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 )

     - Add 3 type nat bucket to snowflake broker

     - Implement TLS Delegate in Rust (cont.)

onyinyang: 2026-07-16

     Last week(s):

     - Mid-year break

     - Work for project #170 to detect bridge blocking

     Next week:

        - Continue 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? 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:

  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: 2026-05-28

     Last weeks:

     - Researching possible DTLS block in Russia

     - Snowflake-targeted DTLS filtering in Russia, starting 2026-03-30 · Issue #603 · net4people/bbs · GitHub

     - Implementing DTLS 1.3 in pion

     Next weeks:

     - Implementing DTLS 1.3 in pion

     Help with:

     -

Facilitator Queue:

     cohosh meskio onyinyang 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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