[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2026-08-20

Shelikhoo · August 20, 2026, 5:27pm

Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship work meeting pad

···

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Anti-censorship
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Next meeting: Thursday, August 27 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:
* 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 ==

 \* Reading group next week \(August 20\) CensorLess: Cost\-Efficient Censorship Circumvention Through Serverless Cloud Functions https://www.petsymposium.org/popets/2026/popets-2026-0096.php

== Discussion ==

 \* snowflake broker deployment
     \* new version of probetest is already deployed in the broker but not configured in nginx
     \* the deployment of broker will also include the proxy ratelimiting feature

== Actions ==

\*

== Interesting links ==

== Reading group ==

 \* We will discuss &quot;CensorLess: Cost\-Efficient Censorship Circumvention Through Serverless Cloud Functions&quot; on Aug/20/2026
     \* https://www.petsymposium.org/popets/2026/popets-2026-0096.pdf
     \* https://www.petsymposium.org/popets/2026/popets-2026-0096.php
     \* 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): 2026-08-20
Last weeks:
- Implemented and merged rate limit map for proxy polls (snowflake#40506)
- Fixed proxy prometheus metrics in the case a client doesn't have SDP candidates (snowflake#40544)
- Updated wording of help text for -outbound-address proxy option (snowflake#40515)
- decommissioned old Conjure bridge (conjure#46)
- reviewed 3 bucket NAT type MR (snowflake!727)
- wrote a summary of CensorLess and some Tor integration options (research#19)
Next week:
- continue review of UAT (team#178)
- make proxy-bridge reachability checks robust to bridge outages (snowflake#40504)

dcf: 2026-08-20
Last week:
Next week:
Help with:

meskio: 2026-08-20
Last week:
- research existing DNS transports (team#199)
- redirect bridgest.torproject.org/info to the distributors documentation (rdsys!659)
- catching up after AFK
Next week:
- research existing DNS transports (team#199)

onyinyang: 2026-08-20
Last week(s):
- Work for project #170 to detect bridge blocking
- flag bridges that have a drop
- create API endpoint to poll for flagged bridges?
Next week:
- Continue tasks for project #170
- send flagged bridges to vantage point or else collect them to be sent

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&#39;s going wrong
            Blog post for conjure: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/conjure/-/issues/46
           \- review Tor browser Lox integration https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests/1300
           \- add TTL cache to lox MR for duplicate responses:

         \- 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:

- 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&#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: 2026-05-28
Last weeks:
- Researching possible DTLS block in Russia
- Issue · 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