Hello,
Thanks everyone for joining the Tor Relay Operator Meetup on January.
Our next meetup will happen on **March 2nd** at 1900 UTC.
I'll send an invitation to the mailing list and collect topics for the
agenda.
cheers,
Gus
# Notes - Relay Operator Meetup - January, 27th, 2024
## Announcements
* EOL 0.4.7.x removal
Tor 0.4.7.x is approaching the end-of-life (EOL). In February, The
Network Health and Community teams will start the usual work to
contact operators to upgrade.
If you're running a relay or a bridge, please upgrade.
- Announcement:
[tor-relays] PSA: Tor 0.4.7 reaches end of life (EOL) on 2024-01-31
- Metrics: Relays running 0.4.7.x:
Relay Search
- We will track 0.4.7.x removal here:
Deal with EOL 0.4.7.x relays and bridges (#344) · Issues · The Tor Project / Network Health / Team · GitLab
- Relay EOL Policy:Hi
Relay EOL policy · Wiki · The Tor Project / Network Health / Team · GitLab
* Tor University Challenge update - https://toruniversity.eff.org/
EFF video: Electronic Frontier Foundation: "Start a Tor relay at your university, get a chall…" - Mastodon
Two further links for those who want to keep informed:
-
Tor University Challenge: First Semester Report Card | Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Coordinate Tor session at TNC 2024 (#40054) · Issues · The Tor Project / Community / Outreach · GitLab
Next step, we just got accepted to do a presentation at TNC, which is
the annual NREN conference in Europe.
We will present in June alongside Switch, the Swiss NREN.
Q: Who's a good person to contact at a university?
A: Good people to reach at universities are (a) professors, (b)
librarians and (c) student security clubs. See also
Tor University Challenge
## Tor Relay Operator Community Policies
We launched a new website with the Tor Project Community Policies and
we have a section for Tor Relay Operators Policies.
Check out: The Tor Project - Policies
### 001 - Process for new policies for relay operators
Last year we wrote a meta proposal:
Process for new policies and proposals for the Tor relay operator community - The Tor Project - Policies
It explains how to submit a proposal of policy to the relay operators community.
Basically, it's a three steps process:
- Step 1: Submit your draft following the meta proposal format.
- Step 2: Discussion and consensus
- Step 3: Policy and Implementation
Example: Restrict contact information field to email address (and make
it mandatory):
Write proposal to restrict contact information field to email address (and make it mandatory) (#17) · Issues · The Tor Project / Community / Policies · GitLab
Discussion:
[tor-relays] Proposal: Restrict ContactInfo to Mandatory Email Address
## Upcoming elections in 2024 and online censorship
- 2024: the year of Democracy! 
More than 65 elections happening this year (General, Presidential,
Prime Minister, National Assembly, local elections…).
We wrote a blog post "Defend Internet Freedom with Tor in 2024
elections season":
Defend Internet Freedom with Tor in 2024 elections season | The Tor Project
It would be great if you could run bridges and Tor Snowflake during
the whole year, however, if you don't have enough resources, running a
bridge the week before the elections of these countries can help many
users to circumvent censorship.
- Azerbaijan (7th February):
OONI measurements show ongoing internet censorship in Azerbaijan | OONI
- Pakistan (8th February):
Pakistan: Blocking of Wikipedia and Deutsche Welle (DW) | OONI
- Indonesia (14th February): Indonesian Focus Group discusses filtering mechanisms · Issue #316 · net4people/bbs · GitHub
- Belarus (25th February): Some insights into the blocking of Tor in Belarus · Issue #72 · net4people/bbs · GitHub
- Cambodia and Senegal (25th February)
- Iran (1st March)
- Russia (17th March)
- India (April, TBA)
- Elections (partial list):
Elections in 2024 ($196) · Snippets · GitLab or
2024 elections and internet shutdowns watch - Access Now
- Tor Bridge guides: obfs4:
Tor Project | Bridge
- WebTunnel bridge: Tor Project | WebTunnel Bridge
- Snowflake standalone guides (Debian, Docker, FreeBSD, compile from
source): Tor Project | Snowflake
- Script made by Emerald Onion to manage obfs4 bridges:
GitHub - emeraldonion/bridge-management
Related, the video for Roger's CCC talk is now published:
Tor censorship attempts in Russia, Iran, Turkmenistan - media.ccc.de
Or YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5ZiBYR-1MM
## Status of ddos (Network Health / Network Team)
See: New kind of attack?
Q: Is there a profile available yet on DOS targeted relays (guard/exit
status) and whether they are losing particular flags? Also any timing
information?
A: No (to both) --GeKo
## Tor Metrics issues (wrong first seen date)
Surprise bug in the metrics portal where it is assigning the wrong
'first seen' date to relays.
Many older relays seem suddenly less than 2 weeks old... (#40024) · Issues · The Tor Project / Network Health / Metrics / Relay Search · GitLab
We hope to get it fixed next week. It's not doing damage except for
all of the alarm and irritation and confusion it is generating.
## Upcoming torservers.net meetup for non-profits running relays.
Contact Stefan Leibi [stefan@torservers.net] if you are running a
non-profit and have not been contacted by me today.
## Tor Q&A
* Q: Who decides who is a [Directory
Authority](Relay Search)?
The current directory authorities decide by consensus. One challenge
with adding more directory authorities is that the coordination work
to add or remove one scales poorly with more of them, so while in
theory we want a bunch because of improved trust, in practice 10 or so
is the limit. (Performance bottlenecks are mostly resolved by the
'fallbackdir' design, so now it's only a trust question, not a
bandwidth question mostly.)
* Q: Who is currently running an authority and why do we trust them?
You can see the current list at
src/app/config/auth_dirs.inc · main · The Tor Project / Core / Tor · GitLab
-- this is a list of IPs. The question is who is operating the relays?
Yep! There are eight v3 directory authority operators currently:
Roger, weasel, sebastian, alex, linus, andreas, stefani, micah. We
don't hide the list, but also we haven't been good on docs at that
level. Better to find us at a Tor dev meeting / hacker conference and
meet us in person! See also
Tell me about all the keys Tor uses | Tor Project | Support for a related
question.
* Q: Who choose the current operators?
We have accumulated them over the past two decades, using the
cypherpunks / remailer community as the initial trust root.
As for 'why do we trust them', trust is a complicated topic, so the
first thought is, trust them to do what? Their hourly votes are public
and archived at https://collector.torproject.org/
* Q: What's the status of bandwidth scanners?
They are running and doing their job. All bandwidth authorities
switched over from TorFlow to sbws; we plan to replace that with
onbasca at some point.
* Q: What happened with FlashFlow? (prop316)
proposals/316-flashflow.md · main · The Tor Project / Core / Tor Specifications · GitLab
ahf (who cannot make this meeting): there was an unfinished implementation of this, but we did not think it was worthwhile to finish due to its complexity and because of improvements in the general bw scanning space thanks to sbws. We may want to look into this again in the future.
* Q: Could relays be explicitly recommended to use common TCP ports
for their ORPort (such as 21 and 8080) instead of 9001 in case 443
isn't available? For instance, my university blocks TCP on most ports
but 21 and 8080 are still open.
A: Interesting! Because most places that filter ports leave 443 open.
* Q: With the massive amount of snowflake proxies available, it seems
like IP blocks would be much harder to achieve. Is there any plan to
possibly recommend that users use snowflake over obfs4?
A: snowflake is already automatically recommended to users in some
countries when they start Tor Browser ("Connection Assist" feature)
and Orbot ("smart connect")
conf/circumvention.json · main · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / rdsys-admin · GitLab
* Q: please update the snowflake package in debian
Related:
Make the snowflake deb more accessible to Debian stable users (#40105) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
If you want to run snowflake proxies at scale we wrote a guide on how
to do it with Ansible (scroll a bit down)
How to run your own Tor snowflake proxy - Unredacted
* Q: At DFRI (dfri.se) we are running some exit relays. Recently we
had an idea that maybe we would try to apply for funding for a project
that would be something like "managing a secure and sustainable tor
exit relay setup using Debian, Tor, ansible, git, gpg, and so on". Now
we are wondering if others have thoughts on this idea and if anyone
here would be interesting in participating in such a project. Who
should fund this? The idea is to apply for money from something like
the "Open Tech Fund" (https://www.opentech.fund/) or similar.
A: Yes, this sounds great! Two thoughts: (a) coordinate with Leibi on
the torservers.net coalitions, and (b) OTF is the place everybody goes
for every funding idea, so they are often overloaded with proposals
these days.
A: One thing this relay community would love and needs more of is
workshops. Can you run a workshop for the relay operator community on
how to scalably run these relays?
Q: Tor Browser doesn't work to bootstrap on an IPv6-only network. I
think Tor is trying the ipv4 for each of its fallbackdirs and those
don't work. If anybody lives in IPv6-only land, please help us
diagnose and fix!
Q: When will the next online meetup be? Suggestion: Always announce
the next meeting date at the current meetup so that we have these
meetups on a regular basis.
(and please link or include the previous notes, for people who missed
the meeting)
A: Many Tor people will be at FOSDEM. We could have an in-person
meetup! Let us know if you want to help organize that.
A: We will have the next online meetup March 2nd, @ 19 UTC
On Fri, Jan 26, 2024 at 05:13:48PM -0300, gus wrote:
Hi,
Just a friendly reminder that we're meeting this Saturday, January
27th at 19 UTC.
Meetup Agenda
-------------
* EOL 0.4.7.x removal
* Tor University Challenge update https://toruniversity.eff.org/
* Community Policies site: The Tor Project - Policies
* 001 - Process for new policies for relay operators
* Upcoming elections in 2024 and online censorship
* Status of DDoS
* Tor Metrics issues (wrong first seen date)
* Tor Q&A
Room link: Tor Relay Operator Meetup
cheers,
Gus
On Wed, Jan 17, 2024 at 02:11:11PM -0300, gus wrote:
> Dear Tor relay operators and volunteers,
>
> Save the date: the next Tor Relay Operator Meetup will happen on
> Saturday, January 27 at 19 UTC!
>
> We're still working on the agenda for this meetup, however feel free to
> add your topics directly to the ticket or just reply to the mailing list:
> Tor relay operator meetup (2024-01-27 at 1900 UTC) (#84) · Issues · The Tor Project / Community / Relays · GitLab
>
> Where:
> Room link: Tor Relay Operator Meetup
> When: January 27, 19:00 UTC
>
> Tor Code of Conduct:
> Code of Conduct - The Tor Project - Policies
>
> Registration
> No need for a registration or anything else, just use the
> room-linkabove. We will open the room 10 minutes before so you can test
> your mic setup.
>
> Please share with your friends, social media and other mailing lists!
>
> cheers,
> Gus
> --
> The Tor Project
> Community Team Lead
--
The Tor Project
Community Team Lead
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