17:00:25 <phw> #startmeeting anti-censorship weekly checkin 2019-09-26
17:00:25 <MeetBot> Meeting started Thu Sep 26 17:00:25 2019 UTC.  The chair is phw. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot.
17:00:25 <MeetBot> Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic.
17:00:28 <phw> hi everyone
17:00:35 <gaba> hi!
17:00:36 <dcf1> hi
17:00:36 <cohosh> hello
17:00:37 <catalyst> hi
17:00:44 <phw> here's our meeting pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-censorship-2019-keep
17:00:55 <antonela> hello
17:01:02 <cjb> hihi, will be lurking again
17:01:09 <phw> cohosh: the first announcement is yours, right?
17:01:14 <cohosh> oh yep
17:01:25 <phw> (now with obligatory exclamation mark)
17:01:38 <cohosh> GeKo reviewed the patches for using the pion branch of snowflake and wants to put it in the upcoming alpha release
17:01:47 <dcf1> great work
17:01:50 <cohosh> thanks for adding that (!)
17:02:04 <phw> that's a big milestone, nice work
17:02:13 <GeKo> indeed!
17:02:18 <cohosh> thanks for the help with those scripts dcf1
17:02:59 <cohosh> we can close a bunch of tickets now
17:03:08 <cohosh> but i'll wait to for when we merge that branch to master
17:03:46 <dcf1> sadly I have been pretty much leeting tickets pile up in my inbox for the last week, and I will probably continue to ignore them for at least a few more days
17:04:05 <dcf1> "leeting" typo not intended, but appreciated
17:04:05 <cohosh> ok
17:04:14 <cohosh> lol
17:04:17 <antonela> lol
17:04:20 <cohosh> we're not blocked on it right now
17:04:23 <arlolra> :)
17:05:53 <cohosh> </announcement>
17:05:55 <phw> let's talk about the contribution guidelines next (#31847) while we're still on the topic of snowflake?
17:06:01 <cohosh> ah sure
17:06:20 <cohosh> so sah (who might not be here) filed a linting related ticket
17:06:30 <cohosh> and made some patches
17:06:45 <dcf1> #31794
17:07:06 <cohosh> there were a few pieces of feedback that would apply to all patches and it would be nice to have them in our contributing guidelines
17:07:12 <cohosh> like how to structure commit messages,
17:07:21 <cohosh> keeping changes relevant to the ticket,
17:07:31 <cohosh> how to submit a PR in the first place,
17:07:32 <cohosh> etc
17:07:50 <cohosh> esp. since we are getting more people contributing to snowflake recently
17:08:12 <cohosh> i would like to add the linter sah used to the guidelines as well
17:09:30 <dcf1> thanks for shepherding this case, cohosh
17:09:37 <phw> bridgedb's hacking.md can provide some inspiration: https://github.com/NullHypothesis/bridgedb/blob/master/doc/HACKING.md
17:09:42 <cohosh> np
17:09:51 <cohosh> thanks phw, i'll take a look
17:09:53 <dcf1> these kinds of tickets are sometimes hard for me to deal with because they often provide little value relative to the amount of work they require
17:10:20 <cohosh> yeah i'm hoping some contributing guidelines can also cut down a bit on reviewer work
17:10:21 <dcf1> but sometimes good developers use a ticket like this one to get themselves going when they don't know where else to start
17:10:28 <dcf1> so sometimes the investment pays off
17:10:47 <cohosh> yep i think they are interested in tackling some code coverage issues next
17:10:55 <cohosh> which is nice because i've let that fall down on my priority queue
17:11:58 <phw> are we tagging snowflake tickets with 'easy' on trac? it would help with pointing volunteers at good tickets to start with
17:12:25 <cohosh> some are tagged that way, but i'm not consistent with remembering to do that
17:12:41 <cohosh> i might go through them and tag some as easy or starter this week
17:13:03 <cohosh> i have a pretty good mental map of all the snowflake tickets at this point
17:13:18 <phw> ok, nice
17:14:48 <phw> are we done with the volunteering part?
17:14:54 <cohosh> i think so
17:15:05 <phw> gaba, let's talk about sponsor28 and 30 next?
17:15:12 <gaba> ok
17:15:12 <dcf1> I'm not sure about some of these reported errors, for example the "shadow" ones look like deliberate narrowing of variable scope, and probably should not be changed.
17:15:20 <dcf1> (I'll write on the ticket)
17:15:26 <cohosh> thanks dcf1
17:16:12 <gaba> s30 officially started and there are a few objectives that need tickets. There is a master ticket for objective 2. We could later talk about how to go into creating the rest of tickets for it.
17:17:03 <antonela> what is the timeline for s30? are we going to follow the original proposal timeframes?
17:17:26 <antonela> and, will this meeting be the place where we will discuss progress on overlapping tasks?
17:17:27 <gaba> yes. It started on September 20 by the contract.
17:17:40 <gaba> I can share the timeline with you once nextcloud is back up
17:17:52 <gaba> And share it with everybody in the meeting in the next couple of weeks
17:20:45 <antonela> ok, thanks gaba
17:21:16 <gaba> so for sponsor 28 phw is going to be liason, right?
17:21:28 <gaba> we can talk later with phw on the rest of the activities
17:21:33 <gaba> sorry. I meant sponsor 30
17:21:41 <phw> gaba: yes
17:23:01 <gaba> next is an update on sponsor 28.  We we re doing updates a few months ago and then we stopped. It would be good to give a general update here about it.
17:23:52 <phw> on my side, i worked almost exclusively on #30716. it's a lot of work and happens to be our first deliverable
17:24:27 <phw> basically, we want to improve obfs4's flow obfuscation and find a way to "regulate" per-packet entropy, so a high-entropy filter cannot easily block the protocol
17:24:40 <phw> i have a prototype for the former and nothing for the latter
17:25:06 <cohosh> phw: nice, is there help you'd like with that?
17:25:40 <gaba> nice
17:25:49 <phw> cohosh: yes, plenty
17:26:38 <phw> in particular regarding the entropy part -- it also involves some research and potentially significant changes to the protocol
17:27:40 <phw> in parallel, we're following the work our georgetown colleagues are doing on evaluating obfs4
17:27:54 <phw> that is, throwing classifiers at it and seeing how well they can spot it
17:28:12 <phw> ideally, this should inform the flow obfuscator that we're working on
17:28:31 <phw> that's it from my side
17:28:48 <cohosh> for me, pretty much all of the snowflake work falls under sponsor 28
17:28:52 <cohosh> but it's a later deliverable
17:28:54 <gaba> thanks
17:29:08 <gaba> yes
17:29:44 <cohosh> i think snowflake is important to work on now since we're going to be getting more users and the quality of connections still aren't great
17:30:00 <cohosh> but if we're under time pressure, i can spend some time helping out with the obfs4 successor
17:30:35 <cohosh> i'm almost done with #29206 which should really help with a few improvements
17:31:11 <phw> yes, we need to take another look at our capacity planning
17:31:29 <phw> i think only 10% (or was it 20?) of my time are allocated for sponsor 28
17:31:35 <cohosh> this ticket ^^ has taken a lot longer than i expected
17:31:51 <cohosh> phw: ok, sounds good
17:32:04 <cohosh> at the roadmapping i pretty much just roadmapped snowflake tickets
17:32:43 <cohosh> but that left you with the obfs4 (sharknado?) stuff and the sponsor 30 work
17:33:36 <phw> right, and we haven't even started looking at obfs4's high-entropy issues
17:33:44 <gaba> phw, cohosh: reality is that we have you two full time for s28 and 30. We can rearrange on how work is divided.
17:34:14 <cohosh> gaba: ok
17:34:43 <phw> right, gaba. i'd like to take a look at upcoming deliverables and figure out what we should prioritise in the near future.
17:35:18 <gaba> i have the timeline for s30 but we had one for s28 too that we should look at. maybe later in our sync
17:35:35 <phw> yes, sounds good
17:37:01 <phw> the next item on our agenda is our september report
17:37:10 <phw> can y'all please add your monthly highlights to this pad? https://pad.riseup.net/p/B8Um_zirxIsHD84D6iR_
17:38:07 <phw> ok, time to take a look at our 'needs help with' sections
17:38:45 * phw wonders if there's something new on hiro's gettor front
17:39:28 <phw> other than that, we have #30830, #31843, soon #29206, and #28942 for cohosh
17:39:37 <phw> #31391 for arlolra
17:39:50 <cohosh> #29206 and #28942 are for dcf1 when he has time
17:40:02 <cohosh> i can take #31391
17:40:45 <cohosh> phw: could you look at #30830 and #31843? they are small changes to snowflake
17:41:05 <phw> cohosh: yes, will do
17:42:00 <cohosh> thanks!
17:42:41 <phw> ok, we went through our agenda for today. anything else on anyone's mind?
17:44:02 <phw> let's wrap it up for today
17:44:05 <phw> #endmeeting