15:59:58 <phw> #startmeeting anti-censorship meeting
15:59:58 <MeetBot> Meeting started Thu Jun  4 15:59:58 2020 UTC.  The chair is phw. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot.
15:59:58 <MeetBot> Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic.
16:00:07 <cohosh> hi
16:00:10 <agix> hi
16:00:12 <phw> dcf1: you must mean 4-6
16:00:22 <phw> here's our meeting pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-keep
16:00:40 <dcf1> i mean 六四
16:00:45 <hanneloresx> hi everyone! i'm new here and hope to help out with anti-censorship however i can
16:00:59 <phw> hanneloresx: hey, welcome!
16:01:00 <agix> hi hanneloresx
16:01:28 <phw> hanneloresx: let us first go over our meeting agenda and then let's talk!
16:01:33 <cohosh> hanneloresx: welcome :)
16:01:34 <hanneloresx> :)
16:02:08 <phw> a brief announcement: we will soon be migrating trac.torproject.org to gitlab.torproject.org. trac tickets will be moved over to gitlab for the most part, so we won't lose a lot of information
16:02:37 <phw> at this point, gitlab.torproject.org doesn't support open account creation, so we will have to set everyone up with an account manually
16:03:52 <phw> next up are some thoughts about generalising wolpertinger and potentially turning it into a bridgedb successor
16:04:24 <phw> i think a big issue with bridgedb is that its underlying language is dynamically types, which means that we can catch bugs only through excessive unit tests
16:05:01 <phw> and it's sometimes oddly difficult to figure out what type a variable has because the source code comments aren't always truthful
16:05:27 <phw> while writing wolpertinger, i realised that it's basically bridgedb but for censorship measurement clients rather than users
16:05:43 <phw> so one could look at it as yet another distributor
16:06:01 <phw> arma2 already posted some thoughts along these lines: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2020-May/000097.html
16:07:10 <phw> i've been experimenting with generalising wolpertinger's concept. the idea is that it takes as input "resources". these could be bridges, tor browser links, or maybe even snowflake proxies (or other proxy types that don't have a tor client, like https proxy)
16:07:40 <phw> then, we have distributors as we already have them in bridgedb: https, email, moat, and at some point maybe salmon and wolpertinger
16:07:52 <phw> and some kind of matchmaking system that supplies distributors with resources
16:08:08 <phw> anyway, that's all i got. i wanted to keep you all in the loop and hear your thoughts
16:08:17 <cohosh> thanks phw
16:08:54 <cohosh> i like this idea. my one concern, after working on gettor a while is that bridgedb has had years of work put into it
16:09:11 <cohosh> to solve things like preventing infinite loops with other autoresponders
16:09:17 <phw> (i'm working on some basic interfaces and data structures, and will soon have some code to illustrate the concept)
16:09:26 <cohosh> and this will take work re-implement
16:09:35 <cohosh> not that we should use this as a reason not to move to something better
16:09:39 <cohosh> just something to be aware of
16:10:08 <cohosh> and if we're gonna do this, writing it so that it can be merged with gettor would ofc be ideal
16:10:10 <phw> yes, for sure. i'm not convinced myself that this is the way forward but i want to spend some time exploring this
16:11:31 <phw> there's definitely a substantial cost in terms of reimplementing some of bridgedb but i currently see it as return on investment
16:12:02 <phw> anyway, let's continue this discussion on the mailing list, in the thread that arma2 started!
16:12:05 <phw> thanks for your thoughts cohosh
16:12:14 <cohosh> cool :)
16:13:09 <phw> anything else for today, before we assign reviews?
16:13:40 <agix> in which language will wolpertinger be based on?
16:14:45 <phw> agix: go. i'm a big fan because of its comprehensive standard library and how easy it makes notoriously difficult concepts like threads
16:14:58 <phw> the work-in-progress code is here: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/wolpertinger
16:15:17 <agix> nice thanks :)
16:16:55 <phw> ok folks, let's do reviews! i need help with #19774 and #31422, and agix needs help with #27984
16:16:59 <phw> did i miss anyone?
16:17:07 <phw> agix: i'll review #27984
16:17:16 <cohosh> phw: i can take any of those
16:17:27 <cohosh> just lmk which ones
16:17:52 <phw> agix: do you have time/interest to review #31422?
16:18:01 <agix> cool thxsure :)
16:18:09 <agix> sry, i mean sure :)
16:18:17 <phw> cohosh: can i assign #19774 to you, then?
16:18:48 <cohosh> sounds good
16:18:52 <phw> thanks!
16:19:09 <phw> okay, we went over our agenda for today
16:19:27 <phw> hanneloresx: what are your interests and/or skills? anything you're particularly excited about?
16:20:07 <hanneloresx> hey, so i'm a lawyer by day, so any sort of advocacy/grant writing, i can probably do
16:20:08 <phw> we need help with all sorts of things: documentation, user support, development, graphic design, testing, ...
16:20:21 <hanneloresx> i also dabble in coding (made a couple of small contributions to tor code)
16:20:34 <hanneloresx> so any beginner friendly coding projects, documentation, i can take also
16:20:34 <phw> oh, interesting!
16:21:03 <hanneloresx> also in case helpful, i'm fluent in Chinese, so can do translations etc
16:21:31 <hanneloresx> really excited to help out any way i can really, happy to join the team, especially on June 4
16:21:37 <phw> our grand grant writer is alsmith. i wonder if they have any suggestions?
16:22:03 <phw> this skill set makes you a unicorn, hanneloresx
16:22:27 <hanneloresx> haha....thanks! hope i can be helpful
16:22:30 <cohosh> <3
16:23:09 <phw> it would be amazing if we could translate some of our blog posts to chinese, if that's something you're interested in
16:23:32 <hanneloresx> sure thing. that'd be a good way for me to get familiarized with what's going on too
16:24:20 <hanneloresx> i can take a look at the blog and find a good one to start with
16:24:23 <phw> we just started turning our monthly team reports into blog posts, to keep our users in the loop. we could translate the next one (for june) into chinese and think about ways to help folks in china read it
16:24:30 <phw> ...because blog.torproject.org is blocked
16:25:10 <alsmith> hi! we have also been compiling a bank of social media posts in languages other than english so we can use them over time, ggus is leading that effort
16:25:19 <phw> what's your favourite programming language, hanneloresx? most of our code is in python and golang but we have some code in other languages too.
16:25:31 <hanneloresx> python by far
16:25:52 <hanneloresx> i've also done C++/C/Java
16:26:32 <phw> ok! i will compile a short list of beginner-friendly issues that you may be interested in tackling
16:26:38 <dcf1> hanneloresx: for our next week's reading group we'll be discussing v2ray, and most of the discussion forums on it are in Chinese. E.g. https://github.com/v2ray/discussion/issues. It might be nice if you can skim some of the topics and share an impression of the kind of things people are talking about.
16:27:07 <hanneloresx> awesome! will do
16:27:30 <hanneloresx> sorry if this is readily available info, but where/when is the reading group?
16:27:46 <cohosh> we do it every other week at the end of these meetings
16:27:51 <hanneloresx> ah ok
16:27:51 <cohosh> so the next one is next thursday
16:28:00 <hanneloresx> got it. i'll be there
16:28:16 <cohosh> hanneloresx: more info is in the pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-keep
16:28:31 <hanneloresx> kk
16:28:33 <phw> you may also find our team info page interesting: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/AntiCensorshipTeam
16:29:10 <hanneloresx> ok will read those!
16:30:21 * phw finally realises the significance of june 4. embarrassing
16:30:54 <hanneloresx> i'll be rewatching Gate of Heavenly Peace tonight -- great documentary of the event if you're interested in learning more
16:31:34 <phw> oh, i'll take a look!
16:32:10 <phw> hanneloresx: i hope that's enough to get you started. please let us know if you have any questions. we're all around in #tor-dev and #tor-project
16:32:33 <hanneloresx> :) thanks for the warm welcome everyone!!  i've got my todo list for the week
16:32:51 <hanneloresx> i'll try to be here on irc as much as possible, but i also signed up for the anti-censorship mailing list
16:33:29 <phw> perfect, irc and mailing list is where all the action happens
16:33:31 <cohosh> awesome :D
16:33:58 <phw> ok folks, anything else for today?
16:34:06 <dcf1> about the reading group next week,
16:34:48 <dcf1> V2Ray is a kind of meta-proxy that supports many protocols. So I suggest that we limit the scope and talk about the main V2Ray and VMess, which seems to be the "native" obfuscation protocol.
16:35:00 <dcf1> I dropped a couple of links in the pad.
16:35:30 <dcf1> I'm also going to open a thread on net4people/bbs to see if anyone experienced in V2Ray can give good pointers on where to start understanding.
16:35:51 <cohosh> dcf1: nice!
16:36:05 <phw> neat, thanks dcf1. i'm excited to read some code as part of our reading group
16:36:23 <phw> reading too many papers gives me grad school ptsd
16:37:56 * phw wraps up the meeting in 1 minute if there's nothing else to discuss
16:38:56 <phw> #endmeeting