15:58:50 #startmeeting anti-censorship team meeting 15:58:50 Meeting started Thu Jul 16 15:58:50 2020 UTC. The chair is cohosh. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot. 15:58:50 Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic. 15:58:55 hi! 15:59:14 our meeting pad for today is here: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-keep 15:59:16 o/ 15:59:33 hello 15:59:57 not a lot on the agenda today 16:00:17 first up is an announcement that the privacy enhancing technologies symposium is happening now and being livestreamed 16:00:28 hi 16:00:46 in about 45 minutes there is a session on censorship available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdDgAuuilZk 16:00:51 o/ 16:01:16 also prerecorded talk videos at https://sites.events.concordia.ca/sites/pets2020/en/pets2020/schedule/112/Track:%20Censorship 16:01:26 and earlier today there was a talk for the paper we are going to discuss at next week's reading group 16:01:43 * antonela o/ 16:01:52 o/ 16:01:54 available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aSO4ZMKjmY 16:02:29 or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jksejehBQII for just the VPN talk 16:02:42 ah thanks dcf 16:03:02 any other last-minute announcements before we move on to discussion? 16:03:50 okay i'll let phw take the next discussion point about bridgedb names 16:04:14 if anyone has any suggestions for the name of our work-in-progress reimplementation: let me know! 16:04:24 i also ported our baby name book over to our new wiki: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/Baby-Name-Book 16:04:42 it has lots of name candidates for new software 16:05:00 feel free to pick any name or add new ones 16:05:19 * cohosh gets distracted reading over the names again 16:05:25 that's it from me 16:06:33 any more discussion points before we move on to reviews? 16:07:17 i have a question 16:07:37 nicoleiocana__: awesome :) 16:07:57 regarding this issue, particularly, the How to Circumvent the Great Firewall in China from here: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40001 16:08:54 ggus and I discussed which options would be best for users to obtain priuvate bridges as a solution to visitors of that site... 16:09:18 one is - ask them to email frontdesk to get bridges; option b would be give them some private bridges so they can distribute. 16:09:40 *private 16:09:47 i'm afraid there's no great answer to that. for now, the two options that you suggested are reasonable. 16:09:57 thank you :) 16:10:05 we cannot just hand out private bridges to anyone because that defeats the purpose 16:10:33 ideally, we would hand a few private bridges to folks we trust, in china, so they can hand them out themselves 16:10:34 phw: I agree. 16:11:59 Hi cohosh, just curious, I see "continue with BridgeDB refactor" in your section of the pad, what sort of refactoring is that? 16:12:13 juggy: this is specifically referring to gettor 16:12:22 phw is also working on changes to bridgedb 16:12:28 so there are a few things going on at once 16:13:16 a good summary is that right now we're still thinking about how to split bridgedb up in smaller components that talk to each other and this will allow us to do things like reuse some components for gettor, and reimplement some in a different language 16:13:38 phw: can we sync about those changes in bridgedb? i tried to compile it, without success and im considering to make a plain html (using lektor) so then you guys can implement the dynamic parts of it 16:13:46 ah I see, thanks! 16:14:29 antonela: yes, i think that would work 16:14:29 is this the re-implementation of bridge-db you folks were talking about? 16:14:50 HashikD: yep! 16:14:51 antonela: how much effort would that be on your end? i'm asking because if the answer is "more than an hour or two", i'd argue that we shouldn't be working on this 16:15:08 phw: excellent, honestly is less than making the entire thing works 16:15:55 antonela: ok, thanks for your help! 16:16:17 np 16:16:19 thanks! 16:17:15 okay, feel free to jump in with more discussion 16:17:25 it looks like we don't have much in the way of needed reviews 16:17:40 One quick note is that I realized I needed to change my notification settings at https://gitlab.torproject.org/profile/notifications 16:17:40 oh agix needs a review 16:18:03 jap, that would be nice 16:18:06 I wasn't getting emails I was expecting to get. If that's you too, try tweaking some settings on that page. 16:18:37 agix: i'll take a look at your changes. thanks for working on it 16:18:50 dcf1: ah ha, thanks for that. i am also trying to get used to using the gitlab interface for todos 16:18:58 phw: sure, thanks! 16:20:31 okay anything else? 16:21:08 From the point of view of a beginner, I thought it would be nice if I could compile a series of research papers regarding anti-censorship. Then anyone interested to help out could start off with this reading list, kind of like the required reading for Google SoC projects. Any good paper suggestions? 16:21:43 Maybe we could have a section at the bottom of the pad so we can progressively add papers over time 16:22:20 juggy: i've been trying to do that with censorbib.nymity.ch but arguably, the list has gotten quite big and overwhelming 16:22:20 juggy: nice! the papers we cover in the reading group here could be a good start (and the logs of our discussions), and also the papers discussed on net4people/bbs 16:23:14 Oh great! I can start by filtering from these lists then 16:23:15 they are even nicely labelled: https://github.com/net4people/bbs/labels/reading%20group 16:23:20 for "required reading" it would have to be a short list, I'm not sure which 2-3 papers from CensorBib I would recommend to a beginner. 16:24:19 i thought censorbib.nymity.ch was a great resource even as a beginner for a repository of papers, and the reading groups fulfill purpose of more guided reading 16:24:27 before bbs I used to post paper summaries at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/traffic-obf, but they're not specially labeled. 16:24:51 agree that it'd be helpful to have these paper repositories on our wiki 16:24:52 E.g. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/traffic-obf/X6fE99hinMU https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/traffic-obf/76xh3oS6wkE 16:24:54 the anonymity bibliography at freehaven.net/anonbib/ has boxes around recommended papers but i never felt comfortable being the one to decide what others should read 16:25:54 As a beginniner and long time user of multiple proxying tools ove the years it would be nice if there was some summury of the changes to tor over the years in relation to where the project is going. I think in the space of volonteering to help I would be coming in with a lot of old memories of how it works and what didn't work. 16:27:16 w0mbat32: that's a good suggestion. we have a few blog posts about anti-censorship work at tor, but not a central source of information about what exactly we're currently doing 16:28:52 w0mbat32: here's a document that talks about the reason behind tls-related changes in tor: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/projects/Tor/TLSHistory 16:30:59 this blog post/video is a good summary: https://blog.torproject.org/next-chapter-anti-censorship 16:31:18 it can be hard to find blog posts though 16:31:33 i just tried 3 different searches to find that one, and that was from some memory of the title 16:32:07 ah yes, many people recommended that post too a few months back when I asked for resources 16:32:26 The lists would be good for researchers but hardware and networking technicians like me who work with end users and server systems (securing medica servers) more likely read the summeries and how-to's to test and wreck tools to see how best to use them and qualify them for use. I came from a freelance Tech support background teachng businesses and activists how to stay safe. So i work on simplifying more complicated explanations 16:32:27 after being told for years "But that sounds too complicated can you simplify it?" 16:33:00 wow this blog post is useful. Would be great to see these links in one place, possibly on the wiki 16:33:10 I think it is important they can understand even the complicated detains even if it seems simplified. That has been the bigest challenge getting users to adopt new tools. 16:33:22 w0mbat32: that's awesome 16:33:43 dcf1: has done some work in the past summarizing various pluggable transports on our wiki 16:33:55 and we've had a few reading group sessions that focus on tools instead of academic research 16:34:34 but we don't have a central list like censorbib for this. the net4people/bbs github repo does this better 16:34:54 https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues 16:36:41 Thanks for the suggestions, I'll see what I can come up with and ask for a review next time :) 16:37:10 great, thanks for taking the initiative, juggy! 16:38:46 * cohosh makes a note to check up on wiki migration progress 16:39:46 okay i'll wait another minute or so before closing the meeting today 16:41:33 #endmeeting