15:58:31 <cohosh> #startmeeting tor anti-censorship meeting
15:58:31 <MeetBot> Meeting started Thu Oct 15 15:58:31 2020 UTC.  The chair is cohosh. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot.
15:58:31 <MeetBot> Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic.
15:58:47 <cohosh> here is our meeting pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-keep
15:58:57 <cohosh> feel free to add to it, our agenda is pretty sparse today
16:00:07 <gaba> o/
16:01:13 <phw> i have a quick remark: i'm considering stopping the monthly report blog post. the idea was to get feedback from our users but that hasn't worked out well
16:01:38 <phw> most comments are unrelated and moderation is a big nuisance
16:01:59 <cohosh> ah :/ it was a worthwhile experiment
16:02:01 <phw> i think these ~2 hours are better spent elsewhere
16:03:14 <cohosh> yeah
16:03:15 <phw> anyway, end of rant
16:03:29 <cohosh> we'll still have it on th emailing list right?
16:03:51 <phw> yes, it's probably a good idea to keep the list. at the very least it's helpful to projects like racecar
16:04:09 <cohosh> thanks for undertaking that endeavor phw
16:04:18 <phw> but i don't know if it's read by one person or 10,000
16:04:41 <cohosh> yeah i think it's good to have a public report of our progress accessible for the future
16:04:52 <cohosh> even if not many users are reading it *right now*
16:05:00 <cohosh> but the mailing list seems good enough for that for now
16:05:12 <phw> i suppose we could also make a blog post and turn the comment section off
16:05:31 <phw> making the blog post is as simple as doing "markdown report.md > report.html" and copy&pasting the result into the blog post textbox
16:05:56 <cohosh> maybe, i find the blog more difficult to navigate and search in than the mailing list tbh
16:06:04 <phw> yes, that for sure
16:06:29 <cohosh> if we move to a different blog platform though we could revisit this
16:06:43 <phw> yes
16:07:16 <cohosh> okay, in other news i have some new snowflake measurements from china that might be interesting: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/32657#note_2712025
16:07:38 <cohosh> i am curious what are your thoughts on the results
16:08:00 <cohosh> snowflake seems to be generally uncensored and reachable but the throughput seems so bad that it's not really usable
16:08:21 * phw looks
16:12:07 <phw> hmm, my first impression is that this is due to packet loss or more generally: bad international connectivity
16:12:20 <dcf1> CN is in the top 5 of users according to dirreq-stats on the bridge
16:12:22 <dcf1> dirreq-v3-ips ru=56,us=48,by=32,cn=32,tm=16,??=8,ae=8,al=8,at=8,au=8,bd=8,be=8,br=8,ca=8,ch=8,co=8,de=8,ec=8,eg=8,es=8,fi=8,fr=8,gb=8,id=8,il=8,in=8,ir=8,jp=8,kw=8,lb=8,ma=8,my=8,nz=8,pl=8,ro=8,sa=8,se=8,tr=8,ua=8,za=8
16:12:44 <phw> i wonder how things would look like if somebody in china were to connect to snowflakes in adjacent places like hong kong, singapore, taiwan, etc.
16:12:50 <cohosh> hmm, this is by ip right, so it's probably not just my tests skewing that?
16:13:26 <cohosh> maybe it is just that the VPS has some connectivity issues
16:14:03 <cohosh> i'd be surprised if there were 30 users in china putting up with more than half of their connections failing due to timeouts
16:14:14 <dcf1> By IP is a different file, but looks similar
16:14:18 <dcf1> bridge-ips us=104,ru=96,by=48,cn=40,de=24,gb=24,br=16,eg=16,in=16,jp=16,tm=16,tr=16,??=8,ae=8,al=8,ar=8,at=8,au=8,bd=8,be=8,ca=8,ch=8,co=8,cz=8,dz=8,ec=8,es=8,fi=8,fr=8,id=8,ie=8,il=8,ir=8,kw=8,lb=8,lr=8,lu=8,ma=8,my=8,nl=8,no=8,nz=8,ph=8,pl=8,pt=8,qa=8,ro=8,sa=8,se=8,tw=8,ua=8,ug=8,za=8
16:14:34 <phw> you ran several tests per day, right? and then averaged the success rate?
16:14:42 <cohosh> 100 tests per day
16:14:50 <cohosh> this is the % of tests that succeeded
16:14:55 <cohosh> so not even an average
16:14:56 <phw> uniformly distributed throughout the day?
16:15:12 <cohosh> no, they were run sequentially at UTC 0000
16:15:48 <phw> so at utc 00, we started running 100 tests, one after another?
16:15:53 <cohosh> yeah
16:16:21 <cohosh> it could be that the vps is being throttle for suspicious activity i guess
16:17:00 <phw> that's 8 am in china, just around the time everyone starts using the internet
16:17:18 <cohosh> hmm
16:17:38 <cohosh> do you think that would have this big of an impact?
16:17:38 <phw> would it be easy to isolate the measurements that happened on the weekend?
16:18:16 <phw> that i don't know
16:18:35 <cohosh> yeah, well each of the date labels on the graph are a tuesdsay
16:19:06 <phw> at least we have a solid idea of what using snowflake on a tuesday morning looks like ;)
16:19:06 <cohosh> and in any case, the days with the highest succss rate were still around 50%
16:19:22 <cohosh> you can kind of tell where the weekends would be in there
16:20:16 <cohosh> each point is a different day, so the weekend would be 2-3 points behind the date markers
16:20:17 <phw> i think it's worthwhile to spend a few hours browsing internet measurement literature to get a better understanding of link quality between china and the rest of the world
16:20:22 <cohosh> yeah
16:20:29 <cohosh> that's a good idea
16:20:49 <phw> because it's probably not uniform. i'm willing to bet that connectivity to, say, singapore is much better than to germany
16:21:06 <cohosh> i could probably also alter the tests to get geo data on where each of the snowflakes is
16:21:07 <phw> and if that's the case, we may want to look into prioritising certain snowflakes over others
16:21:49 <phw> agix was looking for a thesis topic. i think one could turn this into an interesting measurement project
16:22:05 <cohosh> yeah
16:23:02 <cohosh> alright, thanks for taking a look! i'd be interested to hear from those users in china to see how their experience is
16:23:17 <phw> yes, that would be useful
16:23:31 <cohosh> okay we have another discussion item
16:23:35 <cohosh> by gaba i think?
16:23:38 <phw> anyway, the % of successful bootstraps is > 0, so that's already a success!
16:23:48 <cohosh> on the status of https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-tickets-keep
16:24:02 <cohosh> phw: true XD
16:24:48 <gaba> yes
16:24:50 <gaba> i added
16:24:53 <gaba> im going through the tickets
16:24:58 <gaba> and see if all of them have the label
16:25:03 <gaba> can we close that pad if we do?
16:25:14 <phw> gaba: works for me. i just made a local copy, just in case
16:25:28 <gaba> ok
16:25:29 <cohosh> yup same
16:26:24 <cohosh> any other discussion items for today?
16:27:09 <cohosh> if not let's move on to our needs help with sections
16:27:14 <phw> sounds good
16:27:34 <cohosh> it looks like there's a bug in https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-bugs-keep
16:27:48 <dcf1> I'll copy it to gitlab
16:28:14 <cohosh> i think this is just from overzealous logging
16:28:20 <dcf1> me too
16:28:24 <cohosh> but we should probably fix that
16:28:39 <cohosh> because i get people asking this quite a bit on #tor
16:28:54 <cohosh> well like 4 people have asked
16:29:30 <phw> should be a simple fix, no? even i can fix that ;)
16:29:54 <phw> (i'm in favour of fixing it)
16:30:05 <dcf1> we don't have to litigate it now
16:31:17 <cohosh> okay, i also have an implementation for snowflake#40013 that could use a review
16:31:43 <dcf1> I don't have any time for reviews this week
16:32:05 <phw> i'll review it, no problem
16:32:13 <cohosh> phw: thanks!
16:32:26 <cohosh> and agix would like a review of #34218
16:33:15 <cohosh> err
16:33:29 <phw> hmm, must be a typo
16:33:40 <cohosh> agix: you around?
16:34:13 <dcf1> https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/trac/-/issues/34128 ?
16:34:17 <phw> i think it's #34318
16:34:39 <dcf1> nvm
16:34:49 <phw> (you can click on somebody's profile in gitlab and it shows you what they did most recently)
16:35:02 <phw> i'll try to review it today agix, sorry for the delay :/
16:35:49 <cohosh> cool, anything else?
16:36:00 <phw> not from me
16:36:00 <cohosh> should we pick a reading?
16:36:56 <phw> feel free to do so but i cannot promise that i'll be able to read anything over the next few weeks. i'm swamped with financial crypto reviews :/
16:37:15 <cohosh> alright let's postpone for a bit longer
16:37:25 <cohosh> i am also swamped with some deliverables
16:37:44 <phw> *thumbs up*
16:38:09 <cohosh> cool, let's wrap things up for today
16:38:13 <cohosh> #endmeeting