15:58:13 #startmeeting tor anti-censorship meeting 15:58:13 Meeting started Thu Feb 25 15:58:13 2021 UTC. The chair is cohosh. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot. 15:58:13 Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic. 15:58:27 here is our meeting pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-keep 15:59:10 we have a few things on the agenda today 15:59:49 first is an announcement that the snowflake user survey was rolled out: https://blog.torproject.org/learning-more-about-tor-users 16:00:09 i'm excited to see what kind of feedback we get 16:00:39 mostly i'm hoping this will help us ramp up usage a bit more so we can stress test snowflake and see what/if anything breaks when we get more users 16:01:21 hi! 16:01:30 ggus: hey! 16:01:48 do you have more to add about the surveys? 16:01:53 cohosh: is the survey being announced in places other than the blog? how can we help? 16:02:07 hi! 16:02:21 cohosh: i suggested to comms team to tweet about snowflake next monday, so we use next month to promote snowflake 16:02:28 very nice, I see it also pops up when launching Tor 16:02:38 nice! 16:03:10 yeah my understanding is it's being announced in alpha versions of tor browser and then on social media 16:03:31 dcf1: but it might also be worth doing a post on ntc or bbs? 16:04:52 * cohosh waits a second before moving on to the next topic 16:05:04 we're going to promote three things: 1. run snowflake proxy; 2. try snowflake in tb alpha; 3. answer the survey. 16:05:36 I was thinking about that, but the survey is more user-oriented than developer-oriented and I wasn't sure if it would be of interest to the subscribers 16:06:26 dcf1: yeah that's fair, it would more be an ask to help spread the promotion i suppose 16:07:02 ggus: very cool, the number of proxies has been pretty steady lately so this will be exciting to see if we get even more 16:08:54 okay next on the agenda is some snowflake metrics 16:09:06 https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/5481936581E23D2D178105D44DB6915AB06BFB7F 16:09:29 dcf1: was this your point? 16:09:31 Last week the number of clients was suspiciously flat, which made me think we might be hitting some kind of resrouce ceiling 16:09:51 I logged into the bridge and checked CPU and file descriptors, but there was still headroom on both 16:10:16 Since then the number went back down, so it's not clear if it was a coincidence 16:11:03 tbh, i find the discrepancy between the number of bridge users and the amount of requests to the broker to be a bit suspicious 16:11:38 it seems like we're getting a ton of broker requests (and the domain fronting cost has been rising), but bridge usage is still fairly low 16:11:39 I don't have a suggestion about what to do for now, except to remember in case we see it again 16:12:16 yup sounds good 16:12:32 maybe there's a rogue installation out there with `-max 3` that's constantly useless polling even when it already has a connection 16:13:17 by "rogue installation" I mean something like, maybe there's a blog post out there that's like "how to accelerate your snowflake", sometimes things like that happen 16:14:03 that might explain snowflake#30498 as well 16:15:07 alright, hopefully we'll get more usage and see if there's a resource constraint soon 16:16:46 next on the agenda is some possible new blocking of Tor in Belarus 16:17:25 we had an email to security@ from a user in Belarus saying that all of their obfs4 bridges were being blocked 16:18:00 and looking at metrics, there's been an drop in obfs4 usage and a corresponding increase in meek 16:18:07 https://people.torproject.org/~dcf/metrics-country.html?start=2021-01-15&end=2021-03-15&country=by 16:18:45 * dcf1 hopes metrics.torproject.org will have a page like this someday 16:19:17 you mean all the graphs on a single page? 16:19:20 yeah 16:19:30 yeah 16:19:36 and then also a graph for default bridge use 16:20:12 we're still not sure whether the blocking is just for default bridges, or if there is some enumeration of bridgedb bridges going on as well 16:22:05 i opened an issue in our censorship analysis repo for this: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/issues/40002 16:23:57 dcf1: yes, with ggus we were thinking of using the hackweek at the end of March to look at other visualizations of metrics data 16:23:58 any other discussion for today? 16:27:05 any needs help with? reviews? 16:28:18 okay i'll end the meeting here 16:28:32 * cohosh is multiplexing meetings and a bit distracted today >.< 16:28:51 just a reminder that we have a reading group discussion next meeting 16:29:19 on HTTPS interception in Kazakhstan: https://censoredplanet.org/assets/Kazakhstan.pdf 16:29:32 looking forward to it 16:29:33 #endmeeting