16:00:08 #startmeeting anti-censorship meeting 16:00:08 Meeting started Thu Aug 19 16:00:08 2021 UTC. The chair is cohosh. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot. 16:00:08 Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic. 16:00:18 welcome 16:00:21 hello 16:00:29 here is our meeting pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-keep 16:00:46 feel free to add items to the agenda :) 16:02:27 looks like we've got some items from last time that we might want to follow up on 16:02:58 is there any discussion we want to have still on the v3 manifest? 16:04:00 I was just curious if our need had been expressed since last meeting 16:04:26 no, i think arlolra (who isn't here atm) was going to write up a draft 16:04:46 but i can do it this week if needed 16:05:41 hi, what is the v3 manifest? 16:05:48 hey anadahz 16:05:54 it's a webextension thing 16:06:14 we have a webextension that volunteers can install on firefox and chrome if they want to run a snowflake proxy 16:06:20 anadahz: see https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake-web 16:06:23 ext/-/merge_requests/21 16:06:35 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake-webext/-/merge_requests/21 16:07:19 great! 16:07:42 ok i think we can move on to the next item 16:08:25 about support#40030 16:08:25 Uhm, which one of [tpo/community/support, tpo/web/support] did you mean? 16:08:31 :o 16:08:45 community/support#40030 16:08:52 hey! 16:08:58 * cohosh pats tor bot on the head 16:09:03 good bot! 16:09:16 :) 16:10:06 i found a user with computer, but their computer is not installing tb-10.5, but they could install an old tor browser version. i'm trying to figure out how to fix it. 16:10:56 * cohosh checks to see if there are any more ooni results since last meeting 16:11:13 If I understand, this is someone other than who you were talking with before--that other person was using Tor Browser on Android? 16:11:29 dcf1: it's the same person 16:11:32 ok 16:11:46 i'm reaching out to more people in TM, just got a new contact today. 16:12:11 nice, that's great about finding more people 16:12:27 i still don't see any ooni test results 16:13:09 i will ask this person to install ooni 16:13:27 if we want more ideas for contacts, we could ask maria and arturo. they always seem to know people in interesting places. 16:13:55 yeah, erin from loclab was also trying to contact more ppl 16:14:06 i will ping maria 16:14:51 great 16:15:30 did we confirm that snowflake wasn't working there? i see it in our notes on the pad but not on the ticket 16:15:51 well s/confirm/have evidence for 16:17:33 cohosh: the person only tried once. we need more people to test 16:17:46 or one that have more technical skills 16:18:17 okay, yep makes sense 16:19:58 tm=32 in the most recent bridge stats 16:20:13 (though it doesn't necessarily mean it's working) 16:22:20 anymore discussion on this topic? 16:22:38 i guess we will keep trying to work with users there to run more tests 16:23:10 yeah, i was just replying to a TM person right now. 16:23:16 speaking of snowflake blocking, i opened what i hope is a useful ticket for the future, in 16:23:17 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40062 16:23:30 useful for users in weird places being able to tell us why their snowflake fails, 16:23:40 and also useful for our own measurement tools to have better assessment 16:24:39 yeah i understand the idea here is to use the LOG or STATUS message to pass info to tor? 16:25:10 well, the main idea is to have snowflake think through how it can fail and how it can decide where it has failed 16:25:26 hmm 16:25:26 the details of what it does with that info need to be handled too, and yes using log or status sounds plausible, 16:25:35 but let's not get distracted from the main goal which is the self-assessment 16:26:43 snowflake already logs pretty much all the info we need to its own logs 16:27:12 you can tell from those whether your connection to STUN servers, the broker, or the proxies are failing 16:27:13 ok. deciding which of those you would want to tell a human, and when you think it's right to tell them, sounds like the next step then 16:27:19 and whether the broker was out of proxies 16:27:44 since right now if you did the full snowflake log and also you shipped with a cohosh to look at it for you, everything would be fine :) 16:28:01 so, if the purpose is to help us debug, the most usable way for us to get that information from users is to have it wind up in the tor log 16:28:14 yep 16:28:15 because there is a user-friendly way to copy that from tor browser on both desktop and android 16:28:19 yep 16:29:54 from an engineering perspective i think it makes sense to implement some callbacks for connection failure events since we are tyring to have the fully functioning snowflake library separate from the tor-specific interactions 16:29:59 i am still thinking of an intermediate step, where periodically in the snowflake logs it says "CONCLUSION: I am failing to bootstrap because x" 16:30:28 but idk if a definite conclusion is helpful here 16:30:46 since the broker can be restarted and temporarily unreachable 16:30:48 because "i failed to reach a foo" doesn't say whether you're about to try to reach a second foo or what 16:30:59 or we're short on proxies and it takes a variable number of tries 16:31:23 snowflake will keep trying indefinitely until the SOCKS connection closes 16:31:28 which i think is the right thing to do 16:31:48 since so many of these connection failures might be temporary 16:31:48 yep. that is why this intermediate step isn't trivial 16:32:34 but the better we can get at heuristics and thresholds and guesses, the happier we'll be in the long run 16:32:35 i still don't understand the need for the intermediate step 16:32:54 well, imagine you have a docker image that runs snowflake tests from a vps in china 16:32:55 we can take the existing logs, figure out which of them are "connection events" and funnel them to tor 16:33:04 right now the output is "what percentage of bootstrap does tor report" 16:33:26 wouldn't it be great if the output was "how far through the snowflake connection did i get, and where did i stop" 16:33:45 that would help you pinpoint what part of snowflake seems to be the problem, 16:33:50 okay is see so some mapping from these events to a progress bar 16:33:53 and that might change, even if the tor bootstrap is always '10% doesn't work' 16:34:01 that is easily grep-able? 16:34:15 maybe? i don't know. 16:34:32 no need to soak up the whole meeting on this, in any case. there is a ticket. :) 16:35:26 yup, thanks for bringing this up. it will definitely make our job easier for handling those vague "i think snowflake isn't working" tickets 16:35:53 we don't have any more agenda items for today after this 16:37:20 (unless someone would like to jump in?) :) 16:37:37 while we have .tm on the list, 16:37:44 we should know that we're going to have ukraine on the list soon 16:37:50 since they are seeing a spike on use currently 16:38:01 and there will inevitably be a drop in use and we will say 'woah are they being censored' 16:38:11 so here is our advance warning :) 16:40:28 https://people.torproject.org/~dcf/metrics-country.html?country=ua 16:41:11 that is quite a spike 16:41:13 In answer to your pre-meeting questions, arma2, the Ukraine browser was FreeU Browser 16:41:16 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/issues/22369 16:41:22 https://groups.google.com/g/traffic-obf/c/PhQ1_Gvjyzs/m/FCkTdrx1CAAJ 16:41:26 i was about to open a ticket, but i was following up with romania, TM and zambia 16:41:50 yay 16:41:52 zambia metrics-timeline entry is ready. i think i screwed up on git, but maybe it's possible to cherry-pick 16:42:38 and romanian people weren't very happy with the tor spike: https://www.reddit.com/r/Romania/comments/p70fsc/tor_users_in_romania_202108/ 16:42:39 ok ggus, I'll check re zambia metrics-timeline, thanks 16:42:47 ty, dcf1! 16:43:54 my best guess for the romania spike is: the geoip db on the relays is now years out of date 16:44:06 btw some FreeU domains are on the citizenlab test-lists https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/commit/7e0b7eac9afda4fc396a36479e1375d067af7281 16:44:16 so if e.g. a popular chunk of ukraine is listed as romania in those old geoip dbs, then that would explain it all 16:45:08 dcf1 (or anyone else), do we have contacts with the FreeU people? 16:45:22 Not that I know 16:45:44 freeU is the browser thing? 16:45:49 ggus: sounds like you should put that on your list to try to brainstorm ways to reach. yes 16:46:12 i can do that next week 16:46:15 details here: https://groups.google.com/g/traffic-obf/c/PhQ1_Gvjyzs/m/FCkTdrx1CAAJ 16:46:21 ggus: there's an --output-country-codes option to the scrape-geoip script in metrics-timeline 16:46:55 It's off by default because it creates too much noise, but if you activate it, it will give you the % +/- change in geoip entries for each country that was changed 16:47:37 mmmh! i didn't know about that. i'm still not very familiar with our metrics tools 16:47:55 All the 'geoip and geoip6 databases updated' entries in the timeline are auto-generated by the scrape-geoip script 16:48:23 because at one point I thought that maybe sudden geoip changes could be responsible for sudden changes in user counts, but that hypothesis never really panned out 16:50:50 and here arma is trying the hypothesis again 16:51:00 i wish we had some new ideas in this space :) 16:51:34 though in this case it is a huge geoip time gap 16:51:39 not the usual monthly change 16:52:54 though....hm. tor 0.4.5.9 got a new ipfire geoip update (june 2021) 16:53:52 i guess the next step is to look at whether there is a correlation between tor version and user counts 16:54:34 * ggus checking r/ukraine 16:54:44 i.e. if relays with older geoip dbs are predominantly claiming romania users 16:56:40 what does ooni use for geoip/asn data? 16:56:57 hm. yet another angle to consider: if users in a given country spend more time with their tor browser running, our graphs will show that as more users. like, if the average person in the country moves from 2 hours of tor browser online per day to 4 hours, we'll show that the user count doubled. 16:57:07 good question re ooni, i do not know 16:57:35 but i think, at least as of long ago, they did the conversion at the client side, for privacy. so they probably wrestled with the maxmind license change too? 16:58:27 ok, we're getting to the end of the meeting 16:58:40 anything else for the last 2 mins? 16:58:46 i'll wait that long to close it 17:00:03 #endmeeting