15:59:41 <cohosh> #startmeeting tor anti-censorship meeting
15:59:41 <MeetBot> Meeting started Thu Nov  4 15:59:41 2021 UTC.  The chair is cohosh. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot.
15:59:41 <MeetBot> Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic.
15:59:50 <cohosh> hi and welcome!
15:59:54 <shelikhoo> Hi~
16:00:03 <cohosh> here is our meeting pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-keep
16:00:15 <agix> hi
16:00:26 <cohosh> feel free to add items to the agenda and update what you're working on :)
16:00:29 <meskio> hello
16:00:39 <cohosh> agix: woah nice to see you (and without the 10 min delay)!
16:01:02 <agix> yeah I am glad to be back without the delays ^^ missed you guys
16:01:09 <cohosh> :D
16:01:27 <meskio> agix: did I see you are thinking on taking the gettor twitter ticket?
16:01:35 <cohosh> also welcome to shelikhoo \o/
16:01:50 <agix> meskio yeah I was about to ask if that's okay for you
16:01:57 <meskio> yeah, wellcome shelikhoo
16:02:05 <agix> welcome shelikhoo :)
16:02:13 <shelikhoo> Yeah! I am honored to work in the team!
16:02:17 <meskio> agix: is great, I was dreaming on doing it but have too much stuff in my plate, please do
16:02:26 <meskio> I leave some comments in the ticket with some ideas
16:02:38 <agix> meskio cool thanks a lot :)
16:03:04 <meskio> feel free to ask if you need help to navigate how code is organized in rdsys (or other things)
16:03:37 <agix> meskio I will
16:03:39 <cohosh> shelikhoo: do you want to introduce yourself?
16:03:45 <cohosh> no pressure ofc
16:04:39 <shelikhoo> Hi, I am Shelikhoo.
16:05:00 <dcf1> shelikhoo has been here before, http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2020/tor-meeting.2020-06-11-15.59.log.html
16:05:14 <shelikhoo> I am the lead developer of V2Ray/V2Fly.
16:06:02 <anadahz> (hi)
16:07:26 <shelikhoo> And now I am really glad to join Tor to build tools aimed at resisting censorship.
16:07:42 <cohosh> \o/
16:07:46 <shelikhoo> https://github.com/xiaokangwang
16:08:14 <shelikhoo> The project I am currently test in my free time is: https://github.com/xiaokangwang/VLite
16:09:28 <shelikhoo> Let me know if you get a bad connection but still wants to play games/online meeting with UDP P2P connections!
16:09:37 <shelikhoo> EOF/Over!
16:09:44 * cohosh bookmarks vlite to check out later :D
16:10:09 <meskio> looks cool
16:10:36 <shelikhoo> I am currently trying to integrate it into V2Fly/
16:11:16 <cohosh> the first item on our agenda is a followup from last week
16:11:16 <shelikhoo> EOF/Over
16:11:39 <cohosh> we were having issues with snowflake proxies not knowing their NAT type
16:11:57 <cohosh> it looks like restarting our NAT check service resolved that at least temporarily
16:12:21 <cohosh> but the count of proxies will unrestricted (meaning full cone, or restricted cone NATs) were still low
16:12:42 <cohosh> i think it's recovering now finally
16:13:04 <cohosh> but we had to disable some our new alerts because the email flood was too much
16:14:18 <meskio> did you mention that the problem is related to the standalone proxy not rechecking ever the NAT type?
16:14:45 <meskio> should we prioritize fixing that? hopefully is not hard to change
16:15:14 <cohosh> yeah i opened snowflake#40075 for that
16:16:05 <cohosh> it's probably worth addressing since our NAT check service is likely to be flakey again
16:17:35 <cohosh> i bumped up the priority of the ticket in gitlab
16:18:14 <cohosh> that's all i have for this item, should we move on to the next thing?
16:18:25 <meskio> +1
16:18:33 <shelikhoo> +1
16:18:58 <cohosh> cool, whoever posted it can take the metaphorical mic :)
16:19:56 <anadahz> Confused about the meek client metrics in Turkmenistan -- https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-combined.png?start=2021-08-02&end=2021-11-04&country=tm
16:20:39 <anadahz> How come and there are so many meek clients in Turkmenistan?
16:20:54 <dcf1> Here is a graph with some more context
16:20:56 <dcf1> https://people.torproject.org/~dcf/metrics-country.html?start=2021-08-01&end=2021-11-05&country=tm
16:21:00 <meskio> does it look like related to snowflake going down?
16:21:13 <dcf1> however zoom out a bit to get even *more* context (esp. wrt relay users)
16:21:15 <dcf1> https://people.torproject.org/~dcf/metrics-country.html?start=2021-07-01&end=2021-11-05&country=tm
16:21:23 <cohosh> related info on tor blocking in TM: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40030
16:22:10 <dcf1> to me it looks like OR and meek were rising simultaneously, then snowflake and OR got blocked.
16:22:33 <cohosh> wow
16:22:49 <meskio> blocked? or our failure with probetest?
16:23:45 <dcf1> but snowflake users globally did not go to zero in the same way https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-transport.html?start=2021-08-06&end=2021-11-04&transport=snowflake
16:24:05 <anadahz> On 2021-10-31 the amount of meek clients count were almost spike to 1,5 times than before.
16:24:05 <meskio> I see what you mean :(
16:24:09 <cohosh> yeah this looks suspiciously close to zero
16:24:37 <shelikhoo> Do we have any information about whether the signaling service is still reachable in Turkmenistan?
16:25:21 <cohosh> we don't collect client country count metrics at the snowflake broker
16:25:37 <cohosh> so we don't have info on where/how it's getting blocked just from usage metrics
16:26:27 <anadahz> (also I thought meek was deprecated?)
16:26:50 <cohosh> the best we could do with our current tools is probably ask gus if some user contacts there can send us snowflake logs
16:26:54 <meskio> maybe ggus has contacts there that can share snowflake logs to see what is happening
16:27:13 <meskio> ups, we say the same :)
16:27:29 <cohosh> anadahz: meek is still operational but we were planning to shift over to snowflake and eventually deprecate it
16:28:05 <cohosh> i suppose this could be a reason not to remove it from tor browser immediately
16:28:07 <anadahz> cohosh, meskio What kind of snowflake logs do you need?
16:28:16 <cohosh> as long as TPO is still okay with the bill
16:28:20 <meskio> does meek and snowflake use the same domain for domain fronting? just to narrow down that is not TM blocking the domain
16:28:46 <cohosh> anadahz: we'd need the lcient to configure the torrc file to specify a snowflake log
16:28:50 <anadahz> Is there a link/doc/how-to to get the "require"d snowflake logs?
16:28:51 <cohosh> this is distinct from the tor log
16:29:39 <cohosh> hmm our doc on this isnt' great
16:29:41 <cohosh> https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/tree/main/client
16:29:52 <cohosh> it's a command line option on ClientTransportPlugin line
16:30:15 <meskio> what is the status of snowflake ooni?
16:30:34 <cohosh> meskio: afaik not done yet
16:30:40 <meskio> pity
16:30:53 <cohosh> https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+snowflake
16:30:54 <anadahz> Changing the torrc file to specify is very fragile (for instance with PATHs per OS) and it requires a fair amount of technical background. :/
16:31:00 <cohosh> these are the open ooni issues **
16:31:06 <cohosh> *^^
16:31:17 <cohosh> anadahz: yeah it's not great
16:31:39 <dcf1> Editing the torrc at least doesn't need to specify the path, you can use -log-to-state-dir. But you have to know what path to find the log file in.
16:31:55 <cohosh> we have this work that we've roadmapped next to send snowflake connection info to the tor log: snowflake#40062
16:32:13 <anadahz> Also, OONI's backend collector seems to be blocked currently in TM.
16:32:23 <cohosh> ah :/
16:32:39 <dcf1> anadahz: what made you look at Turkmenistan and meek specifically? Weird occurrences like this happen often, in many places.
16:33:50 <anadahz> Also the psiphon proxy seems to be also blocked in TM.
16:34:14 <shelikhoo> Maybe there should be a way to generate a full bug report from Tor Browser in GUI. I believe there is a copy log button when connection failed.
16:35:11 <anadahz> dcf1: Lots of services/websites being blocked there for long time.. I stumbled upon the meek metrics in TM, that was mentioned in #ooni-entropy channel.
16:35:11 <dcf1> shelikhoo: the Tor Browser button only copies the tor log; the snowflake-client log is separate. That is what snowflake#40062 is about, to have snowflake-client send information to the tor log, where it will be accessible using that button.
16:36:50 <cohosh> thanks for bringing this up anadahz
16:37:00 <meskio> I say let's ask ggus, see if he can find contacts there to run it, and if needed maybe we can prepare a simple probe, it doesn't need to connect to tor, just to see if it connects to a proxy might be good
16:37:30 <cohosh> yea sounds good
16:38:15 <shelikhoo> dcf1: Yes, I will look at this issue.
16:39:16 <anadahz> So just to recap the steps needed to get some logs: 1. Get Tor Browser, 2. Adjust to collect snowflake logs, 3. Re run Tor Browsers, 4. Get snowflake logs from the specified PATH
16:39:28 <anadahz> Do I miss anything here^ ?
16:40:21 <cohosh> yea that look right, the adjustment will require manually editing the torrc file that ships with tor browser
16:40:34 <cohosh> it might be easier to do it on the command line if you can find a user that can do that
16:41:04 <dcf1> here are brief instructions for editing torrc to add snowflake logging (written for an unrelated purpose) https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/35#issue-626875810
16:42:28 <anadahz> dcf1: thx!
16:43:30 <cohosh> anything else for today?
16:44:29 <meskio> just a reminder: next week we have reading group: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3473604.3474560
16:44:42 <cohosh> :D
16:45:10 <dcf1> I'll miss next week's meeting. But I'll read the reading.
16:45:50 <cohosh> another closing note: it's time for our montly report
16:45:57 <cohosh> which has turned into a bi-monthly report lately
16:46:22 <cohosh> if you can please fill it out with things you've worked on during september and october: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-monthly-report-keep
16:46:57 <cohosh> i'll end the meeting here, thanks everyone!
16:47:00 <cohosh> #endmeeting