13:59:14 <ggus> #startmeeting Community Team meeting - April 04 2022
13:59:14 <MeetBot> Meeting started Mon Apr  4 13:59:14 2022 UTC.  The chair is ggus. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot.
13:59:14 <MeetBot> Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic.
13:59:18 <ggus> hello folks
13:59:20 <championquizzer> hello! o/
13:59:27 <ggus> community team meeting is starting now! o/
13:59:30 <raya[m]> hello! o/
13:59:34 <emmapeel> o/
13:59:39 <ggus> here is our meeting pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-community-team-2022-keep
13:59:53 <ggus> please add your updates and feel free to add items on the discussion
14:00:30 <nah> o/
14:00:38 * gman999 lurking and working
14:00:40 <nina13[m]> Hi!
14:08:03 <ggus> it seems it will be a short meeting today.
14:08:17 <ggus> we don't have any topics to discuss
14:08:29 <ggus> at least on the discussion agenda
14:09:39 <ggus> do people would like to share or discuss something?
14:10:07 <raya[m]> i wanted to point out something
14:10:18 <raya[m]> when gathering traffic data for the narrative report
14:10:59 <raya[m]> i found an interesting spike in ukraine
14:11:01 <raya[m]> https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?start=2022-02-01&end=2022-03-31&country=ua&events=on
14:11:19 <raya[m]> right around russia's invasion
14:12:02 <raya[m]> then the number of relay users went down almost back to pre-war levels
14:12:07 <raya[m]> i was wondering what the explanation could be
14:12:44 <hiro> 🤷
14:13:20 <hiro> I have been thinking it was people being misplaced... having to leave and not having computers
14:13:27 <hiro> many towns were destroyed
14:13:46 <hiro> I mean I don't know but that could be an explanation
14:13:53 <raya[m]> for sure.. of course
14:14:08 <raya[m]> i meant, what could've encouraged the spike, was there a campaign?
14:14:51 <emmapeel> maybe the russian soldier were circumventing ukrainian censorship?
14:15:16 <gman999> unlikely, but i dont have a better explanation
14:15:16 <nina13[m]> they are mostly not allowed to have mobile phones with them
14:15:27 <emmapeel> i read somewhere that russian army had problems to connect to the phone network and get internet
14:15:40 <gman999> there are massive comms problems for the ru army
14:15:51 <ggus> it's an interesting event that we don't have one answer
14:15:52 <hiro> maybe it could also be people from russia using vpns in ucraine 🤷
14:15:54 <gman999> so there is cell phone usage despite official policy
14:16:24 <ggus> some days ago people were discussing that topic on #tor-relays channel
14:16:48 <gman999> i posted two useful URLs in #cake
14:17:22 <nina13[m]> well, 150000 is more than overall number of russian soldiers in the country
14:17:30 <ggus> it worth remember that on the week of the invasion there was a massive cyberattack in UA
14:17:50 <ggus> so maybe that motivated people to download tor?
14:18:30 <raya[m]> perhaps
14:18:51 <gman999> i would want to look closer with PTs, etc.
14:19:06 <ggus> last year there was another spike in UA that we couldn't find a good answer - https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?start=2021-02-01&end=2022-03-31&country=ua&events=off
14:19:33 <gman999> would ooni ppl know more?
14:19:55 <hiro> but we thought that was a geoip issue?
14:20:05 <raya[m]> gman999: https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-combined.html?start=2022-02-01&end=2022-03-31&country=ua
14:20:07 <ggus> yes, hiro.
14:20:24 <raya[m]> ggus: ah interesting..
14:20:46 <hiro> so then we updated the geoip db and that went away
14:21:36 <emmapeel> hiro, and how often is the geoipdb updated?
14:21:44 <hiro> every tor release
14:21:50 <emmapeel> especially in relation to this new spike
14:21:54 <hiro> and then manually for onionoo
14:22:08 <ggus> raya[m]: maybe we could cross check with psiphon data too - https://psix.ca/d/Vcvqvj6Wk/global-overview?orgId=2
14:22:17 <ggus> and see if they also saw a spike on their usage
14:22:23 <hiro> but now that was automated so every two weeks it is updated on onionoo
14:23:47 <gman999> all the geoIP craziness over the years may mean we should also check against other geoIP sources...
14:23:50 <gman999> and ooni
14:24:25 <gman999> i see it all the time just checking manually
14:26:59 <gman999> sorry.. my point is that if it doesnt make sense, we should have some checks.
14:27:34 <emmapeel> but how can we check? we dont have the ips, do we?
14:28:02 <gman999> we can start based on known IPs... with relays even
14:28:57 <emmapeel> but this are the ips of the users that connect to the nodes, how can i check that the country is real, if i dont have that ip? will i need to run a relay for this?
14:29:16 <gman999> i just meant checking the geoIP data source
14:29:26 <gman999> sorry if i distracted...
14:29:34 <gman999> just a long time issue
14:29:45 <gman999> nigeria used to look the same as uk..
14:29:53 <gman999> since it was rolled out as brit telecom
14:30:02 <gman999> but that was a long time ago :)
14:31:08 <ggus> alright
14:31:21 <ggus> raya[m]: sometimes it's very hard to understand what's up
14:31:40 <ggus> i have been collecting these events here: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues
14:32:07 <emmapeel> maybe we should add ukraine's invasion to the events timeline?
14:32:14 <ggus> example: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40049
14:32:22 <ggus> emmapeel: david already added
14:32:36 <emmapeel> oh great
14:32:41 <raya[m]> thank you!
14:33:13 <gman999> one last thought on ua spike...
14:33:29 <gman999> in eastern europe, it wasn't uncommon to pick up networks over the border
14:33:37 <gman999> it actualy is a 'roaming' problem
14:33:41 <ggus> and we have this monitoring workflow: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/team/-/wikis/On-monitoring-metrics-per-country
14:34:01 <gman999> so possible that those 'ua users' were in 'ru'
14:34:11 <gman999> due to cell phone shutdowns near the border etc.
14:34:19 <gman999> just a thought.  done. sorry.
14:34:34 <emmapeel> gman999: i thought about that!
14:34:51 <gman999> i had the issue before!
14:34:51 <rhatto> sorry, im laaate! :)
14:37:59 <ggus> https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40068
14:38:00 <raya[m]> hello rhatto!
14:38:32 <raya[m]> thanks gus!
14:38:35 <championquizzer> np, rhatto. this was a discussion about spike in Tor usage in .ua at end of Feb/ start of March
14:38:40 <championquizzer> https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?start=2022-02-01&end=2022-03-31&country=ua&events=on
14:40:06 <rhatto> championquizzer, ah, ok! thanks for bringing me back in the loop :)
14:40:28 <gman999> honestly, i feel like there's a lot of 'parties' who should look at taht collectively..
14:40:31 <gman999> including ooni ppl
14:41:49 <emmapeel> yeah
14:43:52 <gman999> i just asked on #ooni
14:44:16 <ggus> i added some info on the ticket
14:44:21 <ggus> https://explorer.ooni.org/search?since=2022-02-24&until=2022-02-28&failure=false&probe_cc=UA&only=anomalies
14:45:01 <ggus> these were the sites that had some issues during the spike period
14:46:49 <ggus> feel free to add your observations on that ticket
14:46:56 <ggus> later we can link on metrics timeline
14:47:12 <ggus> anything else that people would like to talk or share today?
14:47:15 <raya[m]> will do!
14:47:34 <gman999> side note on that...
14:47:43 <gman999> i have relays 'blocked' from ru in metrics..
14:47:51 <gman999> but it looks like i still get ru traffic
14:47:59 <gman999> but who knows if it's legit
14:48:13 <gman999> we dont have a mechanism to distinguish good v bad connections
14:49:16 <ggus> and it worth remember that the metrics data is a conservative estimation of tor usage
14:49:25 <ggus> https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/metrics/website/-/issues/40009
14:49:33 <gman999> right.
14:51:16 <ggus> if everyone is good, i will stop the bot
14:51:36 <raya[m]> super
14:51:44 <raya[m]> thank you for the feedback
14:51:48 <raya[m]> learned a lot
14:51:56 <gman999> good stuff
14:52:03 <ggus> thank you for bringing that topic, raya[m]!
14:52:10 <championquizzer> thanks all!
14:52:19 <nina13[m]> Thanks!
14:52:20 <championquizzer> yes, ty, raya[m] :)
14:52:32 <ggus> #endmeeting