16:59:29 <phw> #startmeeting anti-censorship weekly checkin 2019-10-10
16:59:29 <MeetBot> Meeting started Thu Oct 10 16:59:29 2019 UTC.  The chair is phw. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot.
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16:59:33 <phw> hi everyone!
16:59:36 <cohosh> hi
16:59:43 <phw> here's our meeting pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-censorship-2019-keep
17:00:42 <phw> all the announcements are mine this time:
17:01:28 <phw> our "set up new bridges" campaign ended with october, see #30777
17:01:55 <phw> we got ~100 new bridges and picked 10 winners for a t-shirt
17:02:07 <phw> i added a few "lessons learned" to the ticket
17:02:26 <cohosh> nice \o/
17:02:37 <phw> during the campaign, a volunteer reached out and set up 20 reliable and fast private bridges for us
17:03:21 <phw> we intend to hand over these bridges to NGOs, so they can distribute them among their users
17:04:09 <phw> apparently there's room for more, so i reached out to nathan, to see if this could help with orbot's lack of default bridges: https://github.com/guardianproject/orbot/issues/258
17:04:54 <phw> while it's a lot of capacity, it's all in the hands of a single person
17:05:51 <gaba> nice
17:05:56 <phw> let me know if you have other ideas on what to do with these bridges
17:06:30 <phw> finally, i filed #31990, so we can continue last week's discussion on website mirrors
17:06:34 <gaba> phw: ggus is involved in the distribution to NGOs, right?
17:06:57 <ggus> gaba: i'd like to distirbute to users asking in frontdesk
17:07:11 <ggus> i added that as a discussion topic
17:07:16 <phw> gaba: no, we're in direct contact with two ngos that arma2 had contacts in.
17:07:45 <phw> ggus: that's a good idea
17:08:55 <phw> for now, i have a csv file with 20 bridges. i plan to assign them for different purposes, e.g., 5 to ngo X, 5 to ngo Y, 5 for the frontdesk
17:09:36 <phw> ggus: i can send you an email with, say, five bridges and you can distribute them as you see fit.
17:09:45 <ggus> great!
17:10:10 <ggus> last month i did an experiment. i setup some private bridges and started to share with some users
17:10:31 <ggus> one of them asked about if they could share it with more people, or what was our policy here
17:12:12 <phw> i would encourage people to share it with people they trust
17:13:50 <ggus> ok, and if it gets blocked somewhere, do we ask our contact to change the ip address or what?
17:15:44 <phw> that's a possibility, yes. i don't really have a plan for this yet. i would suggest to get started with a handful of bridges and see what we can learn
17:15:52 <phw> and improve our process as we go
17:16:15 <dcf1> It won't get blocked though :) Not unless someone builds it into software they distribute.
17:16:32 <dcf1> IMO it's a remote risk, not worth worrying about too much.
17:16:56 <ggus> ok!
17:17:11 <phw> right, and even if a bridge ends up blocked in country X, it should still work in all other countries
17:17:59 <phw> ok, let's talk about your gettor item, ggus?
17:18:12 <cohosh> we probably don't want to change IP addresses too much if we're handing the bridge lines out to multiple people anyway, since the change will make it stop working for others
17:19:48 <ggus> so, now if an user search about torproject.org in google, and the website is blocked where they are, we could add something in the description like a gettor link so they could learn about this service.
17:20:10 <phw> hmm, it would be neat if there was an easier way to distribute private bridges. say, a secret "password" for moat that returns a set of private bridges instead of the default moat bridges.
17:20:59 <ggus> cohosh: i was thinking to send private bridge A to country A, private B to country B, so i could 'rotate' if it's blocked.
17:21:16 <gaba> phw: that could be a neat idea that can be talked with antonela and tor browser for s30
17:21:58 <gaba> for #31269
17:23:30 <phw> ggus: changing our search engine description for censored users sounds like a great idea
17:23:54 <phw> on google, it currently says "Defend yourself against tracking and surveillance. Circumvent censorship. | Anonymity Online."
17:24:15 <phw> duckduckgo says "RESIST FINGERPRINTING. Tor Browser aims to make all users look the same making it difficult for you to be fingerprinted based on your browser and device information."
17:25:12 <phw> another sentence would be useful. something along the lines of "unable to connect to our website? get tor browser by emailing gettor@tpo"
17:26:10 <cohosh> nice
17:26:12 <arma2> (ok i have emerged from my previous meeting and am catching up with backlog here)
17:26:25 <phw> ggus: how does this work? is there a text field in which we can have arbitrary descriptions?
17:27:13 <ggus> phw: in google, yes. but we need to sign up in their webmaster service thing
17:27:26 <ggus> in ddg dunno
17:27:35 * phw wonders how it would work in baidu
17:27:39 <phw> ...if it works
17:29:07 <phw> ggus: i like the idea, thanks for bringing it up. anything we can do to help move it forward?
17:29:39 <ggus> i'll email some people to get this google thing working, and then i'll ping you
17:29:47 <phw> thanks!
17:30:17 <dcf1> I think the Google text comes from this: <meta name="description" content="Defend yourself against tracking and surveillance. Circumvent censorship. | Anonymity Online">
17:30:43 <ggus> dcf1: yes, but it's also possible to edit links and other things if you use their webmaster console
17:30:55 <dcf1> ggus: aha, I see, thanks.
17:31:28 <phw> it's odd that ddg picks a random div for their description
17:32:22 <phw> anything else to annouce or discuss?
17:32:43 <arma2> isa and i might be meeting with the ddg people in the coming weeks. we can ask a question if we have a concrete one
17:33:37 <phw> maybe "can we have a custom description in your search results, so we can point people to gettor if our website is unreachable to users?"
17:34:51 <phw> we should find out if we can pull this trick with baidu too. i'll file a ticket
17:34:58 <arma2> great
17:35:15 <arma2> in the distant past, google was famous for leaving sites out of its results, when it thought you wouldn't be able to reach the sites
17:35:36 <arma2> i guess that was china in particular. and now...does google even work from china. i don't know the status.
17:35:51 <phw> gosh, the first hit on baidu is http://t-browser.sourceforge.net, which is... a bridgedb clone?
17:36:49 <cohosh> o.O
17:36:57 <arma2> i love how it says "© The Tor Project" at the bottom
17:37:17 <arma2> fsdo love
17:37:56 <hiro> the mailto goes to us though
17:38:25 <phw> it looks like they took our web frontend and added their own thing to it
17:38:41 <hiro> also different keys http://t-browser.sourceforge.net/keys
17:39:14 <phw> http://t-browser.sourceforge.net/download.html seems to point to our github copies
17:39:58 <arma2> hiro: i never really understood what bridgedb's keys were actually used for
17:40:00 <phw> hiro: the keys are identical to me
17:40:25 <phw> arma2: i think bridgedb has the ability to sign its emails.
17:41:08 <arma2> #17548
17:41:20 <arma2> "another approach besides updating the key might be to figure out what the key is actually used for, notice that it hasn't been working for three+ years and nobody minded, and change the design to not need this key anymore."
17:42:17 <phw> i'll try to take a look soon
17:43:01 <hiro> phw ah I didn't check... maybe they copied locally
17:43:44 <phw> shall we take a look at our 'needs review' sections?
17:44:41 <dcf1> aye
17:45:31 <cohosh> dcf1: i think it's possible upgrading the webext could help with snowflake health, but likely isn't the only problem
17:45:40 <cohosh> in any case, thanks for taking a look at the packaging script
17:45:52 <cohosh> i just pushed another fix
17:45:57 <phw> cohosh: i can take a look at #31384 and #31253
17:46:11 <phw> unless arlo is an expert on localisation, in which case i would prefer him to review
17:46:14 <dcf1> yeah I wasn't sure if it was meant to solve a specific bug.
17:46:17 <cohosh> phw: thanks!
17:46:35 * Samdney is reading backlog....
17:46:50 <cohosh> dcf1: arlo's reachability check hasn't been deployed yet which is a specific potential bug
17:46:57 <phw> hi Samdney
17:47:04 <cohosh> unfortunately it's hard to know exactly why lots of proxies are failing
17:47:39 <dcf1> cohosh: I thought the reachability check was what I was talking about -- I thought it was merged in the code but not yet deployed in the webextension.
17:47:50 <cohosh> dcf1: yes that's right
17:48:06 <cohosh> but i'm not sure to what extent that is the cause of the bad network health
17:48:07 <dcf1> Okay we're on the same page.
17:48:17 <cohosh> yup
17:48:30 <phw> dcf1: wrt #31890: i emailed sina the other day and copied tor-team@. not sure if you're on the list. unfortunately i haven't heard back yet
17:48:53 <dcf1> yeah I got that
17:49:16 <cohosh> dcf1: i'll take care of #31889 too while i'm in deployment mode
17:49:26 <phw> thanks cohosh
17:51:35 <phw> i think that's it
17:51:40 <cohosh> dcf1: thanks for taking a look at #29206, this change is quite big and probably takes a long time to review
17:52:12 * phw hands the 'review of the week' award to dcf1
17:53:16 <phw> any last comments?
17:53:21 * phw waits for 1 more minute
17:53:46 <antonela> thanks for your feedback on the installation email people! will reply soonish
17:54:02 <cohosh> cool :)
17:54:11 <arma2> phw: should we try to get another person who can do whatever it is we keep wanting sina to do? for redundancy
17:54:41 <phw> arma2: that would be useful. do you mean inside team cymru? or outside?
17:55:45 <arma2> i'm not sure.
17:55:46 <phw> i'll ask sina in my next reminder how he feels about the maintenance burden
17:56:04 <arma2> just, single points of failure are bad in general, and in this case this one seems to fail sometimes
17:56:41 <phw> yes, maybe there are more people inside team cymru who have access to this machine
17:58:22 <phw> ok, let's wrap it up for today
17:58:24 <phw> #endmeeting