15:58:09 <cohosh> #startmeeting anti-censorship meeting 15:58:09 <MeetBot> Meeting started Thu Feb 4 15:58:09 2021 UTC. The chair is cohosh. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot. 15:58:09 <MeetBot> Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic. 15:58:13 <cohosh> hey everyone! 15:58:16 <agix> hi 15:58:18 <dcf1> hello 15:58:20 <cohosh> here is our meeting pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-keep 15:58:40 <hanneloresx> hi 15:58:58 <cohosh> we have a pretty light agenda today 15:59:38 <cohosh> first is the weekly reminder that the anti-censorship job opening is still up so be sure to apply soon if you're interested :) 15:59:55 <atagar> good morning 16:00:56 <cohosh> the next is that the snowflake and snowflake-webext repos are set up on anonticket.onionize.space 16:01:27 <cohosh> so you can now anonymously report and track tickets by visiting https://anonticket.onionize.space 16:01:49 <cohosh> i created snowflake-webext#21 this morning to try out the interface and it's pretty cool 16:02:04 <cohosh> we do need to approve the tickets before they are added to the repo 16:02:44 <cohosh> dcf1: you're also a maintainer of snowflake so let me know if you want to be added as a moderator to this system 16:03:57 <cohosh> alright, anyone have other discussion items for this week? 16:03:58 <dcf1> hmm probably not but I'll let you know if I change my mind 16:04:06 <cohosh> dcf1: sounds good 16:04:20 <dcf1> would we benefit from any interactive discussion on https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/30498 16:04:29 <cohosh> possibly 16:04:31 <dcf1> I've been following and it is a weird one 16:05:04 <cohosh> yeah, i'm not sure how much time we want to spend on it since standalone proxies are a very small percentage of snowflakes these days 16:05:24 <dcf1> It looks like, proxy connects to client, proxy connects to bridge, 20 seconds pass, then "OnClose channel" with 0 bytes transferred 16:05:24 <cohosh> but i'd still like to know what's happening here 16:05:36 <cohosh> since it might be we have faulty assumptions on how NATs work still 16:05:54 <cohosh> yup 16:05:55 <dcf1> could it be happening with web-based proxies too? 16:06:06 <cohosh> it's possible 16:06:25 <cohosh> it is also possible that this is due to a client acting strangely and not a problem with proxies at all 16:06:31 <dcf1> yeah I was just about to say 16:06:41 <cohosh> since I frequently do throughput tests from different types of NATs and haven't noticed a lot of issues 16:07:25 <cohosh> if there is a client scraping snowflake for proxy IPs this is the behaviour I'd expect, heh 16:07:47 <dcf1> mm, true 16:08:17 <dcf1> ok thanks, the situation is clearer to me now 16:09:07 <cohosh> yeah thanks for bringing it up 16:09:37 <cohosh> i have been curious about how the number of requests for snowflakes is much higher than our daily number of clients 16:11:32 <dcf1> the Tor Metrics graph is not exactly the daily number of clients 16:12:05 <dcf1> it's -- I forget how it's phrased exactly, let me look it up quick 16:12:37 <dcf1> https://gitweb.torproject.org/metrics-web.git/tree/src/main/resources/doc/users-q-and-a.txt 16:12:52 <dcf1> "Average number of concurrent users, estimated from data collected over a day." 16:13:19 <cohosh> ahh interesting 16:13:20 <dcf1> So the graph estimates, if you were to spot-check at a random time during the day, how many users would be currently connected. 16:14:05 <dcf1> So if the average user stays connected less than 24 hours, the daily unique users will be higher than the metrics graph; if they stay connected longer than 24 hours, lower. 16:14:12 <dcf1> that may explain it in part 16:14:31 <atagar> Estimates, and of course intentially imprecise for anonymity purposes. Many metrics stats are like that, but if you're concerned about a significant delta it wouldn't account for that. 16:15:58 <cohosh> we are getting about 10,000 snowflake matches per day 16:16:12 <cohosh> but i also haven't seen how many snowflakes i go through if i'm browsing on snowflake all day 16:16:26 <cohosh> that might be a worthwhile thing to track 16:16:32 <dcf1> we have a "research ideas" wiki page, right? 16:16:52 <cohosh> if we don't we should :) 16:17:02 <dcf1> I thought phw made one, let's see 16:17:46 <dcf1> hmm maybe not 16:18:05 <cohosh> we have https://research.torproject.org/ 16:18:19 <cohosh> but it might be worth making one specifically on the anti-censorship team wiki 16:18:40 <dcf1> cuz I'm also interested to know, if an adversary were to try to do proxy enumeration, how many proxies would they see and how fast does the pool change 16:18:49 <cohosh> yup 16:19:21 <dcf1> now that we've created this thing worthy of study 16:19:29 <cohosh> :) 16:19:36 <cohosh> i can create this page after the meeting 16:19:55 <cohosh> i also have an email i keep re-sending to students that has a list of open snowflake-adjacent questions 16:20:17 <cohosh> or we can open a ticket for it and label it "research" 16:20:33 <cohosh> or both 16:21:25 <dcf1> as long as the idea doesn't get lost 16:22:15 <cohosh> yup, i'll definitely do the wiki, and check with phw first to see if this already exists and i'm just not finding it 16:23:16 <cohosh> any needs help with items for today? 16:23:51 <cohosh> hanneloresx: are you waiting for a review on anything? 16:23:59 <atagar> I am 16:24:11 <atagar> oops, sorry 16:24:20 <atagar> thought that said 'willing to review anything' 16:24:37 <hanneloresx> haha, i have an MR that phw is reviewing 16:24:40 <hanneloresx> so should be fine 16:25:00 <cohosh> atagar: heh awesome, i might have some bridgedb code for you to review soon :) 16:25:06 <cohosh> hanneloresx: cool! 16:25:14 <atagar> \o/ 16:26:04 <cohosh> anything else before closing the meeting? 16:28:05 <cohosh> okay see you all next week! 16:28:10 <cohosh> #endmeeting