15:58:13 <cohosh> #startmeeting tor anti-censorship meeting
15:58:13 <MeetBot> Meeting started Thu Feb 25 15:58:13 2021 UTC.  The chair is cohosh. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot.
15:58:13 <MeetBot> Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic.
15:58:27 <cohosh> here is our meeting pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-keep
15:59:10 <cohosh> we have a few things on the agenda today
15:59:49 <cohosh> first is an announcement that the snowflake user survey was rolled out: https://blog.torproject.org/learning-more-about-tor-users
16:00:09 <cohosh> i'm excited to see what kind of feedback we get
16:00:39 <cohosh> mostly i'm hoping this will help us ramp up usage a bit more so we can stress test snowflake and see what/if anything breaks when we get more users
16:01:21 <ggus> hi!
16:01:30 <cohosh> ggus: hey!
16:01:48 <cohosh> do you have more to add about the surveys?
16:01:53 <dcf1> cohosh: is the survey being announced in places other than the blog? how can we help?
16:02:07 <agix> hi!
16:02:21 <ggus> cohosh: i suggested to comms team to tweet about snowflake next monday, so we use next month to promote snowflake
16:02:28 <agix> very nice, I see it also pops up when launching Tor
16:02:38 <cohosh> nice!
16:03:10 <cohosh> yeah my understanding is it's being announced in alpha versions of tor browser and then on social media
16:03:31 <cohosh> dcf1: but it might also be worth doing a post on ntc or bbs?
16:04:52 * cohosh waits a second before moving on to the next topic
16:05:04 <ggus> we're going to promote three things: 1. run snowflake proxy; 2. try snowflake in tb alpha; 3. answer the survey.
16:05:36 <dcf1> I was thinking about that, but the survey is more user-oriented than developer-oriented and I wasn't sure if it would be of interest to the subscribers
16:06:26 <cohosh> dcf1: yeah that's fair, it would more be an ask to help spread the promotion i suppose
16:07:02 <cohosh> ggus: very cool, the number of proxies has been pretty steady lately so this will be exciting to see if we get even more
16:08:54 <cohosh> okay next on the agenda is some snowflake metrics
16:09:06 <cohosh> https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/5481936581E23D2D178105D44DB6915AB06BFB7F
16:09:29 <cohosh> dcf1: was this your point?
16:09:31 <dcf1> Last week the number of clients was suspiciously flat, which made me think we might be hitting some kind of resrouce ceiling
16:09:51 <dcf1> I logged into the bridge and checked CPU and file descriptors, but there was still headroom on both
16:10:16 <dcf1> Since then the number went back down, so it's not clear if it was a coincidence
16:11:03 <cohosh> tbh, i find the discrepancy between the number of bridge users and the amount of requests to the broker to be a bit suspicious
16:11:38 <cohosh> it seems like we're getting a ton of broker requests (and the domain fronting cost has been rising), but bridge usage is still fairly low
16:11:39 <dcf1> I don't have a suggestion about what to do for now, except to remember in case we see it again
16:12:16 <cohosh> yup sounds good
16:12:32 <dcf1> maybe there's a rogue installation out there with `-max 3` that's constantly useless polling even when it already has a connection
16:13:17 <dcf1> by "rogue installation" I mean something like, maybe there's a blog post out there that's like "how to accelerate your snowflake", sometimes things like that happen
16:14:03 <cohosh> that might explain snowflake#30498 as well
16:15:07 <cohosh> alright, hopefully we'll get more usage and see if there's a resource constraint soon
16:16:46 <cohosh> next on the agenda is some possible new blocking of Tor in Belarus
16:17:25 <cohosh> we had an email to security@ from a user in Belarus saying that all of their obfs4 bridges were being blocked
16:18:00 <cohosh> and looking at metrics, there's been an drop in obfs4 usage and a corresponding increase in meek
16:18:07 <dcf1> https://people.torproject.org/~dcf/metrics-country.html?start=2021-01-15&end=2021-03-15&country=by
16:18:45 * dcf1 hopes metrics.torproject.org will have a page like this someday
16:19:17 <cohosh> you mean all the graphs on a single page?
16:19:20 <dcf1> yeah
16:19:30 <cohosh> yeah
16:19:36 <cohosh> and then also a graph for default bridge use
16:20:12 <cohosh> we're still not sure whether the blocking is just for default bridges, or if there is some enumeration of bridgedb bridges going on as well
16:22:05 <cohosh> i opened an issue in our censorship analysis repo for this: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/issues/40002
16:23:57 <gaba> dcf1: yes, with ggus we were thinking of using the hackweek at the end of March to look at other visualizations of metrics data
16:23:58 <cohosh> any other discussion for today?
16:27:05 <cohosh> any needs help with? reviews?
16:28:18 <cohosh> okay i'll end the meeting here
16:28:32 * cohosh is multiplexing meetings and a bit distracted today >.<
16:28:51 <cohosh> just a reminder that we have a reading group discussion next meeting
16:29:19 <cohosh> on HTTPS interception in Kazakhstan: https://censoredplanet.org/assets/Kazakhstan.pdf
16:29:32 <agix> looking forward to it
16:29:33 <cohosh> #endmeeting