16:00:18 <cohosh> #startmeeting tor anti-censorship meeting
16:00:18 <MeetBot> Meeting started Thu Jul 16 16:00:18 2026 UTC.  The chair is cohosh. Information about MeetBot at https://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot.
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16:00:23 <cohosh> hello everyone
16:00:28 <meskio[mds]> hello
16:00:29 <cohosh> here is our meeting pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/r.9574e996bb9c0266213d38b91b56c469
16:00:37 <cohosh> let us know if you need a link to edit it
16:00:50 <Shelikhoo[mds]> hi~hi~
16:01:04 <onyinyang[mds]> hihi
16:01:11 <cohosh> i'll wait a minute to let people fill the pad
16:02:34 <cohosh> okay just one item on the agenda for discussion
16:02:51 <cohosh> an update from snowflake daily operations
16:03:16 <dcf1> that's mine
16:04:03 <dcf1> Snowflake Daily Operations is the name for the Open Collective that takes donations for the operation of the snowflake-01 bridge.
16:04:06 <dcf1> https://opencollective.com/censorship-circumvention/projects/snowflake-daily-operations
16:05:06 <dcf1> We are touched by the recent situation with Mullvad, because Mullvad has been the largest yearly contributor. About 75% of donations in the past 12 months have come from Mullvad.
16:05:41 <dcf1> We at Snowflake Daily Operations have been talking about what to do.
16:06:27 <dcf1> We're planning to make a public statement with our decision, but fyi, it's going to look like refusing donations from Mullvad.
16:06:56 <meskio[mds]> I guess this is only for future donations, isn't it?
16:07:15 <dcf1> That's going to put a serious crunch on our operations, which is the other thing we're talking about, how to deal with the shortfall, whether through alternative sources of support or through reduced capacity.
16:07:40 <dcf1> meskio[mds]: we're still working out the details.
16:08:30 <dcf1> We'll probably at least put out an appeal for more donations, and we're looking at other ideas as well.
16:09:13 <meskio[mds]> I undestand is not an easy decision
16:09:54 <dcf1> There is a lot to consider. But everyone on the team, I think it's safe to say, is comfortable with the idea of not taking any more money.
16:10:28 <dcf1> That's all, just updating you all on the situation.
16:10:40 <Shelikhoo[mds]> the snowflake's distributed bridge system does support more than 2 bridges, so it is possible for us to spread the cost across more operators
16:10:54 <Shelikhoo[mds]> the snowflake's distributed bridge system does support more than 2 server/bridges, so it is possible for us to spread the cost across more operators
16:11:08 <dcf1> Yes, that is one option we have talked about, add more bridge capacity to reduce the bandwidth needs of snowflake-01.
16:11:34 <Shelikhoo[mds]> however, the bottleneck at C-Tor's bridge fingerprint pinning system is not changed
16:11:56 <meskio[mds]> I think your decision makes sense, I hope making the call works to cover the missing money
16:12:28 <cohosh> yeah, thank you for the update
16:13:31 <onyinyang[mds]> me too!
16:13:38 <cohosh> let us know if there's more we can do on our side to support this
16:13:41 <Shelikhoo[mds]> yes, thanks for the update
16:14:48 <cohosh> next up are some interesting links, related to PETS and FOCI next week
16:15:08 <cohosh> https://petsymposium.org/popets/2026/popets-2026-0030.php
16:15:32 <cohosh> "Obscura: Enabling Ephemeral Proxies for Traffic Encapsulation in WebRTC Media Streams Against Cost-Effective Censors"
16:15:54 <dcf1> "Troll Patrol" is also directly relevant to Tor bridges, when I checked the PDF was not up yet.
16:16:08 <Shelikhoo[mds]> yes, I see we do have a long hold merge request about encoding data in webrtc media stream
16:16:12 <cohosh> and other PETS/FOCI papers relevant to this team: https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/636
16:17:03 <Shelikhoo[mds]> I recall there is a paper about differential degradation attack on media stream
16:17:12 <Shelikhoo[mds]> by DPI and selectively drop packets
16:17:19 <onyinyang[mds]> @dcf1 it's up now at https://petsymposium.org/popets/2026/popets-2026-0154.pdf
16:17:20 <cohosh> yeah we've discussed some of these in our reading group
16:17:42 <Shelikhoo[mds]> it is possible to harm data transfer more than live streaming
16:18:26 <Shelikhoo[mds]> (just one thing come to my mind when I see the title of this paper, that I should pay attention to)
16:19:24 <cohosh> anything else for today?
16:19:33 <meskio[mds]> not from me
16:19:38 <Shelikhoo[mds]> EOF from me
16:20:16 <cohosh> okay i'll end the meeting here, thanks everyone!
16:20:19 <cohosh> #endmeeting