17:59:25 <phw> #startmeeting anti-censorship meeting
17:59:25 <MeetBot> Meeting started Thu Feb 13 17:59:25 2020 UTC.  The chair is phw. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot.
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17:59:29 <phw> hi everyone
17:59:38 <gaba> hi!
17:59:38 <phw> here is today's meeting pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-keep
18:00:01 <cohosh> hi
18:00:32 <phw> our agenda is empty. does anyone have anything to discuss or announce?
18:00:41 <cohosh> oh i have something
18:01:04 <cohosh> we're thinking of switching from the completed translation branch of snowflake to a different one
18:01:14 <cohosh> that has partial/unreviewed translations
18:01:33 <cohosh> the reason being that for example a volunteer translated it to swedish 5 months ago
18:01:48 <cohosh> and it still hasn't gotten reviewed
18:01:48 <dcf1> #33132
18:02:11 <cohosh> there are a lot more translations that have been sitting around for a while
18:02:18 <cohosh> any objections to this move?
18:02:43 <arlolra> might want to verify that everything works if some strings are missing from the translation
18:02:59 <phw> we may want to have a threshold for how partial a translation is
18:03:19 <cohosh> my understanding is that missing translations will default the english
18:03:39 <phw> a 10%-finished translation isn't as good as a 90%-finished translation and maybe not worth deploying
18:03:42 <cohosh> phw: did you implement this threshold for bridgedb?
18:03:52 <arlolra> that's true in the extension but the functions for the badge may be incomplete
18:04:02 <phw> cohosh: not yet, no
18:04:11 <cohosh> arlolra: i tookd a look at the messages.json files
18:04:27 <cohosh> and they have all the fields there, just some are still in english
18:04:29 <phw> #32035
18:04:41 <cohosh> phw: thanks, that's helpful to keep track of
18:06:35 <phw> my general feeling is "yes, let's do this, but let's also make sure that we won't end up deploying barely translated languages"
18:06:49 <cohosh> ok sounds good
18:06:54 <cjb> Hi! I remember last week there was something about TBB people wanting to talk, what was the outcome there?
18:07:04 <arlolra> cohosh: https://github.com/keroserene/snowflake/blob/master/proxy/static/index.js#L7
18:07:34 <phw> for what it's worth, i have the same plan for bridgedb
18:08:18 <cohosh> oh thanks arlolra, i'll take a look at that
18:08:31 <hiro> cohosh I ma behind wiht the reviews
18:08:42 <hiro> sorry about that
18:08:55 <cohosh> hiro: oh no worries!
18:09:38 <arma2> cohosh: also, if the translations aren't getting reviewed, maybe that is a process thing that needs to get unwedged elsewhere. if so, we could highlight that as a dependency we need, rather than quietly working around it.
18:10:12 <arma2> (what does 'reviewed' mean? somebody who speaks swedish looks at the translations and says yep that's swedish?)
18:10:23 <phw> arma2: aiui, the set of volunteers that translates is small and one cannot review their own translation.
18:10:38 <cohosh> yeah i talked with emmapeel about it, so she is aware the issue
18:10:42 <cohosh> *aware of
18:10:57 <arma2> is there a plan for a fix? we can't be the only ones suffering from that issue
18:11:55 <cohosh> i am not sure, we could ask the community team?
18:12:26 <arma2> sounds good. also telling phw to raise it with the vegas team ("help, my team needs translations, they exist but somehow they're not getting to us")
18:13:23 <arma2> in case other teams have solved it somehow
18:14:32 <gaba> or bring it to the emmapeel and applications team to see how to move this forward
18:15:10 <hiro> arma2: the translations are reviewed by the translators themselves... emmapeel knows the process
18:16:26 <phw> see also https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/26543#comment:23
18:17:53 <phw> the main issues are 1) shortcomings in transifex and 2) a lack of volunteers. we could improve 2) by doing some outreach and encouraging people to sign up to translate
18:18:18 <arma2> makes sense
18:18:41 <arma2> and sounds like a good plan. having a reviewer is a reasonable process. so getting enough people that we can have a reviewer is a useful step to do.
18:19:03 <gaba> before there was some work with localization lab, no? maybe call for some kind of sprint for translation working with ggus
18:19:58 <arma2> (i don't know; maybe?)
18:20:13 <phw> in an ideal world we would have reviews for all languages but we aren't there yet. in the meanwhile we should be deploying fully translated yet unreviewed languages
18:20:20 <arma2> also, if you're about to call for a localization sprint, that's the perfect time to look over the english strings and see if there are changes you've been meaning to make
18:20:39 <kushal> in SecureDrop a few times we (the developers) had to read and review the translation as it was just before release.
18:21:01 <arma2> it is true. we know some swedish speakers who could glance over the swedish translations.
18:21:37 <arma2> anyway, the tl;dr is: don't treat the translations as a black box that you can't influence or predict. :)
18:23:06 <arma2> ...is there a plan to set up a turbotunnel bridge? or is it too early for that?
18:23:34 <dcf1> arma2: i'm planning to open a ticket this week
18:23:37 <gaba> phw: i help following up on this with ggus if that helps now
18:24:08 <arma2> dcf1: great
18:24:31 <arma2> i am excited to have a snowflake nightly + have a turbotunnel bridge exist, so we can put some load on it and see what happens
18:24:44 <cohosh> same :D
18:24:44 <arma2> i guess there remain quite a few steps before that point
18:25:22 <phw> cohosh: btw, have you seen this wiki page: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/translation/developers ? i found it helpful back when i started learning about translations
18:26:17 <phw> gaba: a general call for volunteers would be helpful but we shouldn't do that without emmapeel's input
18:26:25 <cohosh> phw: thanks!
18:26:29 <gaba> yes. agree
18:27:14 <phw> also, i found it helpful to sign up for transifex to get an idea of how the translation process works
18:27:29 <phw> emmapeel made me a reviewer for german, so i can help move forward new translations
18:28:19 <cohosh> nice, i have an account but need to spend some time figuring out how it works
18:29:16 <phw> so to summarise, let's: 1) try to improve the situation by getting more volunteers and coordinating with emmapeel, and in the meanwhile 2) deploy unreviewed translations to keep our existing volunteers and users happy. does that sound reasonable?
18:29:47 <cohosh> sounds good to me
18:29:51 <arma2> yep
18:30:00 <phw> cohosh: i found it really confusing. no wonder that it's difficult to get volunteers for it :/
18:30:29 <arma2> maybe writing up the parts you found most confusing is the first step to having it become better
18:30:45 <arma2> there is an intermittent meeting of a group calling themselves linguine that are working on a better translation process
18:30:51 <arma2> starting from the rome tor dev meetup
18:31:17 <arma2> hans, al, and sajolida are in on it
18:31:31 <arma2> along with emma, erinm, and others
18:31:33 <phw> the UI is complex and one has to understand the underlying principles (like the idea of reviewing translations) first
18:32:25 <arma2> so if you told the linguine folks that you are looking forward to a better outcome, and here are your four pain points, they might be more likely to arrive at a place that addresses them
18:32:53 <phw> i'll try to look into it.
18:33:40 <phw> let's move on. the next item on our agenda is the "tor library size" project. let me summarise what that is
18:34:10 <phw> we're trying to get to a point where cell phone apps can easily bundle tor, to provide their users with anonymity and censorship resistance
18:34:41 <phw> that's already possible but not very easy to do, and a big issue is the size of the "tor library"
18:35:25 <phw> the smaller our library would be, the better. the guardian project is currently at ~5 MB (excluding PTs) and aiming for 2 MB
18:36:07 <phw> now, PTs make this more difficult because our entire anti-censorship suite is currently written in golang
18:36:32 <phw> ...and golang doesn't support dynamic linking, resulting in relatively big binaries
18:36:47 <phw> i recently created a ticket about that
18:37:09 <gaba> phw: you have ticket number?
18:37:14 <phw> i'm trying to find it
18:38:35 <phw> but long story short: we should get to a point where we can offer lightweight PTs for third party apps to ship
18:38:48 <phw> and that may entail re-implementing PTs in a language other than golang
18:39:00 <dcf1> nobody uses my idea of linking multiple go executables together like busybox (#13770). it would be less convenient but much smaller if you're optimizing for size. only one runtime, one copy of each library, etc.
18:39:26 <cohosh> oh interesting dcf1
18:39:30 <phw> oh, i wasn't aware of this ticket, thanks
18:40:49 <phw> here's the ticket i recently filed: #33047
18:41:35 <gaba> and this is the one i created for tor #33291
18:41:46 <phw> thanks gaba
18:42:00 <gaba> are you ok if i put both your tickets as children of the one on tor?
18:42:42 <phw> i don't think one ticket must be a dependency for another
18:42:53 <gaba> right, i will add tor-size to all of them
18:42:58 <phw> that sounds good, thanks
18:43:16 <phw> ok, we don't need to discuss this right now but i wanted to summarise the call we had the other day
18:43:43 <gaba> yes. thanks
18:44:01 <phw> "re-implement a PT in another language" may have been a good gsoc project
18:44:11 <cjb> dcf1: for e.g. Snowflake, there's already a JS implementation for Firefox, right?
18:44:33 <arma2> phw: it's not too late to add gsoc projects.
18:44:38 <cohosh> cjb: that's for the proxy, not the client-side which is what we're concerned about here
18:44:45 <cjb> oops I see
18:45:05 <arma2> phw: and, you know about all of blanu's PTs written in swift, right?
18:45:12 <phw> arma2: it's not? well then i'll talk to pili about that
18:46:05 <phw> yes, i know about his swift implementations but i don't know their binary size properties
18:46:27 <phw> #todo: learn more about blanu's PT swift implementations
18:46:57 <arma2> https://github.com/OperatorFoundation/Shapeshifter-Swift-Transports
18:47:02 <phw> thanks arma2
18:47:28 <arma2> swift is meant to be fun to use for ios but i also have no clue about how big its files are
18:48:20 <arma2> https://github.com/OperatorFoundation lists a bunch of other projects that have the word swift in their names
18:49:05 <phw> ok, we have a bunch of tickets to catch up on, and more things to learn. shall we move on to our 'needs help with' sections?
18:49:56 <cohosh> hiro just reviewed two of mine, so that just leaves #23225 for me
18:50:17 <phw> i can take that
18:50:22 <cohosh> thanks!
18:50:36 <phw> cohosh: how about i trade you #33299?
18:50:47 <cohosh> sounds good
18:51:27 <phw> i think there were all reviews
18:51:33 <phw> agix: anything bridgedb-related that we can help with?
18:53:17 <phw> agix: if there is, let's talk about it in #tor-dev, ok?
18:53:38 <phw> i think that's it for today. any last words? if not, i'll end the meeting in a minute.
18:54:08 <gaba> thanks! o/
18:54:47 <phw> #endmeeting