17:59:25 #startmeeting anti-censorship meeting 17:59:25 Meeting started Thu Feb 13 17:59:25 2020 UTC. The chair is phw. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot. 17:59:25 Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic. 17:59:29 hi everyone 17:59:38 hi! 17:59:38 here is today's meeting pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-keep 18:00:01 hi 18:00:32 our agenda is empty. does anyone have anything to discuss or announce? 18:00:41 oh i have something 18:01:04 we're thinking of switching from the completed translation branch of snowflake to a different one 18:01:14 that has partial/unreviewed translations 18:01:33 the reason being that for example a volunteer translated it to swedish 5 months ago 18:01:48 and it still hasn't gotten reviewed 18:01:48 #33132 18:02:11 there are a lot more translations that have been sitting around for a while 18:02:18 any objections to this move? 18:02:43 might want to verify that everything works if some strings are missing from the translation 18:02:59 we may want to have a threshold for how partial a translation is 18:03:19 my understanding is that missing translations will default the english 18:03:39 a 10%-finished translation isn't as good as a 90%-finished translation and maybe not worth deploying 18:03:42 phw: did you implement this threshold for bridgedb? 18:03:52 that's true in the extension but the functions for the badge may be incomplete 18:04:02 cohosh: not yet, no 18:04:11 arlolra: i tookd a look at the messages.json files 18:04:27 and they have all the fields there, just some are still in english 18:04:29 #32035 18:04:41 phw: thanks, that's helpful to keep track of 18:06:35 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 ok sounds good 18:06:54 Hi! I remember last week there was something about TBB people wanting to talk, what was the outcome there? 18:07:04 cohosh: https://github.com/keroserene/snowflake/blob/master/proxy/static/index.js#L7 18:07:34 for what it's worth, i have the same plan for bridgedb 18:08:18 oh thanks arlolra, i'll take a look at that 18:08:31 cohosh I ma behind wiht the reviews 18:08:42 sorry about that 18:08:55 hiro: oh no worries! 18:09:38 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 (what does 'reviewed' mean? somebody who speaks swedish looks at the translations and says yep that's swedish?) 18:10:23 arma2: aiui, the set of volunteers that translates is small and one cannot review their own translation. 18:10:38 yeah i talked with emmapeel about it, so she is aware the issue 18:10:42 *aware of 18:10:57 is there a plan for a fix? we can't be the only ones suffering from that issue 18:11:55 i am not sure, we could ask the community team? 18:12:26 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 in case other teams have solved it somehow 18:14:32 or bring it to the emmapeel and applications team to see how to move this forward 18:15:10 arma2: the translations are reviewed by the translators themselves... emmapeel knows the process 18:16:26 see also https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/26543#comment:23 18:17:53 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 makes sense 18:18:41 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 before there was some work with localization lab, no? maybe call for some kind of sprint for translation working with ggus 18:19:58 (i don't know; maybe?) 18:20:13 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 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 in SecureDrop a few times we (the developers) had to read and review the translation as it was just before release. 18:21:01 it is true. we know some swedish speakers who could glance over the swedish translations. 18:21:37 anyway, the tl;dr is: don't treat the translations as a black box that you can't influence or predict. :) 18:23:06 ...is there a plan to set up a turbotunnel bridge? or is it too early for that? 18:23:34 arma2: i'm planning to open a ticket this week 18:23:37 phw: i help following up on this with ggus if that helps now 18:24:08 dcf1: great 18:24:31 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 same :D 18:24:44 i guess there remain quite a few steps before that point 18:25:22 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 gaba: a general call for volunteers would be helpful but we shouldn't do that without emmapeel's input 18:26:25 phw: thanks! 18:26:29 yes. agree 18:27:14 also, i found it helpful to sign up for transifex to get an idea of how the translation process works 18:27:29 emmapeel made me a reviewer for german, so i can help move forward new translations 18:28:19 nice, i have an account but need to spend some time figuring out how it works 18:29:16 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 sounds good to me 18:29:51 yep 18:30:00 cohosh: i found it really confusing. no wonder that it's difficult to get volunteers for it :/ 18:30:29 maybe writing up the parts you found most confusing is the first step to having it become better 18:30:45 there is an intermittent meeting of a group calling themselves linguine that are working on a better translation process 18:30:51 starting from the rome tor dev meetup 18:31:17 hans, al, and sajolida are in on it 18:31:31 along with emma, erinm, and others 18:31:33 the UI is complex and one has to understand the underlying principles (like the idea of reviewing translations) first 18:32:25 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 i'll try to look into it. 18:33:40 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 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 that's already possible but not very easy to do, and a big issue is the size of the "tor library" 18:35:25 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 now, PTs make this more difficult because our entire anti-censorship suite is currently written in golang 18:36:32 ...and golang doesn't support dynamic linking, resulting in relatively big binaries 18:36:47 i recently created a ticket about that 18:37:09 phw: you have ticket number? 18:37:14 i'm trying to find it 18:38:35 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 and that may entail re-implementing PTs in a language other than golang 18:39:00 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 oh interesting dcf1 18:39:30 oh, i wasn't aware of this ticket, thanks 18:40:49 here's the ticket i recently filed: #33047 18:41:35 and this is the one i created for tor #33291 18:41:46 thanks gaba 18:42:00 are you ok if i put both your tickets as children of the one on tor? 18:42:42 i don't think one ticket must be a dependency for another 18:42:53 right, i will add tor-size to all of them 18:42:58 that sounds good, thanks 18:43:16 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 yes. thanks 18:44:01 "re-implement a PT in another language" may have been a good gsoc project 18:44:11 dcf1: for e.g. Snowflake, there's already a JS implementation for Firefox, right? 18:44:33 phw: it's not too late to add gsoc projects. 18:44:38 cjb: that's for the proxy, not the client-side which is what we're concerned about here 18:44:45 oops I see 18:45:05 phw: and, you know about all of blanu's PTs written in swift, right? 18:45:12 arma2: it's not? well then i'll talk to pili about that 18:46:05 yes, i know about his swift implementations but i don't know their binary size properties 18:46:27 #todo: learn more about blanu's PT swift implementations 18:46:57 https://github.com/OperatorFoundation/Shapeshifter-Swift-Transports 18:47:02 thanks arma2 18:47:28 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 https://github.com/OperatorFoundation lists a bunch of other projects that have the word swift in their names 18:49:05 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 hiro just reviewed two of mine, so that just leaves #23225 for me 18:50:17 i can take that 18:50:22 thanks! 18:50:36 cohosh: how about i trade you #33299? 18:50:47 sounds good 18:51:27 i think there were all reviews 18:51:33 agix: anything bridgedb-related that we can help with? 18:53:17 agix: if there is, let's talk about it in #tor-dev, ok? 18:53:38 i think that's it for today. any last words? if not, i'll end the meeting in a minute. 18:54:08 thanks! o/ 18:54:47 #endmeeting