15:59:41 #startmeeting tor anti-censorship meeting 15:59:41 Meeting started Thu Nov 4 15:59:41 2021 UTC. The chair is cohosh. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot. 15:59:41 Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic. 15:59:50 hi and welcome! 15:59:54 Hi~ 16:00:03 here is our meeting pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-keep 16:00:15 hi 16:00:26 feel free to add items to the agenda and update what you're working on :) 16:00:29 hello 16:00:39 agix: woah nice to see you (and without the 10 min delay)! 16:01:02 yeah I am glad to be back without the delays ^^ missed you guys 16:01:09 :D 16:01:27 agix: did I see you are thinking on taking the gettor twitter ticket? 16:01:35 also welcome to shelikhoo \o/ 16:01:50 meskio yeah I was about to ask if that's okay for you 16:01:57 yeah, wellcome shelikhoo 16:02:05 welcome shelikhoo :) 16:02:13 Yeah! I am honored to work in the team! 16:02:17 agix: is great, I was dreaming on doing it but have too much stuff in my plate, please do 16:02:26 I leave some comments in the ticket with some ideas 16:02:38 meskio cool thanks a lot :) 16:03:04 feel free to ask if you need help to navigate how code is organized in rdsys (or other things) 16:03:37 meskio I will 16:03:39 shelikhoo: do you want to introduce yourself? 16:03:45 no pressure ofc 16:04:39 Hi, I am Shelikhoo. 16:05:00 shelikhoo has been here before, http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2020/tor-meeting.2020-06-11-15.59.log.html 16:05:14 I am the lead developer of V2Ray/V2Fly. 16:06:02 (hi) 16:07:26 And now I am really glad to join Tor to build tools aimed at resisting censorship. 16:07:42 \o/ 16:07:46 https://github.com/xiaokangwang 16:08:14 The project I am currently test in my free time is: https://github.com/xiaokangwang/VLite 16:09:28 Let me know if you get a bad connection but still wants to play games/online meeting with UDP P2P connections! 16:09:37 EOF/Over! 16:09:44 * cohosh bookmarks vlite to check out later :D 16:10:09 looks cool 16:10:36 I am currently trying to integrate it into V2Fly/ 16:11:16 the first item on our agenda is a followup from last week 16:11:16 EOF/Over 16:11:39 we were having issues with snowflake proxies not knowing their NAT type 16:11:57 it looks like restarting our NAT check service resolved that at least temporarily 16:12:21 but the count of proxies will unrestricted (meaning full cone, or restricted cone NATs) were still low 16:12:42 i think it's recovering now finally 16:13:04 but we had to disable some our new alerts because the email flood was too much 16:14:18 did you mention that the problem is related to the standalone proxy not rechecking ever the NAT type? 16:14:45 should we prioritize fixing that? hopefully is not hard to change 16:15:14 yeah i opened snowflake#40075 for that 16:16:05 it's probably worth addressing since our NAT check service is likely to be flakey again 16:17:35 i bumped up the priority of the ticket in gitlab 16:18:14 that's all i have for this item, should we move on to the next thing? 16:18:25 +1 16:18:33 +1 16:18:58 cool, whoever posted it can take the metaphorical mic :) 16:19:56 Confused about the meek client metrics in Turkmenistan -- https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-combined.png?start=2021-08-02&end=2021-11-04&country=tm 16:20:39 How come and there are so many meek clients in Turkmenistan? 16:20:54 Here is a graph with some more context 16:20:56 https://people.torproject.org/~dcf/metrics-country.html?start=2021-08-01&end=2021-11-05&country=tm 16:21:00 does it look like related to snowflake going down? 16:21:13 however zoom out a bit to get even *more* context (esp. wrt relay users) 16:21:15 https://people.torproject.org/~dcf/metrics-country.html?start=2021-07-01&end=2021-11-05&country=tm 16:21:23 related info on tor blocking in TM: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40030 16:22:10 to me it looks like OR and meek were rising simultaneously, then snowflake and OR got blocked. 16:22:33 wow 16:22:49 blocked? or our failure with probetest? 16:23:45 but snowflake users globally did not go to zero in the same way https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-transport.html?start=2021-08-06&end=2021-11-04&transport=snowflake 16:24:05 On 2021-10-31 the amount of meek clients count were almost spike to 1,5 times than before. 16:24:05 I see what you mean :( 16:24:09 yeah this looks suspiciously close to zero 16:24:37 Do we have any information about whether the signaling service is still reachable in Turkmenistan? 16:25:21 we don't collect client country count metrics at the snowflake broker 16:25:37 so we don't have info on where/how it's getting blocked just from usage metrics 16:26:27 (also I thought meek was deprecated?) 16:26:50 the best we could do with our current tools is probably ask gus if some user contacts there can send us snowflake logs 16:26:54 maybe ggus has contacts there that can share snowflake logs to see what is happening 16:27:13 ups, we say the same :) 16:27:29 anadahz: meek is still operational but we were planning to shift over to snowflake and eventually deprecate it 16:28:05 i suppose this could be a reason not to remove it from tor browser immediately 16:28:07 cohosh, meskio What kind of snowflake logs do you need? 16:28:16 as long as TPO is still okay with the bill 16:28:20 does meek and snowflake use the same domain for domain fronting? just to narrow down that is not TM blocking the domain 16:28:46 anadahz: we'd need the lcient to configure the torrc file to specify a snowflake log 16:28:50 Is there a link/doc/how-to to get the "require"d snowflake logs? 16:28:51 this is distinct from the tor log 16:29:39 hmm our doc on this isnt' great 16:29:41 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/tree/main/client 16:29:52 it's a command line option on ClientTransportPlugin line 16:30:15 what is the status of snowflake ooni? 16:30:34 meskio: afaik not done yet 16:30:40 pity 16:30:53 https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+snowflake 16:30:54 Changing the torrc file to specify is very fragile (for instance with PATHs per OS) and it requires a fair amount of technical background. :/ 16:31:00 these are the open ooni issues ** 16:31:06 *^^ 16:31:17 anadahz: yeah it's not great 16:31:39 Editing the torrc at least doesn't need to specify the path, you can use -log-to-state-dir. But you have to know what path to find the log file in. 16:31:55 we have this work that we've roadmapped next to send snowflake connection info to the tor log: snowflake#40062 16:32:13 Also, OONI's backend collector seems to be blocked currently in TM. 16:32:23 ah :/ 16:32:39 anadahz: what made you look at Turkmenistan and meek specifically? Weird occurrences like this happen often, in many places. 16:33:50 Also the psiphon proxy seems to be also blocked in TM. 16:34:14 Maybe there should be a way to generate a full bug report from Tor Browser in GUI. I believe there is a copy log button when connection failed. 16:35:11 dcf1: Lots of services/websites being blocked there for long time.. I stumbled upon the meek metrics in TM, that was mentioned in #ooni-entropy channel. 16:35:11 shelikhoo: the Tor Browser button only copies the tor log; the snowflake-client log is separate. That is what snowflake#40062 is about, to have snowflake-client send information to the tor log, where it will be accessible using that button. 16:36:50 thanks for bringing this up anadahz 16:37:00 I say let's ask ggus, see if he can find contacts there to run it, and if needed maybe we can prepare a simple probe, it doesn't need to connect to tor, just to see if it connects to a proxy might be good 16:37:30 yea sounds good 16:38:15 dcf1: Yes, I will look at this issue. 16:39:16 So just to recap the steps needed to get some logs: 1. Get Tor Browser, 2. Adjust to collect snowflake logs, 3. Re run Tor Browsers, 4. Get snowflake logs from the specified PATH 16:39:28 Do I miss anything here^ ? 16:40:21 yea that look right, the adjustment will require manually editing the torrc file that ships with tor browser 16:40:34 it might be easier to do it on the command line if you can find a user that can do that 16:41:04 here are brief instructions for editing torrc to add snowflake logging (written for an unrelated purpose) https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/35#issue-626875810 16:42:28 dcf1: thx! 16:43:30 anything else for today? 16:44:29 just a reminder: next week we have reading group: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3473604.3474560 16:44:42 :D 16:45:10 I'll miss next week's meeting. But I'll read the reading. 16:45:50 another closing note: it's time for our montly report 16:45:57 which has turned into a bi-monthly report lately 16:46:22 if you can please fill it out with things you've worked on during september and october: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-monthly-report-keep 16:46:57 i'll end the meeting here, thanks everyone! 16:47:00 #endmeeting