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[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2026-04-02

Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:
https://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2026/tor-meeting.2026-04-02-16.00.html

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship work meeting pad
--------------------------------
Anti-censorship
--------------------------------

Next meeting: Thursday, Apr 09 16:00 UTC
Facilitator: shelikhoo

^^^(See Facilitator Queue at tail)

Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC
(channel is logged while meetings are in progress)

This week's Facilitator:onyinyang
== Goal of this meeting ==

Weekly check-in about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor.
Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at the Tor Project and Tor community. 


== Links to Useful documents ==
    * Our anti-censorship roadmap:
        * Roadmap:https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/boards 
    * The anti-censorship team's wiki page:
        * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/home 
    * Past meeting notes can be found at:
        * https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/
    * Tickets that need reviews: from projects, we are working on:
        * All needs review tickets:
            * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/merge_requests?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=opened&assignee_id=None 


== Announcements ==
    *

== Discussion ==

    * Discuss snowflake proxy mobile application
        * https://github.com/blocoio/snowflake
        * A standalone dedicated app (Android), not bundled with Orbot
        * Planning to release on F-Droid and Google Play as "Snowflake Volunteers" 
        * Implementation language is Kotlin
        * Important priority: keep up with changes in proxy messages and other proxy implementations             * The app uses IPtProxy, so it should inherit updates from there         * App reports its proxy type as "bloco", we need to add that to the list of known proxy types (in the broker?) to have it included in stats as other than "unknown"             * Shell suggests a type name prefixing scheme, whereby implementations could be something like "webext-suffix" and be sorted into the "webext" bucket by default, with the option of separating them out in analysis 
        * Need to ensure no telemetry or logging of user IP addresses
            * Privacy policy: https://bloco-privacy-policy.web.app/snowflake.html 

== Actions ==

    *

== Interesting links ==
    * https://www.techpolicy.press/what-digital-isolation-and-censorship-evasion-look-like-in-wartime-iran/ 
        * via https://mastodon.social/@torproject/116330694532247442

== Reading group ==

    * We will discuss "" on
        *
        * Questions to ask and goals to have:
            * What aspects of the paper are questionable?
            * Are there immediate actions we can take based on this work?
            * Are there long-term actions we can take based on this work?
                *
            * Is there future work that we want to call out in hopes that others will pick it up? 
    * Next in the Reading Group Queue:
        *

== Updates ==
Name:
        This week:
            - What you worked on this week.
        Next week:
            - What you are planning to work on next week.
        Help with:
            - Something you need help with.

cecylia (cohosh): 2026-04-02
    Last week:
        - wrote up plan for dynamic poll rate adjustment
            - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/25598#note_3382867 
        - worked with UCSC researchers on enumeration simulations
        - got go1.22 support for macos only merged in tor-browser-build
    Next week:
        - follow up about running shadow simulations for snowflake performance 
        - research snowflake enumeration attacks (snowflake#40396)
        - implement proxy fairness proposal
        - follow up on snowflake rendezvous failures (snowflake#40447)
        - revisit conjure integration with lyrebird
        - take a look at potential snowflake orbot bug
            - https://github.com/guardianproject/orbot-android/issues/1183


dcf: 2026-04-02
    Last week:
        - commented on a "birthday" NAT traversal idea https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40077#note_3382640 
    Next week:
        - comment on dynamic poll rate adjustment https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/25598#note_3382867         - open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors is nonzero https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40262#note_2886018             - parent: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40267 
Help with:

meskio: 2026-03-26
    Last week:
        - AFK
        - grant work
    Next week:
        - assignments log clean up in rdsys side


Shelikhoo: 2026-04-02
    Last Week:
         - [Testing] Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (cont.)( https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/315 ) testing environment setup/research 
            - Merge request Reviews
            - [Research] proxy pool overload and potential blocking in Iran ( https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40077#note_3361718 )             - [Research] Add three NAT type buckets to the snowflake broker ( https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40077#note_3361718 )             - [MR] Done: Update webtunnel version to 0.0.4 and update bundled dockerfile dependencies ( https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/webtunnel/-/merge_requests/41 ) 
    Next (working) Week/TODO:
        - Merge request reviews
        - [Deployment]Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (cont.)( https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/315 ) Building custom Tor Browser with patch applied 
        - Vantage point maintaince
            - [Research] proxy pool overload and potential blocking in Iran ( https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40077#note_3361718 )             - [Research] Add three NAT type buckets to the snowflake broker ( https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40077#note_3361718 ) 


onyinyang: 2026-04-02
    Last week(s):
            - Finished reworking lox-extension MR and integration with Tor
            - Started background work for project #170
    Next week:
           - Start on tasks for project #170

   Switch back to some of these:
       As time allows:
          - Continue work on rdsys#196
                - Continue Investigating rdsys#248 i.e., why dysfunctional webtunnel bridges are being distributed 
                - Troubleshooting conjure not connecting in China
                        - waiting for more information from conjure authors/maintainers                 - Lox still seems to be filling up the disk on the rdsys-test server despite changes made to delete old entries, look into what's going wrong                Blog post for conjure: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/conjure/-/issues/46               - review Tor browser Lox integration https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests/1300 
              - add TTL cache to lox MR for duplicate responses:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/merge_requests/305

            - Work on outstanding milestone issues:
                - key rotation automation

        Later:
        pending decision on abandoning lox wasm in favour of some kind of FFI? https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/43096): 
            - add pref to handle timing for pubkey checks in Tor browser
            - add trusted invitation logic to tor browser integration:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42974
        - improve metrics collection/think about how to show Lox is working/valuable 
        - sketch out Lox blog post/usage notes for forum

    (long term things were discussed at the meeting!):
        - brainstorming grouping strategies for Lox buckets (of bridges) and gathering context on how types of bridges are distributed/use in practice             Question: What makes a bridge usable for a given user, and how can we encode that to best ensure we're getting the most appropriate resources to people?                 1. Are there some obvious grouping strategies that we can already consider?                     e.g., by PT, by bandwidth (lower bandwidth bridges sacrificed to open-invitation buckets?), by locale (to be matched with a requesting user's geoip or something?)                 2. Does it make sense to group 3 bridges/bucket, so trusted users have access to 3 bridges (and untrusted users have access to 1)? More? Less? 

theodorsm: 2026-02-19
        Last weeks:
            - Bumping pion stack version with backport: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/662O 
            - Implementing DTLS 1.3 in pion
        Next weeks:
            - Implementing DTLS 1.3 in pion
        Help with:
            -



Facilitator Queue:
    cohosh onyinyang shelikhoo meskio
1. First available staff in the Facilitator Queue will be the facilitator for the meeting 2. After facilitating the meeting, the facilitator will be moved to the tail of the queue 

--
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onyinyang

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