Tor's anti-censorship team writes monthly reports to keep the world updated on its progress. So far, we have been posting these team reports to the tor-project mailing list but starting this month, we are experimenting with turning team reports into blog posts as well. Our hope is that this makes it more convenient for the community to follow our work and comment on it. We work for you all, and to do our work well, we need to hear from you!
Without further ado, here's what the anti-censorship team accomplished in May 2020:
Snowflake
- Tor Browser 9.5a13, released on May 22, has a major usability improvement in Snowflake that makes it possible to migrate a connection to a new temporary proxy when the one you are using goes offline. This makes it more likely that a Snowflake connection will work in the first place, and lets Snowflake be used for a longer time. You can read more in ticket #34043.
- Started a Google Summer of Code project to implement an Android snowflake proxy app.
- Started implementing workarounds for NAT incompatibility between snowflake proxies and clients. (#34129)
- Implemented Android reproducible build of snowflake clients. (#28672)
- Fixed a bug that resulted in Chrome proxies hanging. (#31278)
GetTor
- Fixed a problem where GetTor got into an infinite email loop with other autoresponders. (#34286)
- Fixed some bugs in the GetTor twitter responder, bringing it closer to being fixed. (#27330)
BridgeDB
- Made steady progress on wolpertinger, which helps BridgeDB build a feedback loop with OONI (and potentially other censorship measurement platforms). OONI finished its part of the implementation, and can now request bridges from wolpertinger's API. Wolpertinger then fetches OONI's test results from its S3 bucket and writes them back to BridgeDB's SQLite database. (#32740)
- Summarised plans for BridgeDB's future on the anti-censorship-team mailing list.
- Wrote a blog post on our most recent BridgeDB 0.10.1 release.
- Finished monitoring tool that periodically sends email to BridgeDB's autoresponder to make sure that it's still working. (#12802)
- Removed chatspeak references across BridgeDB's UI. (#31528)
- Extended BridgeDB's minimalistic SQL table for blocked bridges. (#34154)
- Updated BridgeDB's user interface with the latest translations from Transifex. Thanks to everyone who helped translate BridgeDB to different languages!
- Fixed a bug that would break BridgeDB's email autoresponder after a while. (#33945)
Miscellaneous
- Set up a monit instance that now monitors our anti-censorship infrastructure. Outage alerts are sent to the anti-censorship-alerts mailing list.
- Updated our docker bridge setup guide after a user pointed out an issue.