Hello,
Thanks everyone who joined us in the last meetup, in April.
Here are the meetup notes, sorry for taking a long time to send it to
the list.
We're still figuring out the next meetup date -- probably June 24 --
and we will announce officialy soon here in the list. :)
In the next weeks Tor staff will be at SIF[1] and Rightscon[2].
If you're joining these events, come to say hi!
cheers,
Gus
[1] https://stockholminternetforum.se/
[2] https://www.rightscon.org/
# Tor Relay Operator meetup - 2023-04-15 . 19.00 - 20 UTC
## Agenda
### Announcements
- Update on Censorship in Turkmenistan:
- obfs4 bridges on residential connections + obfs4 port 80, 443, 8080
- Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.04835
- TMC dashboard: https://tmc.np-tokumei.net/
- Article:
https://globalvoices.org/2023/04/12/new-study-finds-internet-censorship-in-turkmenistan-reaches-over-122000-domains/
- Tor relays running EOL
- Tor Weather - https://weather.torproject.org
- `HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable` womp womp.
- Right, I'll enable the service on Monday again and, hopefully, it
will stay available longer than the last time(s). Pretty bumpy launch :)
--GeKo
- Google Summer of Code
- We might have two network health related projects; the application
deadline is over and we are sorting through proposals. Those are for
the relay-to-relay connectitity checking tool and the network status API
projects on: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/team/-/wikis/GSoC. If we
are lucky, we get mentees for both of them, we'll see... --GeKo
- DoS update
"Load decreased by ~80% for our servers consistently. It's quite
manageable now. Servers are mostly idling now even without all the
attacks"
- Upcoming EFF university Tor relay advocacy campaign, still taking
shape but now with a more detailed roadmap:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/relays/-/issues/67
- The Tor network has a status page! https://status.torproject.org/ --
on this page we try to summarize critical issues about which pieces of
our infrastructure are having issues.
### (Discussion) Proposals towards a more trusted relay operator
community
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/relays/-/issues/55
- Timeline of this process
October 2022 - January 2024
- We called for proposals from the community (March 3 2023)
- Work on proposals (TPO) (like meta proposal about the process and
governance and different stake holders) (March/April)
- Proposal evaluation (May/July)
- Events and offline discussions with community (August/September)
- Approving proposals after feedback from the community and figuring
out the details of enforcement/adhering to them (September-December)
- Proposals go live (January 2024)
### Status update on the "Bumping the 4 relays per ip to 8 relays per
ip"?
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40744#note_2896285:
We want to do the analysis for the bump to 4 relays per IP which won't
happen in April anymore but I try to sneak this into my May ToDo list.
Afterwards we can consider bumping the limit further in case the
analysis looks fine as expected. --GeKo
^^ I made a change to moria1 so it publishes its
AuthDirMaxServersPerAddr value in its v3 vote:
https://consensus-health.torproject.org/#consensusparams so we can know
if the dir auths are even allowing the new 4 number yet. Alas, it
appears that I am still the only dir auth using this patch.
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40753 seems to think
it will be in an upcoming Tor version. --Roger
### Q
Q: Is there a way for me to tell if my bridge is reachable from
Turkmenistan?
A: Alas we don't have an automated vantage point inside .tm. But we can
pass your bridge address to users in-country and ask them to test your
bridge. Email gus@ if you want to learn the answer! Only residential
connections are working there, so 'cloud' (data center) obfs4 bridges
probably do not work.
Q: Is it still unwise to run both a snowflake and also an obfs4 bridge
at home?
A: Correct, you should run either one or the other. The reason is that
if one of them gets your IP address blocked by a censor somewhere, then
the other one will end up blocked too.
Q: What if my IP address changes every few hours?
A: It doesn't make sense to run an obfs4 bridge in this situation,
because clients will learn about your address too late to use it. *But*,
this is a perfect situation for running a Snowflake proxy!
Q: When will we start bumping out Tor relays running 0.4.5?
A: Starting beginning of May. And bridges we will treat differently,
because they are more scarce. We might make an exception for 0.4.5
bridges that are popular.
Update:
https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-relays-psa-tor-0-4-5-reaches-end-of-life-eol-on-2023-02-15/6338/9
Q: Re: the EFF University Relay campaign, University libraries will be
helpful here; did anything much result from the Library Freedom
Project's Tor Exit Relay Project?
