SnowflakeVolunteers

how do we get more people to participate in anti-censorship

• obfs4 bridge campaign
• how can we get more snowflakes?

what do p2p apps use for nat punching?

• georgetown race guy who sometimes lives in china should know

a few years ago there was a blog bridge campaign

todo: have a contact address in our setup guide for people to complain to

should reach out to pets and foci people and ask to set up default bridges

ask existing highly-used bridges to turn their bridges into default bridges

is it a problem to have default bridges run in the same AS?

• capacity vs safety -> atm we want capacity
• same applies to exits and bridges "myth" -> capacity is more important

what kind of usage info is exposed to people?

• approximate number of users per country

tor's throttling not accurate enough

• griffin's bridge reached cap 20 days into the month
• default bridge ops need guidance on that

orbot has different default bridges for countries

would pay off to not have same bridges in tor browser and orbot

• so they're not all blocked at the same time

what if harvard runs a bridge, given that china loves harvard?

• at what granularity would gfw block bridge?

snowflake status: having things run in a browser tab isn't relevant anymore

• you need an extension these days

once you're connected, snowflake should only say "connected"

• only mention numbers once you have > 0

how to get more snowflakes

• twitter
• blog post
• tp.o website frontpage
• talks
• once it gets more popular, people will do advertisement for us

roger's defcon talk is in early august

cupcake is 2-3k active users each day

• griffin could shove it into package
• there was only about one user at any time
• griffin gave a lot of talks on it (lightning talks etc., workshops, ...)
• cupcake hasn't even gotten press coverage

we shouldn't burn our chance to polish it before it gets super popular

• we should coordinate growth and attention
• more important is 1) making sure that it scales, 2) we know what's going on, and 3) the tool is fun to use -> the rest will follow

#1 reason for cupcake uninstalls: crazy bandwidth spikes

• rate limiting may also be important
• client and bridge could rate-limit, so the snowflake proxy doesn't have to

instead of "how many people have i helped" inform "how many people have all snowflakes" helped? you're part of the snowflake blizzard.

broker could inform snowflake proxies how often they should poll again

• that way we can keep the polling rate of all proxies constant

cohosh has script on chinese vps that periodically tries to connect to snowflakes

• proxy-go instances running on bridge were blocked for a while

does ooni test where webrtc is available?

• we don't think so
• would be difficult to ship webrtc with ooni
• ooni could however test stun servers (todo)
  • stun servers work over udp
  • tells you what your own external address is

snowflake is working on orbot as a client, so they can use it as a bridge

• part of that is also about being a snowflake
• they're ready to turn it on

orbot doesn't have moat, so they're in a bad situation when it comes to getting new bridges (copy&paste is also annoying)

• large binary is also a nuisance (our new pure-go implementation would help with that)

our new pure-go webrtc implementation also has a media channel

• pionwebrtc is actively maintained and maintainers are super excited to help us in case of blocking

todo: what diagrams/graphs/screenshots do we want roger to present?

• needs to be done by july 25