Team

About us

Welcome to the anti-censorship team page. The anti-censorship team is a group of people who make Tor reachable anywhere in the world. We analyze censorship attempts and develop technology to work around these censorship attempts. One of the reasons we are not listing the names of the team members here is because we want to keep the team open to everyone. You're on the team if you're participating in discussions and development.

Excited about joining the team? Here is more information on how to get started.

IRC/matrix meetings schedule

We use IRC for our weekly meetings and we meet on the OFTC network in the #tor-meeting channel, this channel is also accesible over the matrix channel at #tor-meeting:matrix.org. The meeting takes place each Thursday at 16:00 UTC and typically lasts for an hour. Sometimes, we have to cancel our meeting but we announce cancellations on our mailing list. Besides, our meeting pad always shows the date of the next meeting.

If you want to get involved in Tor's anti-censorship work, try to show up to the team meeting! To get an idea of what we discuss in our meetings, take a look at our meeting pad. In a nutshell, we use our weekly meetings to:

Make announcements to the team.
Discuss topics like our development roadmap, team processes, or code architecture.
Ask for help with whatever we're working on.
Coordinate code review.

People on the anti-censorship team use the pad to keep track of what they did the past week, what they plan to do next week, and what they need help with. If you missed a meeting, fret not! We post log files of our meetings on the tor-project mailing list, typically with the string "Anti-censorship meeting notes" in the email's subject line.

We use the string "anti-censorship-team" on IRC to reach all team members, e.g. "anti-censorship-team: take a look at bug #1234". Be sure to configure a highlight in your IRC client for this string.

IRC/matrix channel

For direct communication we use the #tor-anticensorship IRC channel in the OFTC network, also available in the matrix network as #tor-anticensorship:matrix.org. Is a good place to hang out or come with questions and comments.

Mailing list

For asynchronous communication, we use our anti-censorship-team mailing list. The list is publicly archived and available for anyone to sign up, so feel free to participate! Among other things, we use this mailing list to coordinate meetings, send announcements, and discuss all matters related to the anti-censorship team. Note that for development-related topics, we use the tor-dev mailing list.

Priorities

Priorities for 2024

Make Tor more accessible in China.
Make Tor more accessible in Iran.
Make Tor more accessible in Turkmeinstan.
Detect and investigate attempts to censor Tor.
Improve the design and reliability of our software.
Improve the performance of Snowflake so that Tor bootstraps reliably on a mobile phone in China.
Maintain probes in areas that are likely to censor Tor and collect pack captures and probe results for storage and analysis.
Diversify domain fronting options.
Discovering and reporting surprises/regressions in Arti's bridge and PT support.
Move to Manifest v3 for Snowflake/ extension.
Deprecate BridgeDB.
Support the Tor community team with anti-censorship issues

Priorities for previous years

Roadmap

Roadmaps for previous years

Active Projects and Contracts

Project 158: RDSys deployment and deprecation of BridgeDB

Projects that the team maintains

rdsys
Lox
Pluggable Transports
Snowflake
Snowflake Mobile
BridgeDB
Services for which we have survival guides

Becoming a volunteer

Thanks for volunteering with us! There are many things that we need your help with:

Do you think that Tor (or one of its pluggable transports) is blocked in your country or network? Let us know!
Do you know how to code? Come help us improve one of our software projects! See below for more details.
We maintain lots of documentation which regularly needs updates and new content.
Do you have a background in UX? We maintain user-facing software whose user experience matters to us.

The best way to get involved is to visit our weekly IRC meeting (see above). Tell us your background and interests and we will find a project for your to get started.

Other interesting communities

Other communities where there are conversations around anti-censorship and we keep connection with are: