Write and submit a defcon 2022 talk: censorship, russia, snowflake, bridge distribution, etc
We have two general directions we might take this talk submission:
My original idea had been to focus on network health and bad relays: in particular, what it means to be a good relay, patterns of bad relays, attacks we've seen in the past and how we handled them and what we need to change to handle them better -- generally, how that arms race can go, so we have clearer public discussion of the topics, and a video that can get everybody up to speed over the next few years.
Isa and the comms team are lobbying for a different topic though, which is a follow-up to the 2019 censorship talk, focusing on what's going on with Russia / Ukraine, the previous data points from Kazakhstan, the huge ramp-up in bridges and snowflakes and snowflake users, alternate bridge distribution approaches like via telegram, what is working well and what needs more work, and generally how the Tor geek audience can help.
I have to say that second one has some strong arguments in favor: the two biggest arguments are (a) it is a timely topic, i.e. now really is much better than later, and (b) I am already gathering a lot of this info, and organizing it into presentations, for the s28 talks, so pulling it together the rest of the way isn't so big a lift.
Cc'ing @gk and @meskio and @shelikhoo so they can know this is a topic (and that we are deciding between topics).