Prepare for s28 PI and ECP presentations: Oct 31 and Nov 1-2 2022

In the tradition of #62 (closed), we have another PI meeting coming up at the beginning of November, where we will want to present the current state of Tor anti-censorship, the situation with deployment and usage of our pluggable transports (obfs4 and snowflake in particular), what we're up to next, etc.

The text from the previous ticket is still a good summary of info I'll be trying to collect and present:

• (0) Did we make any changes to the Snowflake architecture as deployed on Race? Did we find and/or fix any especially interesting Snowflake-on-Race issues? It's fine if the answer here is "no, we did all the hard work last year, this time it was clear sailing".

• (1) Our deployed transports (Snowflake, obfs4, and meek/moat):

  • user-evident dev progress (security and obfuscation fixes, new features, performance changes)
  • adoption (trends in growth of users or capacity or load; or different countries joining the story)

• (2) Task Area One (censorship analysis) progress. Who is censoring components of the Tor ecosystem, how, when, where, for how long?

• (3) Task Area Two (reputation-based bridge distribution strategies) progress.

• (4) Progress on our anti-censorship roadmap tasks. We don't need to make progress on every one of them, but we should have something impressive on some of them. Here are some highlights from the Q1 roadmap where progress would count as interesting:

  • Snowflake performance (especially in Asia)
  • Conjure and httpt
  • Scale Tor reachability through mobile Snowflakes
  • React and steer our response to censorship
  • Monitor bridge health
  • Improved UX for users getting bridges in practice (e.g. "Make it easier for humans & harder for censors to get bridges from moat distributor.", "Improve automatic censorship detection during bootstrapping in Tor Browser (desktop and Android)")

• (5) Collaborations or interactions with external anti-censorship research groups or NGOs that caused (or that we think will cause) the world to become a better place wrt censorship. This one is broad, and we've been too busy and too small to interact much lately, but I have it on the list here in case we notice something, and because hopefully in future iterations we'll start having some answers.