previous priorities

The following were our goals 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

The following were our goals for 2023:

• make Tor accessible in China
• make Tor accessible in Iran
• detect and categorize attempts to censor Tor
• improve the design and reliability of our software
• release our data and software for use by the broader anti-censorship community
• improve the performance of Snowflake so that Tor bootstraps reliably on a mobile phone in China
• deploy TapDance and Conjure as high collateral damage PT
• commit to a design for a reputation-based bridge distribution system
• deploy probes in areas that are likely to censor Tor and collect pack captures and probe results for storage and analysis
• provide OONI with suggestions for improving the accuracy of OONI's Tor tests
• summarize the details of Tor blocking events with data from our probes and volunteers
• sanitize, publish and archive the results of our Tor reachability probes
• complete our documentation for each of our tools so that other organizations can run their own anti-censorship infrastructure
• Meek deprecation.
• Think of priorities for the team so we can write the next proposal to get a sponsor.
• Discovering and reporting surprises/regressions in Arti's bridge and PT support.
• Time to fork obfs4proxy and maintain it ourselves.
• bridge operator usability (obfs4proxy, snowflake, etc): deb packages in the right place, C-Tor patches to include pluggable transport version, etc.

Nice to have:

• Q2: Content for the developer portal.
• Capturing what we did in 2022 toward our priorities, for our future, and for visibility from other teams? Info is in SOTO 2022, anti-censorship team meeting pads, GitLab issues, and sponsor reports.
• Onbasca work to test bridges and bridge performance tpo/network-health/onbasca#130 (closed)
• The "meta signaling channel app" idea ( #111)
• Are there external groups that are doing things we want to use, re-use, rely on, advertise, etc? Like, Geneva and its censorship assessment tools. Two-six and their apps?
• How to structure our future work so that our progress is more evident to our community, in a way that doesn't involve extra bureaucracy/work for us? E.g. other open-source tools use milestones in their issue tracker in a way that organizes tickets by topics, and we don't do that, but we could!

The following were our goals for 2022:

• make Tor accessible in China
• detect and categorize attempts to censor Tor
• improve the design and reliability of our software
• release our data and software for use by the broader anti-censorship community
• improve the performance of Snowflake so that Tor bootstraps reliably on a mobile phone in China <-- work mostly done by dcf
• deploy TapDance and Conjure as high collateral damage PT
• commit to a design for a reputation-based bridge distribution system
• streamline our private bridge setup and distribution process <-- mostly handled by community team, check with ggus how they are handling it [see tpo/community/support#28526 (closed) for original motivation]
• deploy probes in areas that are likely to censor Tor and collect packet captures and probe results for storage and analysis
• provide OONI with suggestions for improving the accuracy of OONI's Tor tests
• summarize the details of Tor blocking events with data from our probes and volunteers
• add more user metrics based monitoring and alert rules using prometheus
• deploy rdsys as the new backend of bridgedb
• ensure that key infrastructure can survive machine outages and restarts
• remove hacky shims necessary for moat (decided to keep them, but did work on it)
• future improve the snowflake library api to allow easy integration of snowflake with other tools
• sanitize, publish and archive the results of our Tor reachability probes
• complete our documentation for each of our tools so that other organizations can run their own anti-censorship infrastructure

The following were our goals for 2021:

• Improve reputation based bridge distribution (e.g. Salmon)
• Better bridge distribution strategies (e.g. Conjure, Salmon)
  1. conjure first priority <---
  2. salmon second priority Task 4.1 Let's build a plan for how we're going to start the Salmon research work (Task 4).
• Make GetTor more reliable and reduce maintenance burden <--- Rewrite gettor in Go to include it in rdsys <-- Evaluate if it makes sense to integrate The hard part of keeping gettor working in the past has been keeping all the files we distribute up-to-date. So let's not forget that part. :)
• Complete integration of bridgedb into the more general rdsys <--- Integrating, not replacing bridgedb.
• Improve the performance of Snowflake for users in Asia The destination we want is that users use multiple Snowflakes and it helps
• Snowflake network health -- have enough of the right snowflakes, have volunteers happy Provide more feedback to users that run Snowflake proxies
• Tor reachability from various countries Task 1.1 Automated scans to create a reachability dataset Task 1.1 Baselines before the blocking event -- get people used to running the tools and sending us the outputs. Maybe work with UX team to streamline this process, identify usability gaps in the tools.

The following were our goals for 2020:

• We want to have more comprehensive BridgeDB metrics.
• We will improve BridgeDB's broken CAPTCHA system.
• We will monitor all critical components of the team's infrastructure.
• Re-engineer GetTor to use multiple distributors (in addition to email)
• We want to have accurate and safely-collected statistics of GetTor use.
• Snowflake should allow clients to start browsing quickly and with reasonable bandwidth
• We have happy Snowflake proxy volunteers that remain active.
• We have a good understanding of censorship events and performance of snowflake in different countries.
• Build feedback loop between BridgeDB and OONI.
• Experiment with a modular BridgeDB architecture.