meek seems blocked in China since 2016-10-19

[David Fifield]

https://bugs.torproject.org/20495

It looks like meek was blocked in China since about October 19, 2016.

I don't know any details yet. I didn't receive any report. I just
happened to check the graph.

[Ox Cart]

Thanks for the heads up. Lantern's domain fronting is still working via CloudFront.

Cheers,

Ox

PGP Key - https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get&search=o...@getlantern.org

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who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

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[David Fifield]

Some time has passed and this no longer looks like a block by China to
me. For one thing, there was a simultaneous drop in many countries, not
only China:

https://bugs.torproject.org/20495#comment:5

And on November 10, there was a simultaneous increase to previous
levels:

https://bugs.torproject.org/20495#comment:7

I still don't know what might have happened, but it doesn't seem like a
censorship block.

[Adam Fisk]

Interesting David thanks. Maybe server side or client side updates on
those dates? We seem to have seen more blocking since the Donald made
his big win, but nothing meek related in particular.

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[Nathan Freitas]

Could have been the tumultuous upgrade cycle we had for the last version of Orbot... We released an RC that was pretty broken, taking out a good chunk of our users for awhile starting around October 20th:

https://lists.mayfirst.org/pipermail/guardian-dev/2016-October/004938.html

and finally stabilizing around Nov 7th:

https://lists.mayfirst.org/pipermail/guardian-dev/2016-November/004986.html

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[Adam Fisk]

That sounds fairly likely based on those dates, Nathan. Any idea what
percentage of overall Meek traffic is Orbot? You guys turn it on by
default, which is unique amongst all Tor deployments, is that right?

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[Nathan Freitas]

It is not on by default, but we do make it easily accessible.

[David Fifield]

On Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 11:23:38PM -0500, Nathan Freitas wrote:
> Could have been the tumultuous upgrade cycle we had for the last version of
> Orbot... We released an RC that was pretty broken, taking out a good chunk of
> our users for awhile starting around October 20th:
>
> https://lists.mayfirst.org/pipermail/guardian-dev/2016-October/004938.html
>
> and finally stabilizing around Nov 7th:
>
> https://lists.mayfirst.org/pipermail/guardian-dev/2016-November/004986.html

Thanks, that's a good idea. If the hypothesis is correct, it means that
Orbot users account for the bulk of meek users in several countries.

FYI, I'm starting to keep track of potential explanations of
metrics-related events at this wiki page:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/MetricsTimeline