[tor-talk] Roger's status report, September/October 2013

----- Forwarded message from Roger Dingledine ----- Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2013 02:47:15 -0400 From: Roger Dingledine To: tor-talk@lists.torproject.org Cc: tor-reports@lists.torproject.org Subject: [tor-talk] Roger's status report, September/October 2013 Message-ID: <20131017064715.GD31806@moria.seul.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14) Reply-To: tor-talk@lists.torproject.org Six things I did in September/October 2013: 1) Released Tor 0.2.4.17-rc: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2013-September/029857.html including writing the fix to prioritize NTor handshakes so Tor 0.2.4.x remains usable despite the five million new bot users: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9574 Released Tor 0.2.5.1-alpha: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2013-October/030269.html 2) Wrote many blog posts: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/how-to-handle-millions-new-tor-clients with a follow-up summary at http://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/115/how-to-prevent-the-mevade-botnet-... https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-nsa-gchq-and-quick-ant-speculation https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-and-silk-road-takedown https://blog.torproject.org/blog/yes-we-know-about-guardian-article https://blog.torproject.org/blog/lifecycle-of-a-new-relay https://blog.torproject.org/blog/improving-tors-anonymity-changing-guard-par... and also answered hundreds of blog comments / questions. 3) Talked to many many journalists to explain Tor and the Internet. My most useful quotes went to Bruce Schneier: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/nsa-gchq-attack-tor-network-enc... and Brian Fung: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/06/the-feds-pays-f... and Dan Goodin: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/how-the-nsa-might-use-hotmail-or-yah... 4) Helped the Tor Stack Exchange beta get off the ground: http://tor.stackexchange.com/ I zipped up to 1000+ reputation from answering questions in the first few days, but then I disappeared because I was distracted by other work. Hopefully other people have filled in the gap. 5) Helped sort out the 2013 Q4 budget, and also get the new SponsorO projects off the ground: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Otter 6) Attended the SponsorF "red team assessment" where they funded some smart DPI developers to evaluate and try to break Obfsproxy and Flash Proxy. So far so good -- one of the outcomes is that we should set up a performance testbed for Flash Proxy to see if we can replicate their "sometimes when I upload a bunch of stuff it takes a long time" behavior. I plan to talk to Arlo, once I'm back online, about doing that. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Seven smaller things I did in September/October 2013: 7) Did a talk at PLUG: http://www.phillylinux.org/meetings.html 8) Sorted out a potential anonymity issue that is a great use case for the TorPS path calculator: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-September/005475.html https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9777 but then haven't followed up yet. 9) Helped a bit with the EPIC BBG FOIA press fuss, which ended with: http://epic.org/2013/09/epic-foia-request-reveals-no-e.html Now ya'll can read the analysis I wrote for BBG of why no single organization should run too many Tor relays: http://epic.org/foia/Tor_Docs.pdf 10) Submitted a 30c3 talk with Jake. Hopefully we'll do a big-room talk where we can lay out all the Tor myths and confusions of 2013. 11) Refused my invite to the IEEE Security & Privacy (Oakland) 2004 Program Committee because of IEEE's anti-science publishing policy: http://www.researchwithoutwalls.org/ 12) Posted a list of "Criteria for prioritizing pluggable transport work": https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-September/005528.html 13) Helped Arlo move forward with his https://check2.torproject.org/ alternative Tor Check implementation. I sure am looking forward to the time when he thinks it's ready to go live. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am going offline now for roughly the rest of October. --Roger -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk@lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5