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[tor-talk] Roger's status report, September/October 2013
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-from-abusing-the-tor-network
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-parameters
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-encryption
and Brian Fung:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/06/the-feds-pays-for-60-percent-of-tors-development-can-users-trust-it/
and Dan Goodin:
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/how-the-nsa-might-use-hotmail-or-yahoo-cookies-to-identify-tor-users/
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.
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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.
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I am going offline now for roughly the rest of October.
--Roger
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