[tor-talk] What should our 31c3 talk be?

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

The 31c3 talk proposals are due this coming Sunday:
http://events.ccc.de/2014/07/12/31c3-call-for-participation-en/

I wonder what would be the most useful topic for this year?

In brainstorming with folks on IRC, here are four options:

--------

1) An update on pluggable transports: obfs3, obfs4, FTE, librtc and
uproxy, and other acronyms you don't recognize. Many transports are now
integrated into the default Tor Browser, we're starting to get some more
useful usage statistics, and pluggable transports have played an important
role in various countries in recent years. Plus we're soon going to start
some projects on evaluation and comparison of transport designs, e.g.
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/SponsorS/PluggableTransports/Proposal

One of the most intriguing pieces of pluggable transports lately is
the convergence of "make it hard to DPI for the protocol so the censor
can't block it" with "make it hard to DPI for the protocol so the global
surveillance adversary doesn't know to add that flow to its database".
In particular, systems like Flashproxy might be especially effective
against the global surveillance adversary, since the many transient
addresses that separate the users from the known Tor relay addresses
make it harder to build a list of users that are worth watching.

2) News on the Tor Browser front: all about our deterministic builds, and
what they get us, and who else is jumping on the bandwagon. A discussion
of the upcoming secure update mechanism, and what security properties
it does/doesn't get us. Tradeoffs with blocking or not blocking ads,
or with enabling or disabling javascript.

3) Double down on the transparency push: walk through all the entries
in https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors and
explain what we're doing for each of them. I think it would be useful
for more of the Tor community to know more details here, but I'm not
sure how to do it in a way that doesn't just turn into a big laundry
list, like the 29c3 talk did:
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/Fahrplan/events/5306.en.html

4) Some sort of more generic Q&A where we raise a bunch of topics
to start, and then inefficiently take questions from the audience,
try to make sense of them, and then talk about whatever comes to mind
in response.

--------

Two lessons I've learned from recent CCC talks:

A) Social commentary works much better than technical things. That is,
the audience respects us for our technical work, and now they want to hear
our perspective on what's going on in the world. So while my instinct
is to use the talks to make the audience more technically competent and
thus more able to help us in this growing global conflict, the talks
that work best these days are more like social rallies.

B) It won't work to pick a more technical topic and ask for a smaller room
to focus on the people who most want to help. The room will still get
mobbed by thousands of people who are there 'for the show'. We learned
this lesson in 29c3. And to be fair, Tor is a major component in the
modern security and privacy conversation, so following what Tor has to
say, even if you're not planning to do anything to help, makes sense.

Is there a fifth topic I should be considering?

So far item 1, the pluggable transport one, seems most plausible to me.

--Roger

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