Roger Dingledine wrote:
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 hearour 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.
It's possible to split the difference a little bit. You've identified that it's difficult to bring people up to speed technically, and *also* hard to cover most of the ecosystem in a meaningful way. There are dozens of components and tor-related projects. While you and Jake both talkfast, there's only so much that you guys can cover in an hour.
I think it makes more sense to start from the beginning. Talk about the social problems that Tor tries to solve, and then talk about the technical ways that Tor actually solves them. Domestic Violence victims are easily tracked via email and other means, so using tor will help prevent that by giving them a different IP address and preventing niche attacks that are otherwise hard to mitigate. People with serious medical concerns use it to keep their private information private. Everything from pregnancy to rape to transgender status can cause someone's personal data to be more valuable to big corporations -- or put them at risk of death, depending on location. Someone wants to look up OSHA regulations anonymously and maybe file a complaint about their dangerous workplace -- Tor helps make sure they're really anonymous through the magic of onion routing. Anonymous bloggers and journalists need it for the same reason.
People frequently need to get through filters to be able to speak freely, and as surveillance and censorship technology improves (eg, DPI), then Tor conducts serious research to bypass those measures quickly (Meek, obfs4, FTE). There's an endless list of use cases and case studies that can be used as entry points into basic technical overview of core components. Projects like Orchid/Shadow/Cupcake are all great, but don't necessarily speak to what Tor actually strives for -- which is to give people tools so that they have the option to speak and learn freely.
With that approach, I feel like what is truly meaningful will get covered.
best, Griffin -- "I believe that usability is a security concern; systems that do not pay close attention to the human interaction factors involved risk failing to provide security by failing to attract users." ~Len Sassaman -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk