[tor-talk] Roger's status report, Dec 2012

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

Six things I did in December 2012:

1) Attended the SponsorF PI meeting and demo. I did another 90 minute
talk for the research groups there, this time about the state of anonymity
research and traffic analysis attacks:
http://freehaven.net/~arma/slides-pi-dec12.pdf
We also did a joint demo with several other research groups funded in
the same program. It went surprisingly smoothly.

2) Met with the Georgetown and NRL research teams about evaluating
Tor performance. Their next plan is to run their own Tor network in a
testbed, and log lots of things to get a handle on what performance data
is most useful to collect. Then we can work on privacy-preserving ways
of collecting exactly that data on the public Tor network, to learn how
the testbed compares to reality and to start identifying performance
bottlenecks in the deployed network.

3) Met with BBG to give them a status update on our task list, and on our
plans for funding exit relays. They are happy with our progress so far.

4) Met with Karsten to explain and elaborate on SponsorF Year3 Phase1
items:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/SponsorF/Year3
He's taking his notes and following up with each developer individually
to make sure all sides are communicating about what they expect.

5) Attended 29c3 in Hamburg, and did another joint talk with Jacob:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/trip-report-29c3

6) Released Tor 0.2.4.7-alpha:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2012-December/026933.html

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Six smaller-but-still-useful things I did too:

7) Attended the Access Innovation Award ceremony, where Tor projects
were named as two of the five winners (and three of the finalists):
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-projects-win-two-access-innovation-awards

8) Wrote grad school recommendation letters for David and Sathya. Turning
Tor developers into Tor researchers is a great next step in growing
our empire!

9) Wrote a review for a traffic analysis submission to NSDI. I hope the
authors fix it up and resubmit it somewhere -- it showed a lot of promise.

10) Refused a journal review for the IEEE Transactions on Information
Forensics & Security, since they're not open-access. I forwarded my mail
to an IEEE publisher representative to make sure they knew my reason
for refusing; she had the audacity to reply that actually they *are*
open-access, since they have an option where they let an author pay
them three thousand dollars per article to not lock the pdf behind their
paywall. That's exactly the dead-end strategy the for-profit publishing
corporations are taking. Shame on IEEE for claiming to have my field's
best interests in mind.

11) Helped Jed Crandall and Joss Wright get oriented for next year's
FOCI workshop (colocated with Usenix Security in DC in August -- see
https://www.usenix.org/conference/foci12/call-for-papers for last
year's). It looks like they'll have a great group on their program
committee.

12) Revised https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-relay-debian to be the
most likely useful instructions page for every Linux/Unix relay operator.

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Five of my January 2013 plans:

1) Have a short vacation in Amsterdam post-29c3.

2) January seems to be my month of law enforcement trainings: I have
a meeting with the DEA to teach them about Tor and answer questions;
then two days of meetings with Dutch law enforcement; a meeting with the
Belgian "cybercrime" division; and Jacob and I are doing the keynote at
a Dutch government security conference:
https://www.ncsc.nl/english/conference/conference-2013/programme
(remember Diginotar, anybody?)

3) Attend the OONI hackfest: we're bringing together Tor developers,
Georgia Tech researchers, and M-Lab representatives so we can improve
cross-collaboration.

4) Meet with Karsten about the second half of the SponsorF Year3 items.

5) Help review our annual report, help figure out our 2013 budget,
and otherwise do useful board member things.

--Roger

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