Archive - 2009

On November 20, we released an updated Tor Browser Bundle, version 1.2.10, which includes:

• updated Vidalia to 0.2.6
• updated Pidgin to 2.6.3
• updated Tor to 0.2.1.20
• updated Firefox to 3.0.15
• updated OpenSSL to 0.9.8l
• updated libevent to 1.4.13

You can download the updated version at https://www.torproject.org/torbrowser/

Thanks to Rob at Freedom House for putting together some videos about how to get, install, and use Tor, Tor Browser Bundle, and Bridges.

• Installing and Using Tor, http://tinyvid.tv/show/3lejztnthk2tm
• Installing and Using the Tor Browser Bundle, http://tinyvid.tv/show/b0e2hzylie8r
• Installing and Using Bridges with Tor, http://tinyvid.tv/show/3uiwckrlqynqv

Freedom House has put together other videos on various tools to use to stay secure online at, http://www.youtube.com/freedom4internet.

Check them out and leave constructive feedback. I'm sure Rob will appreciate help with translating these videos as well.

Tor 0.2.1.20 fixes a crash bug when you're accessing many hidden services
at once, prepares for more performance improvements, and fixes a bunch
of smaller bugs.

The Windows and OS X bundles also include a more recent Vidalia, and
switch from Privoxy to Polipo.

The OS X installers are now drag and drop. It's best to un-install
Tor/Vidalia and then install this new bundle, rather than upgrade. If
you want to upgrade, you'll need to update the paths for Tor and Polipo
in the Vidalia Settings window.

https://www.torproject.org/easy-download

Changes in version 0.2.1.20 - 2009-10-15
o Major bugfixes:

- Send circuit or stream sendme cells when our window has decreased
by 100 cells, not when it has decreased by 101 cells. Bug uncovered
by Karsten when testing the "reduce circuit window" performance
patch. Bugfix on the 54th commit on Tor -- from July 2002,
before the release of Tor 0.0.0. This is the new winner of the read more »

New releases, new hires, new funding
Christian Fromme joins Tor to work on development and maintenance of the growing number of tools we’ve created over the past year. Christian is a great python hacker with a strong security mindset. He’s going to enhance and maintain the tools such as tor weather, get-tor, bridge database, tor control, tor flow, check.torproject.org, etc. Christian has been a volunteer developer for the past year helping to enhance get-tor, tor weather, and generally helping out with our python coding needs.

On October 10, we released Tor version 0.2.2.4-alpha. The release notes can be read at https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-0224-alpha-released or below: read more »

Roger and I attended the 2009 Blogfest Asia, HK BloggerCon, Privacy and Security Workshop series in Hong Kong last week. It was great to meet, and train, bloggers from Malaysia, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Myanmar (Burma). Here's a fine set of pictures from the event, http://www.flickr.com/photos/ripmilla/sets/72157622633892281/. There was a video link between the blogfest and the 5th Chinese BloggerCon. Tor was a sponsor of the CNBloggercon event. read more »

On November 2, we released Vidalia 0.2.6. Primarily a bugfix release for OS X issues. The changed items are:

• Remove the erroneous comma in the default vidalia.conf in the
  Mac OS X drag-and-drop bundle, since we now dump whatever the
  user types into a QString rather than parsing it into a
  QStringList.
• Updated the Arabic, Russian and Slovenian translations.

Packages for OS X and Windows can be found at https://www.torproject.org/vidalia/.

Attending the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit feels like the perfect time to finally write the wrap up of this year's Google Summer of Code. So, what did we learn in our third year of participation?

We had 5 students funded by Google to work on Tor over this summer, plus 1 more for The Electronic Frontier Foundation. We had to pick these 6 out of 32 applications, which was a pretty hard process for us. In retrospect, there were at least 2 more students that we'd really have wanted to work on Tor but that we were not able to pick. Fortunately, they stuck with the project anyway, writing a neat relay monitor and helping reimplement Tor in Java for mobile devices. read more »

On October 14th we released Vidalia 0.2.5. Changes are:

• Add support in the Network settings page for configuring the
  Socks4Proxy and Socks5Proxy* options that were added in
  Tor 0.2.2.1-alpha. Patch from Christopher Davis.
• Add a "Automatically distribute my bridge address" checkbox (enabled
  by default) to the bridge relay settings options. (Ticket #524)
• Add ports 7000 and 7001 to the list of ports excluded by the IRC
  category in the exit policy configuration tab. (Ticket #517)
• Add a context menu for highlighted event items in the "Basic" message
  log view that allows the user to copy the selected item text to the
  clipboard.
• Maybe fix a time conversion bug that could result in Vidalia
  displaying the wrong uptime for a relay in the network map.
• Stop trying to enforce proper quoting and escaping of arguments to be
  given to the proxy executable (e.g., Polipo). Now the user is on their read more »