Blogs

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 »

As reported, Tor was partially blocked by China on September 25th or so in anticipation of the CCP October 1, 2009 60th anniversary.

Here's what one directory mirror recorded for September,

And here's the growth of bridge users in response. Alas, like our graphs of bridge use in Iran in June 2009, we only have relative counts for bridge use, not absolute counts. But with a 70x increase in a week, we are talking about 10000+ bridge users:

On October 11, we released Tor 0.2.2.5-alpha.

It can be downloaded from https://www.torproject.org/download/.

It contains:

Major bugfixes:

• Make the tarball compile again. Oops. Bugfix on 0.2.2.4-alpha.

New directory authorities:

• Move dizum to an alternate IP address.

Code simplifications and refactorings

• Numerous changes, bugfixes, and workarounds from Nathan Freitas
  to help Tor build correctly for Android phones.

On October 10, we released Tor version 0.2.2.4-alpha.

This release can be found at https://www.torproject.org/download/

It contains the following:
Major bugfixes:

• Fix several more asserts in the circuit_build_times code, for
  example one that causes Tor to fail to start once we have
  accumulated 5000 build times in the state file. Bugfixes on
  0.2.2.2-alpha; fixes bug 1108.

New directory authorities:

• Move moria1 and Tonga to alternate IP addresses.

Minor features: read more »

• Log SSL state transitions at debug level during handshake, and
  include SSL states in error messages. This may help debug future
  SSL handshake issues.
• Add a new "Handshake" log domain for activities that happen
  during the TLS handshake.
• Revert to the "June 3 2009" ip-to-country file. The September one
  

Some activists in China came up with this design for tor t-shirts. Comment if you think we should make and sell these for $20/ea.

If you have other ideas, feel free to link to an image of them!

Here's what the Tor Project accomplished in September 2009.

New Hires read more »

• Carolyn Anhalt is our new Translation and Community Manager. Carolyn has years of experience managing and growing content translation, as well as wrangling online communities and developing volunteer moderators and support roles from the community. She’s fluent or conversant in a number of languages, such as: Russian, French, English, German, Italian, and Welsh. Carolyn’s initial goals are to grow the translator community to keep everything Tor translated, work out better translation tools for translators, and to generally assist translators.
• Karen Reilly joins us as our Development Director. Karen has years of experience in growing both community-based and foundation-based funding, as well as helping to fulfill the mission of organizations through outreach and community-building. Karen’s initial goals are to further develop community funding, work with our current donors, help create an annual report, and expand Tor’s outreach efforts.

On September 23rd, we released Tor version 0.2.2.3-alpha.

Major bugfixes:

• Fix an overzealous assert in our new circuit build timeout code.
  Bugfix on 0.2.2.2-alpha; fixes bug 1103.

Minor bugfixes:

• If the networkstatus consensus tells us that we should use a
  negative circuit package window, ignore it. Otherwise we'll
  believe it and then trigger an assert. Bugfix on 0.2.2.2-alpha.