Blogs

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.

On September 21st, we released Tor version 0.2.2.2-alpha.

Major features: read more »

• Tor now tracks how long it takes to build client-side circuits
  over time, and adapts its timeout to local network performance.
  Since a circuit that takes a long time to build will also provide
  bad performance, we get significant latency improvements by
  discarding the slowest 20% of circuits. Specifically, Tor creates
  circuits more aggressively than usual until it has enough data
  points for a good timeout estimate. Implements proposal 151.
  We are especially looking for reports (good and bad) from users with
  both EDGE and broadband connections that can move from broadband
  to EDGE and find out if the build-time data in the .tor/state gets
  reset without loss of Tor usability. You should also see a notice
  log message telling you that Tor has reset its timeout.

I was invited to attend a seminar on "Seeding Tomorrow's Media: Strategies for More Effective Engagement and Investment". This invite came with an all expense paid trip to the Salzburg Global Trust in Salzburg, Austria. The group was an interesting mix of "new media" bloggers and activists and "old media" foundations and journalists. We decided "new media vs old media" is a false dichotomy; perhaps community vs. institutionalized media is a more apt description. read more »