Blogs

I have noticed that a lot of new exit nodes have recently appeared on the network. This is great news, since exit nodes are typically on the scarce side. Exits usually occupy 30-33% of network by capacity, but are currently at a whopping 38.5% (156 MBytes/sec out of 404 total).

However, I want to make sure that these nodes stay up and don't end up being shut down due to easily preventable abuse complaints. I've run a number of exit nodes on a few different ISPs and not only have I lived to tell about it, I've have not had one shut down yet. Moreover, I've only received about 4 abuse complaints in as many years of running exit nodes. This is in stark contrast to other node operators following a more reactive strategy. I'm convinced this is largely because I observe the following pro-active guidelines. read more »

Like Karsten, I too am presenting at HotPETS in Seattle in August. My presentation will cover my work with my TorFlow suite - a python library and utility set to assist measuring and adjusting performance on the Tor network, and to scan the network for malfunctioning and misbehaving exits. read more »

I've been fielding some calls from the press about Tor and Iran. Someone quoted me as saying "double the clients from Iran over the past few days". We wondered, what are the real numbers? What does our network see from Iran? Is port 443 or https:// really blocked? Here's what we've discovered in the past day of working with the new metrics we've developed to be safe to collect without compromising anyone's anonymity. read more »

In continuing to improve TBB for a vast array of users, here's the release candidate for Tor Browser Bundle 1.2.1.

I appreciate your feedback, comments, and bugs filed so far about TBB 1.2.1-dev.

You can find here the updated TBB 1.2.1-1-dev, sig, and sha1 files.

The changes since the last test are:

• Update Pidgin to 2.5.6r2
• Update Firefox to 3.0.11
• Include OpenSSL 0.9.8k DLL and stop using the system ssl dll

On this year's HotPETs workshop (August 5-7 in Seattle, WA, USA) I'm going to present some results on Measuring the Tor Network from Public Directory Information. The main idea is to observe trends in the Tor network without having to measure any data other than public directory information. These data are there anyway as they are required for clients to make good path selection decisions and build circuits. The results of this paper reveal problems in the current Tor network that need to be addressed, e.g., by lowering requirements for assigning certain flags, facilitating the upgrade process, improving support for dynamic IP addresses, possibly calculating bandwidth capacity more reliably, and clarifying legal issues for running relays in view of data retention laws. The next step in understanding the problems of the Tor network requires an extension of network measurements to improve performance and blocking-resistance of Tor.

New releases
On May 25, we released Tor 0.2.1.15-rc.
On May 17, we released Tor VM 0.0.2.
On May 25, we released Vidalia 0.1.13 containing read more »

• Remove an old warning on the relay settings page that running a bridge
  relay requires Tor 0.2.0.8-alpha or newer.
• Add a workaround for a bug that prevented Vidalia's tray icon from
  getting added to the system notification area on Gnome when Vidalia was
  run on system startup. Patch by Steve Tyree. (Ticket #247)
• Fix a bug that prevented the control panel from displaying when
  running on the Enlightenment window manager. Patch by Steve Tyree.
• Rename the CMake variables used to store the location of Qt's lupdate
  and lrelease executables. Recent versions of CMake decided to use the
  same variable name, which was stomping on mine, resulting in the wrong
  lupdate and lrelease executables being used.

A company in China has produced its own distribution of linux, called Red Flag Linux. Various reports are that Internet cafes are being forced to install it. We have no confirmed reports of this actually occurring. However, a few users have asked for rpms anyway.

If you happen to run this Red Flag distribution, we have some test rpms based on tor 0.2.1.15-rc for you.

The binary itself along with signature and sha-1 hash. read more »

Tor 0.2.1.15-rc marks the second release candidate for the 0.2.1.x
series. It fixes a major bug on fast exit relays, as well as a variety
of more minor bugs.

This is a release candidate! That means that we don't know of any
remaining show-stopping bugs, and this will become the new stable if
there are no problems. Please test it, and tell us about any problems
that you find. read more »