Blogs

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 »

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