phobos's blog

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/.

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.