phobos's blog

Congratulations to Chrisd for assuming maintainership of the Polipo codebase from Juliusz. The full announcement is available at the mailing list archives.

Why Chris?

Chrisd was a 2009 Google Summer of Code for Tor/EFF. His project was Polipo Portability Enhancements. Chris has proven himself to be a very competent coder and able to design and implement features as needed. He even wrote a SOCKS layer fix for Firefox bugs, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=280661.

What does this mean to Tor?

It means we have a fantastic new coder maintaining the polipo codebase. Bugfixes, features, and more frequent releases should help improve polipo beyond where it is today.

Is Tor going to control Polipo? read more »

I had a conversation with a private donor from Europe yesterday. During the discussion, I asked,

Is there more we can do in the EU to help protect privacy and anonymity online?

The answer is,

You are already doing it as far as I am concerned: I started using TOR due to the recent coming into force of the legal requirement that UK ISPs must keep all web-browsing and e-mail connections for a year (?), and the fact that practically everyone and his cat (in government, of course) can ask to see those records without judicial review. Maybe you should stop talking about China and Tibet as places where anonymity are needed by journalists, and talk about the EU were anonymity is needed by all. read more »

On November 19, we released the latest in the Tor alpha series, version 0.2.2.6-alpha. This release lays the groundwork for many upcoming features:
support for the new lower-footprint "microdescriptor" directory design,
future-proofing our consensus format against new hash functions or
other changes, and an Android port. It also makes Tor compatible with
the upcoming OpenSSL 0.9.8l release, and fixes a variety of bugs.

It can be downloaded at https://www.torproject.org/download.html.en

Major features:

• Directory authorities can now create, vote on, and serve multiple
  parallel formats of directory data as part of their voting process.
  Partially implements Proposal 162: "Publish the consensus in
  multiple flavors".

• Directory authorities can now agree on and publish small summaries
  of router information that clients can use in place of regular
  server descriptors. This transition will eventually allow clients read more »

Earlier this year, we started looking for a new hosting location for a directory authority outside the US and EU. After talking to a few ISPs, Shinjiru Technology donated a high-bandwidth server to us. The server has been up and running for a few months now without issues. The staff has been great to work with and we'll soon turn this into a public directory authority for the public Tor Network.
This is a public thank you to Shinjiru for supporting online privacy and anonymity with Tor.

On November 20, we released an updated Tor Browser Bundle, version 1.2.10, which includes:

• updated Vidalia to 0.2.6
• updated Pidgin to 2.6.3
• updated Tor to 0.2.1.20
• updated Firefox to 3.0.15
• updated OpenSSL to 0.9.8l
• updated libevent to 1.4.13

You can download the updated version at https://www.torproject.org/torbrowser/

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 »