phobos's blog

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 »

This is a testing release of Tor IM Browser Bundle 1.2.1-dev. The only fix in this release so far is an updated prefs.js to fix plugin scanning. The InvalidPrefs.js file no longer appears either. I'm working on the other suggestions from this comment.

You can view the diffs to see the changes.

The bundle and associated signature and sha1 files are available too.

This is an open call for testing of the soon to be released Tor Browser Bundle 1.2.0.

The major changes in this version are that you can now run multiple instances of Firefox. This means each Firefox browser is independent of the others. They won't leak urls, scripts, etc between instances.

It also includes Tor's geoip database. This will enable people to set ExitNodes by country code. You still have to manually edit the torrc file. We'd love it if someone wrote a way to do this into Vidalia (such as right click on a country in the network map and choose "exit here"). read more »

• Switch to launching Firefox directly from Vidalia to allow multiple instances of Firefox
• Update Firefox to 3.0.10
• Update to Qt 4.5.1
• Update Firefox prefs.js to stop scanning for plugins
• Update libevent to 1.4.11
• Include the Tor geoip database

New releases
On April 12, we released 0.2.1.14-rc. Read the details in the announcement.

Outreach
Roger attended an ITSG conference in Chicago.

Roger, Nick, Jacob, and Mike attended the CodeCon conference in San Francisco, http://www.codecon.org/2009/.

Andrew met with the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia to discuss using Tor for their mission, http://cdhr.info.

Roger and Andrew met with the Department of Justice CyberCrime Division to give an overview of how Tor works and how we could better work with law enforcement.

Wendy, Roger, and Andrew had a dinner with Internews Central Asia media development staff.

Andrew attended the CIMI/NED panel on World Press Freedom, http://cima.ned.org/860/world-press-freedom-day-2009.html. read more »

Updated Tor Browser and Tor IM Browser bundles are released. The updated bundles can be found at https://www.torproject.org/torbrowser/

The changes from 1.1.11 are:

• Update OpenSSL to 0.9.8k
• Update Tor to 0.2.1.14-rc

Also fixes a bug where Chinese (zh_CN) translations weren't being used in Vidalia, see http://archives.seul.org/or/cvs/Apr-2009/msg00001.html for details.

Tor Browser and Tor IM Browser Bundles are also known as the "Zero Install Client" for Windows.

Changes in version 0.2.1.14-rc - 2009-04-12
Major features: read more »

• Clients replace entry guards that were chosen more than a few months ago. This change should significantly improve client performance, especially once more people upgrade, since relays that have been a guard for a long time are currently overloaded.