censorship circumvention

Bridge nodes are one of Tor's key architectural components for allowing wide access to the network. These act like normal Tor nodes, except there is no centralized list available to download, so it's harder to block access to all of them. Users who cannot access the Tor network in the normal way can find the IP addresses of a few bridges, and connect to the rest of the Tor network via these nodes. The bridge node IP addresses are distributed in a way such that anyone should be able to find a few, but it should be difficult for someone to find (and block access to) them all. Currently they are available by email or the web, but more strategies are being considered, such as instant messaging or MMORPGs. read more »

New releases, new hires, new funding

Bruce Leidl joins to work on developing Tor in Java. Bruce will write a fully functional Tor in Java in order to provide a solid foundation for other java-based projects; such as Tor on mobile platforms like Maemo and Android.

On November 2nd we released Vidalia 0.2.6. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/vidalia-026-released

On November 20th, we released Tor Browser Bundle 1.2.10. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-bundle-1210-released

On November 19th, we released Tor 0.2.2.6-alpha. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-0226-alpha-released

Design, develop, and implement enhancements that make
Tor a better tool for users in censored countries.

Roger met with his class at KAIST working on bridge deployment strategies. A few teams developed some creative strategies. Roger is continuing to work with the leading teams to further refine their ideas before publishing. 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:

Here's what the Tor Project accomplished in September 2009.

New Hires read more »

• Carolyn Anhalt is our new Translation and Community Manager. Carolyn has years of experience managing and growing content translation, as well as wrangling online communities and developing volunteer moderators and support roles from the community. She’s fluent or conversant in a number of languages, such as: Russian, French, English, German, Italian, and Welsh. Carolyn’s initial goals are to grow the translator community to keep everything Tor translated, work out better translation tools for translators, and to generally assist translators.
• Karen Reilly joins us as our Development Director. Karen has years of experience in growing both community-based and foundation-based funding, as well as helping to fulfill the mission of organizations through outreach and community-building. Karen’s initial goals are to further develop community funding, work with our current donors, help create an annual report, and expand Tor’s outreach efforts.

I was invited to attend a seminar on "Seeding Tomorrow's Media: Strategies for More Effective Engagement and Investment". This invite came with an all expense paid trip to the Salzburg Global Trust in Salzburg, Austria. The group was an interesting mix of "new media" bloggers and activists and "old media" foundations and journalists. We decided "new media vs old media" is a false dichotomy; perhaps community vs. institutionalized media is a more apt description. read more »

New releases

On June 20th we released Tor 0.2.1.16-rc.
On June 21st, we released Tor Browser Bundle 1.2.1.
On June 23rd, we released Tor Browser Bundle 1.2.2.
On June 24th, we released Tor 0.2.0.35-stable. We expect that this release is the last of the 0.2.0.x -stable series, soon to be replaced with the 0.2.1.x series.
On June 30th, we released Vidalia 0.1.14.

Censorship circumvention

Packaged rpms for Red Flag Linux version 6. Red Flag Linux is reported to be the new operating system for all Internet cafe's in China. So far, no one has seen this conversion actually happen, but now we're ready if it does.

Our email autoresponder, gettor , received a number of patches to deal with dkim issues, including finding a dkim bug that prevented yahoo email users from fetching Tor. This bug has been fixed. Additionally, we've whitelisted some domains where we read more »

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.

The Tor network has grown to more than one thousand relays and millions of casual users over the past few years. We are proud of our network's popularity, but with growth has come increasing performance problems and attempts by some countries to block access to the Tor network. In order to address these problems, we need to learn more about the Tor network. In this post, I describe the current state of network measurements in Tor and some proposed additions to help us understand the network better. read more »

We've always argued that safe circumvention requires anonymity, even from the circumvention service itself. There are many people wanting to record your Internet traffic and browsing patterns; from governments to commercial advertising networks. There are many ways to defeat the threat of traffic analysis; from simple proxy providers, virtual private networks, and distributed peer to peer solutions. Only some of these offer anonymity along with circumvention. Tor's open design and anonymity properties provide protections for the user from those watching the traffic and from us as an organization. read more »

We've published our three-year development roadmap. There are two main goals in publishing this document: first to be more transparent in what we're doing; and second to ask for help in improving everything related to Tor.

While we don't expect everyone will read through the roadmap start to finish, the Table of Contents provides a quick overview of the high-level goals. Each high-level goal is fairly independent of another, so you can simply read about the goals that interest you.

And for the first time ever, we've created a press release. This is our attempt to become more press friendly and provide a way for the media to start a conversation with us.

We welcome your comments and feedback!