gsoc

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 »

This summer I was working on a set of scripts that would make it possible to translate the Tor Project website via Pootle on translation.torproject.org. The website is based on a set of .wml files, but Pootle only takes files in the .pot and po format. The goal was to find a solution that would make it easy to not only translate from .wml to .po and back, but enable us to convert and keep the already translated documents. read more »

As a returning Google Summer of Code student for the second year in a row, I was thrilled to hear that I had been accepted again.

My task was to add BitTorrent support to Thandy, the secure automated updater developed by the Tor project, along with setting up and testing the necessary infrastructure. The goal is to better mitigate load spikes following the release of new software versions and allowing volunteers to easily help users to fetch Tor. read more »

Throughout the summer I've been working on a project called 'arm' (which stands for the 'anonymizing relay monitor'). It's a real-time, terminal monitor for Tor relays providing bandwidth/cpu/memory usage, relay configuration, event log, connections, and other details relay operators might find handy for checking Tor's status. The project's intended for command-line aficionados, ssh connections, and anyone stuck with a tty terminal.

Source, screen shots, and a development log are available on the project's page and an interview by Brenno Winter discussing the project is available here. read more »

Great news! We have been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2009 together with The Electronic Frontier Foundation. Yay!

This will be our third Google Summer of Code after 2007 and 2008. In our first year we had four students working on making relays work better (and not crash) on Windows, on a library and tool to try alternative path selection algorithms, on a fuzzing library to look for parsing problems, and on scalability and privacy for hidden services. In our second year we had seven students. One of our successful students of the 2008 program wrote a nice blog post reviewing how GSoC went for him, for the other students, and for the project in general. read more »

As we started preparing to apply for the Google Summer of Code 2009, we realized that we haven't reported how last year's Summer of Code went for us.

Tor's 2008 Google Summer of Code was a victim of Tor's increasing growth! We've got a lot more people involved now, and we have a lot more projects we want to tackle. But that also means we need to work harder at coordinating everything, and that's not as smooth as we'd hoped.

Tor had the luxury to receive seven slots for students. GSoC 2008 overall, was a success; as the students and projects contributed a lot to the Tor project. Also, here I am, a former GSoC student writing a blog post for the project.

Below is an overview over the GSoC 2008 projects and a summary of their results. read more »

The EFF and The Tor Project announce the final selection of students for the 2008 Google Summer of Code.

We're happy to welcome:

• Aleksei Gorny working on Tor exit scanner improvements
• Camilo Viecco working on Providing Blossom functionality to Vidalia
• Domenik Bork working on Configuration of Hidden Services with User Authorization in Vidalia
• Sebastian Hahn working on A networking application to automatically carry out tests for Tor
• Simon Johansson working on a Translation Wiki
• Christian Wilms working on Performance Enhancing Measures for Tor Hidden Services
• Fallon Chen working on Improving Tor Path Selection

There were a total of 40 applications for 7 slots this year. Congratulations to Aleksei, Camilo, Domenik, Sebastian, Simon, Christian, and Fallon for their excellent applications and subsequent selection. We look forward to releasing their completed projects as functionality for the benefit of the Tor user community.

Once again, with sponsorship from the amazing folks at the EFF, the Tor Project has been accepted as a mentoring organization in Google's Summer of Code. This program funds students to work on open source and free software projects over the summer, and provides organizations like ours with a chance to work with great and enthusiastic coders from around the world.

Many thanks first to Google for the opportunity, and to EFF for their continuing help and support. We'd also like to thanks everyone in the Tor community who agreed to help mentor students with us this summer, especially those who contributed to our project ideas list.

If you're a student interested in working with the Tor Project under the Google Summer of Code program this year, please check out Google's FAQ for the program, and the Tor Project's GSoC 2008 page for more information. If you have any questions that aren't answered there, just stop by our IRC channel and ask. We look forward to seeing you there!

Also, be sure to check out the other great organizations who will be mentoring students this year.