gsoc 2009

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 »

Over the summer for GSoC 2009, I worked on Polipo, Tor's favored Web proxy for bridging the gap between HTTP and SOCKS protocols. The proxy also provides an efficient memory cache to help speed up browsing. I had an opportunity to learn about Polipo and Libevent, and I had a chance to attend PETS, a privacy conference, and meet some of the Tor folks in person. Polipo is authored by Juliusz Chroboczek. Libevent is developed by Nick Mathewson and Niels Provos. Nick Mathewson also happens to work for the Tor Project and was my GSoC mentor over the summer. 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 »