libevent

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 »

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

Hi! I recently wrote up a status report for the progress we're making on hacking Libevent, and I thought I'd post it here too.

BACKGROUND

Tor currently uses Libevent for its high-performance networking calls. Libevent is a software library originally written by Niels Provos (then of UMichigan, now of Google), and now co-developed by Niels Provos and the Tor Project's Nick Mathewson. Its purpose is to provide consistent fast interfaces to various operating systems' mutually incompatible fast networking facilities. Libevent gives applications two basic interfaces to these networking layers: a low-level interface where the application is notified when an operation (like a network read or write) is ready to begin, and a higher-level interface where Libevent itself manages network operations and the application is notified when the network operations are completed. read more »