rpm

As announced here, http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Feb-2010/msg00033.html, we now produce rpms and debs of Tor and Vidalia for easier installation.

When using ubuntu, opensuse, fedora, centos/redhat, or debian, you can simply add our repositories to your package management application (yum, apt, apttitude, zypper, etc) and always have the latest -stable or -alpha tor and vidalia.

This is a direct result of hiring Erinn in December.

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 »

Releases
Vidalia 0.1.9 (released September 2) fixes a big pile of bugs and inconveniences in the earlier releases. This new release marks the first "stable" release of Vidalia, in that we have now branched into a stable (0.1.x) branch and a development (0.2.x) branch.
http://trac.vidalia-project.net/browser/vidalia/tags/vidalia-0.1.9/CHANG...

Tor 0.2.0.31 (released September 3) addresses two potential anonymity issues, starts to fix a big bug we're seeing where in rare cases traffic from one Tor stream gets mixed into another stream, and fixes a variety of smaller issues.
http://archives.seul.org/or/announce/Sep-2008/msg00000.html

Tor 0.2.1.6-alpha (released September 30) further improves performance and robustness of hidden services, starts work on supporting per-country relay selection, and fixes a variety of smaller issues.
http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Oct-2008/msg00093.html

Circumvention Enhancements
From the Vidalia 0.1.9 ChangeLog:
"Correct the location of the simplified Chinese help files so they will actually load again."

From the Tor 0.2.1.6-alpha ChangeLog:
"Start work to allow node restrictions to include country codes. The syntax to exclude nodes in a country with country code XX is "ExcludeNodes {XX}". Patch from Robert Hogan. It still needs some refinement to decide what config options should take priority if you ask to both use a particular node and exclude it."
This feature should allow users in China to specify that they don't want to enter (and/or exit) in China, which in theory could provide stronger security for them.

From the Tor 0.2.1.6-alpha ChangeLog:
"Allow ports 465 and 587 in the default exit policy again. We had rejected them in 0.1.0.15, because back in 2005 they were commonly misconfigured and ended up as spam targets. We hear they are better locked down these days." read more »