talks

Jake, Mike, Karsten, Sebastian, and I attended Hacking at Random last week in The Netherlands. I did a talk on Tor performance challenges — basically walking through the key pieces of the "Why Tor is Slow" document that we wrote in March.

As usual with European hacking cons, they produced a really well-done video just days after my talk. So if you want to get the highlights on what we're doing to speed up Tor and what roadblocks remain, take a look at the video and also the slides that come with it.

In early January after 24C3, I travelled to Stuttgart to meet with the
police there. I spoke to about 30 or 40 investigators. My goal wasn't
to advocate for any particular laws or policies (that's up to them,
after all), but rather to help give them background so they can make
more informed decisions: explain who uses Tor and how it works, and try
to answer any questions that come up. In particular, my goals were to
open a discussion about the data retention laws, and also brainstorm
how German Tor operators and German law enforcement can get along better.

It turns out that the fellow who did the September 2006 seizures was
part of this group, and he was very interested to talk to me and learn
more about Tor.

They explained that the data retention laws *they'd* asked for were
basically that large ISPs should be required to answer them when they
ask who had a given IP address at a given time (data the ISPs already
keep for the most part), and as a bonus, it would be nice if they paid
somebody to answer the requests on weekends too. The law that they got
was way more than that, and they don't need or want most of it. read more »

I'm back from the 24C3 congress in Berlin. My talk went well (video, slides).

Basically I gave an overview of some of the big technical things we did in 2007, some of the policy/legal issues that we're tackling, and some of the technical things that need to come next. The focus was on Germany, so it included some discussion of the upcoming data retention problems, and of the general issue with police in Germany seizing servers.