vidalia

Tor 0.2.0.26-rc (released May 13) fixes a major security vulnerability caused by a bug in Debian's OpenSSL packages. All users running any 0.2.0.x version should upgrade, whether they're running Debian or not.
http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/May-2008/msg00048.html

Vidalia 0.1.3 (released May 25) adds a hidden service configuration UI designed and implemented by Domenik Bork, as well as a few other bugfixes.
http://trac.vidalia-project.net/browser/vidalia/tags/vidalia-0.1.3/CHANG...

The Tor Browser Bundle 1.0.2 (released May 3) and 1.0.3 (released May 16) include upgraded versions of Tor, Vidalia, Torbutton, and Firefox.

We added three new part-time developers in May. We hired Matt Edman as a part-time employee at the beginning of May, to work on Vidalia maintenance, bugfixes, and new features. We also are funding Karsten Loesing to work on making hidden service rendezvous and interaction faster, and Peter Palfrader to work on lowering the overhead of directory requests, especially during bootstrap, which should directly improve the experience for Tor users on modems or cell phones.

Google has agreed to give us some funding to work on auto-update for Windows. Our plan is for Vidalia to look at the majority-signed network status consensus to decide when to update and to what version (Tor already lists what versions are considered safe, in each network status document). We should actually do the update via Tor if possible, for additional privacy, and we need to make sure to check package signatures to ensure package validity. Last, we need to give the user an interface for these updates, including letting her opt to migrate from one major Tor version to the next.

We continued enhancements to the Chinese and Russian Tor website translations. Vidalia also added a Turkish translation.

From the Vidalia 0.1.3 ChangeLog: read more »

Google is funding a project to create an auto-update feature in Vidalia. This auto-update feature will provide a better user experience for Tor users. The goal is to create a system where Vidalia can detect when a new release is available, fetch the package, verify authenticity, and assist the user in upgrading the Vidalia/Tor package. The auto-update feature preserves the user's privacy and anonymity. Over the next six months we'll develop the auto-update system for general release around November 15, 2008.

We're excited to work with Google on this project and look forward to the collaboration.

Jacob Appelbaum joins us to help out with:

• developing a translation portal. This should help us find translators
  and make their updates easier.
• coordinating the Tor translation team and getting parts that need
  translating, translated.
• helping to better document Tor for non-technical users.
• writing an auto-responder to use Google's gmail to deliver Tor to
  users who request it
• helping to get auto-updating for Tor and Vidalia working seamlessly
• maintaining the code that runs the tor exitlist
• generally advocating Tor

Matt Edman joins the Tor Project. Matt joins to help us enhance Tor's
interactions with Vidalia. Specifically, he's working on:

• integrating upnp libraries into vidalia to make it easier to setup servers
• displaying Tor's startup status more visually in Vidalia to help users
  understand what's going on as Tor starts
• assist with making translating Vidalia's interface and help files
  easier for translators
• helping to flesh out proposals in queue on or-dev
• helping to get auto-updating or Tor and Vidalia working seamlessly
• tackling the "matt" section of the TODO file.

Welcome Jacob and Matt!

It appears Qt-4.3.3 has a bug that is causing Vidalia to crash when the list of Tor nodes refreshes and is sorted. The current 0.1.2.19-stable and 0.2.0.17-alpha bundles for OSX are built against Qt-4.3.3.

I've downgraded the build hosts to Qt-4.3.2. The rebuilt OSX vidalia-bundle packages for both 0.1.2.19-stable and 0.2.0.17-alpha are available as:

• Bundle with 0.1.2.19-stable and Vidalia 16a
• Bundle with 0.2.0.17-alpha and Vidalia 16a

These bundles contain Vidalia compiled with Qt-4.3.2. This makes Vidalia happy again.