From today (July 2nd, 2020), the Internet has around 16 months to migrate from onion services v2 to v3 once and for all.

According to a recently published research paper co-authored by researchers from Drexel, NYU, and the University of Washington, Tor users make high-quality contributions to Wikipedia. And, when they are blocked, as doctoral candidate Chau Tran, the lead author describes, "the collateral damage in the form of unrealized valuable contributions from anonymity seekers is invisible."

There's a new alpha release available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.4.1-alpha from the download page. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release by early July.

Remember, this is an alpha release: you should only run this if you'd like to find and report more bugs than usual.

This is the first alpha release in the 0.4.4.x series. It improves our guard selection algorithms, improves the amount of code that can be disabled when running without relay support, and includes numerous small bugfixes and enhancements. It also lays the ground for some IPv6 features that we'll be developing more in the next (0.4.5) series.

Here are the changes since 0.4.3.5.

Changes in version 0.4.4.1-alpha - 2020-06-16

• Major features (Proposal 310, performance + security):
  • Implements Proposal 310, "Bandaid on guard selection". Proposal 310 solves load-balancing issues with older versions of the guard selection algorithm, and improves its security. Under this new algorithm, a newly selected guard never becomes Primary unless all previously sampled guards are unreachable. Implements recommendation from 32088. (Proposal 310 is linked to the CLAPS project researching optimal client location-aware path selections. This project is a collaboration between the UCLouvain Crypto Group, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, and Princeton University.)
• Major features (IPv6, relay):
  • Consider IPv6-only EXTEND2 cells valid on relays. Log a protocol warning if the IPv4 or IPv6 address is an internal address, and internal addresses are not allowed. But continue to use the other address, if it is valid. Closes ticket 33817.
  • If a relay can extend over IPv4 and IPv6, and both addresses are provided, it chooses between them uniformly at random. Closes ticket 33817.
  • Re-use existing IPv6 connections for circuit extends. Closes ticket 33817.
  • Relays may extend circuits over IPv6, if the relay has an IPv6 ORPort, and the client supplies the other relay's IPv6 ORPort in the EXTEND2 cell. IPv6 extends will be used by the relay IPv6 ORPort self-tests in 33222. Closes ticket 33817.

We're pleased to announce that the Tor Project is hosting students this summer as part of Google Summer of Code and Outreachy, thanks to support from DIAL Open Source Center.

Tor Browser 9.5 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.