Today, we are sharing here the publication of his research report, titled "Censored continent: understanding the use of tools during Information controls in Africa: Nigeria, Cameroon, Uganda, and Zimbabwe as case studies."

This August, we asked you to help us fundraise for our second annual Bug Smash Fund campaign. In 2020, despite the challenges of COVID-19 and event cancellations, you helped us to raise $106,709!

Today, we're welcoming two new members to our Board of Directors: Chelsea Komlo and Rabbi Rob. We are happy to say both have accepted our invitation and joined the Tor Project's Board.

After months of work, we have a new stable release series!
If you build Tor from source, you can download the source
code for 0.4.4.5 on the
download page.
Packages should be available within the next several weeks, with a new Tor Browser by some time next week.

Tor 0.4.4.5 is the first stable release in the 0.4.4.x series. This series improves our guard selection algorithms, adds v3 onion balance support, 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.

Per our support policy, we support each stable release series for nine months after its first stable release, or three months after the first stable release of the next series: whichever is longer. This means that 0.4.4.x will be supported until around June 2021--or later, if 0.4.5.x is later than anticipated.

Note also that support for 0.4.2.x has just ended; support for 0.4.3 will continue until Feb 15, 2021. We still plan to continue supporting 0.3.5.x, our long-term stable series, until Feb 2022.

Below are the changes since 0.4.3.6-rc. For a complete list of changes since 0.4.4.4-rc, see the ChangeLog file.

Changes in version 0.4.4.5 - 2020-09-15

• 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 (fallback directory list):
  • Replace the 148 fallback directories originally included in Tor 0.4.1.4-rc (of which around 105 are still functional) with a list of 144 fallbacks generated in July 2020. Closes ticket 40061.

This blog post is about the project I worked on and my experience with Tor under GSoC 2020.

Tor Browser 10.0a6 is now available from the Tor Browser Alpha download page and also from our