Greetings from Tor's New Executive Director

Welcome!

Shari was the mother of the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- guiding it for 15+ years. This is the best possible outcome for the ED search. Welcome Shari!

Welcome!
Wish all the best!

2016 will be a great year

Welcome Shari! Yay Tor!

Welcome!
I've always been a big fan of you too!
It's very important to "Always look at the bright side of life"
"tuudum, tuudumm, tu, tu, tuuuudum"
http://www.listal.com/eric-idle/pictures
(-:

Go Shari! Tor couldn't have hoped for a better leader. A leader that was behind one of the most important digital rights organizations of our time.

Congrats to both Shari and Tor!!! Shari is amazing leader.

meowelcome to the bridge

Hi, Shari Steele. You are welcome!
您好, 莎丽斯蒂尔. 欢迎您!
您好, 莎麗斯蒂爾. 歡迎您!

Please pay more close attention to the internet users inside GFW.
You will be our hero.

Thank you very much!

\m/

Namaste Shari,

Congratulations in your new position. Looking forward to exciting and interesting accomplishments that you no doubt will achieve.

And yes, we shall have fun as well as we make Tor & planet a phenomenal place to inhabit.

WELCOME! Truly, Shari is on the bridge!

Namaste,
imu.

Congrats, Shari! Great news for Tor.

Welcome Shari, and be sure that we will do our best to help you succeed in this role! Thank you for accepting to lead Tor!

I hope you save everyone because...

"Former CIA director: ‘We kill people based on metadata’ "
https://www.rt.com/usa/158460-cia-director-metadata-kill-people/

Long live TOR!

warm welcome <3

Thank you for the great news Torproject. Welcome Shari!

congrats on the new ceo!

curious to what you people think about shari's husband called 'Bill Vass' who has been openly associated with NSA etc. for years now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Vass

not sure what to think here.

Excellent ED hire Torians!

we are honored too.
do you plan removing the observatory feature ?
do you plan removing the http option (default) for an only https feature?
do you plan removing the windows tor-bundle ?
do you plan adding calomel addon ?
do you plan opening library-tor-relays in america, eu, russia, africa australia and not only for us/spanish books ?
do you plan adding on this blog (tor-blog) a box with three negatives options -spam/troll/off-topic - that the users can give their negatives opinions about the quality of the posts ?

Welcome Shari !!

welcome :3

Good news. Hope looking into the possible banning of TOR in France and other countries will be high on the priority list, TOR is not just terrorists and pedos like the media pretends!.

"and regular citizens who care about their privacy"
=> Last but definitely not least. Strength in number, every single casual John Doe using the network makes the network stronger.

Otherwise, as everyone already said, welcome too :)

Hello Im happy to see your happy

How do you make STARTPAGE your default Tor search engine?

Please release an easy to use GUI based Windows client. There used to be one, and it wasn't stable... then you discontinued it... probably for good reason. Now for an updated easy to use client on the world's most popular platform.

Tor on Windows provides false sense of security and weakens security of the Tor network. Tor relays on Windows OS is bad for security of the Tor network, and Tor on Windows provides false sense of security to its users since Windows spies on everything and reports it all. We need to ban Tor on Windows so Windows users do not continue having a false sense of security and to also promote the move away from Windows to more secure systems.

Or at the very least, do not allow Windows computers to operate as a node, and on the Windows versions have a big warning that reads "WARNING: You are using a Windows computer which renders Tor useless at maintaining your privacy since your operating system is spyware. It is recommended to move to a Linux/Unix operating system"

Welcome :o)

Welcome Shari. Great to see you are settling into your new position nicely. I really look forward to watching where you take the Tor project to next. Best of luck for the coming months and beyond, and hope you have a splendid new year.

This is a suggestion I've made elsewhere but is it possible to make tor messenger users operate a relay node by default? So everyone enjoying the benefit of the IM is also "strengthening the network" as per above commenter?

I understand mobile is a different kettle of fish entirely but could we one day see a downloadable tor message app where the average pleb can not only use the IM functionality but contribute a node without needing any expertise to do so?

Back on topic - seems like a great hire, well done

Welcome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Welcome! In recent statements you have alluded to not wanting to step on the toes of EFF in your new role at Tor. While I agree that Tor's main task is to provide tools, I believe that only through effective and public defense of the ideas of privacy and security will you see the mass adoption needed to make the tools useful in the first place.

Do the human verification captcha before entering various sites inject code into the Tor Browser to intentionally identify you or are you still protected behind Tor?

(Part One)

Welcome, congratulations and felicitations!

Roger has no doubt warned you that the Tor user base can be rather demanding, and I want to waste no time in proving that this is no exaggeration!

Roger just said something very important which bears repeating:

> Tor is part of a larger family of civil liberties organizations, and this move makes it clear that Tor is a main figure in that family.

I completely agree, and I believe that at a time when all the Western governments have apparently made a concerted sharp turn towards authoritarianism--- even fascism--- the biggest threat to the continued existence of the Project may be political or legal. Which is not to deny the gravity of the ever more diverse and sophisticated technical attacks which the Project will face in coming years.

For this reason, over the next few years I believe that the highest priority tasks for the leadership of the Tor Project are

o building even closer relationships with other civil liberties and humanitarian organizations (EFF, ACLU, RSF, MSF) and key technology NGOs (Citizen Labs, Debian, Tails, OSF),

o being always available to the most influential tech reporters as a source of apposite quotes responding to political attacks on Tor, crypto, etc.; this requires building personal relations and also following closely news stories (especially ones written by those same reporters),

o working with US legislative staff to ensure that as Executive Director of the Tor Project, you are invited to give testimony rebutting that from people such as FBI Director James Comey,

o working with other civil liberties groups and with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math/stat) professional organizations and US/EU universities to construct boycotts of NSA/DARPA/IARPA/GCHQ, and to craft Codes of Conduct for research on social media and communities such as Tor users, based upon the example of IRBs (but note that this requires simultaneously campaigning to oppose the dismantling of IRBs for medical research in the US threatened by numerous bills now before the US Congress),

o working with other civil liberties groups to encourage serious journalists to expose the most important post-Snowden story; to wit, thanks to Snowden, we know that FVEY is trying to steal everyone's lives/data exhaust, but too few people understand what they plan to do with our data exhaust: to use Bayesian predictive analysis (think IBM Watson) applied to Big Data troves to assign everyone individual citizenship scores, for such purposes as CVE programs currently being ramped up by US and EU governments, programs which specifically target youngsters aged 3-7 for scoring, suasion, and even such drastic interventions as removing children from their home.

That said, in the end Tor cannot exist without energetic and determined devs, and in coming years Tor will clearly need to enlarge the circle of critical developers. So keeping them happy and recruiting fresh blood must have a very high priority. I agree with a strategy I think I see the Project pursuing here, which acknowledges that Tor cannot match Google salaries, but leverages the fact that many people want to do challenging work which will really help a very large number of people, as opposed to simply trying to strike it rich (and the Project wouldn't want to employ people like that anyway--- they're too bribeable).

Tor Project is growing and must grow, and growth always presents problems which the Executive Director must track and ameliorate. One useful general strategy here (and I think Roger would agree) might be to adopt a modular philosophy, in which one continually re-evaluates political/technical goals of subprojects, taking account of the people involved and whom they work best with, to try to ensure that if some subproject becomes useful to many projects outside Tor, it can perhaps be split off into a new NGO, if that would be useful, or at least given freedom to expand gracefully inside Tor Project if not.

Fixing vulnerabilities as they are uncovered must always have a very high priority, of course. Here, urgent problems for the devs probably arrive according to a Poisson distribution, i.e. they tend to cluster. That's just in the nature of how these things work. The Project must continue to be able to take crises in its stride, without letting a bad stretch of serious bugs derail its longer term projects.

In particular, the Project must continue to try to see that further critical R&D gets done, whether as part of Tor Project or in a sister organization, for example

+ continuing research on GFC, SORM, and other censorship/surveillance technologies,

+ research to counter "out of band" deanonymization attacks such as Stylometry (a very hard problem, but I think that some far from useless technical countermeasures would be easy if time-consuming to achieve),

+ research to try to solve or ameliorate untoward consequences of core design decisions in current Tor, such as the most dangerous traffic correlation attacks (also a very hard problem, a fact which should be attractive to the right kind of researcher),

+ projects to develop and market low-cost countermeasures to hardware woes (such as more secure routers for ordinary people, working with industry to provide properly signed firmware upgrades for linux-friendly routers, "Faraday cage" bags, wide frequency scanners leveraging software-designed radio to search for suspicious RF transmissions),

+ providing encouragement to innovators with wild ideas (using drones and/or low power transmitters to build a grassroots open/free alternative to the existing internet, retroflector screens, TEMPEST countermeasures, etc), while gently discouraging obviously ill-advised schemes (e.g. dubious "Tor in a box" schemes).

(Part Two)

Over the next few months, I believe that the most urgent task for the Tor leadership is to join with other civil liberties groups in mobilizing the Tor userbase to speak out against attempts in the US and EU countries to exploit political hysteria to legislatively mandate backdoors in civilian encryption, "split keys" (see Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme for example), "key escrow", or other "unicorns" being demanded by James Comey ("if unicorns don't exist, Silicon Valley must create them"). Here I think the most effective countermeasures may include:

o being ready with carefully crafted quotes when reporters call after the FBI's PR machine seeks to exploit each new "kinetic outrage" (e.g. San Bernardino, Bataclan), major cybercrime incidents, etc., to attack TM, TB, Tor, and encryption generally (analogies can be very effective),

o working with ACLU, EFF, EPIC, etc., to help journalists understand how medical privacy provides an example everyone can understand of why strong non-broken (backdoored) crypto is essential to protect ordinary citizens from very serious harm,

o working with ACLU, EFF to help journalists explain the four worst mathematical fallacies which underlie the Dragnet ("if we collect it all, we can use Big Data analysis to extract all those elusive needles" [sic]):

+ "prosecutor's fallacy": confusing Pr(E|H) with Pr(H|E); a nice concrete example uses E = person is male/female, H = person is color blind,

+ "base rate fallacy": even a "highly accurate test" for some specific condition or potential future event will flag mostly innocents when used dragnet style to try to predict rare conditions or rare events (e.g. to identify which Americans have some undiagnosed rare cancer, or which children aged 3-7 will in future commit some rare act such as a mass shooting)--- ask Roger about this!,

+ "creationist's fallacy": treating events which are not statistically independent as if they were, leading to multiplying lots of probabilities and coming up with an absurdly tiny probability that, for example, someone with a low citizenship score has been unjustly tainted in a "judgment by algorithm" (in the case of "naive Bayes" it requires further mathematical analysis to explain why claims that these errors "wash out" in CVE but not medical applications are fallacious),

+ "Simpson's paradox": a simple argument showing how "drilling down" into huge data sets is as likely to lead to greater confusion than to greater insight; a classic example shows with real data how a hypothetical just prosecutor in a death penalty case could repeatedly reverse her previous conclusions using the statistical analysis of multidimensional contingency tables as further variables are added,

(all of these points are related to the broader issue of criminal justice reform and concern about the fact that forensic "science" [sic] is in fact almost entirely pseudoscience founded upon serious misconceptions such as the four just outlined.

I might also mention the (counter-intuitive?) fact that probabilities and "preferences" are not transitive, so A > B, B > C, C > A are possible. This awkward fact is usually concealed from decision makers who are being pitched some computerized tool which allegedly can make hard decisions better than humans can.