Events

For many vulnerable Internet users, the Tor network is the only way to gain access to encrypted services. It's made possible by relay operators, the thousands of volunteers who donate their time, technical expertise, and hardware. Join us for a roundtable discussion with individual and institutional relay operators to learn more about the ins and outs of powering a safer, more equitable internet.

We invite you to get to know some of Tor’s dedicated volunteer relay operators. For a deeper look at the motivations and challenges of this community, we will speak with two researchers, Ana Custura and Victoria Neumann, who will share findings from their recent study on the Relay Operator Community Health. Then, we’ll hear directly from a group of individual and institutional relay operators to learn more about the ins and outs of powering a safer, more equitable internet.

• Global Encryption Day: Distribute(d) trust -- The key to global encryption access (Monday, October 21, 17:00 UTC)

  • Host: Gus, Community Team Lead, The Tor Project

  • Panelists (Relay Operators)

    • Aquintex, Quintex 

    • Asya Mitseva, BTU Cottbus

    • Gunnar Wolf, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Tor University Challenge)

    • Julien Voisin, Nos Oignons

  • 📺 Stream live on our YouTube channel

This virtual live event is part of Tor's contributions to Global Encryption Day.

CriptoFrevo is a free, open and collaborative event to think about and experiment with the relationship between technology and culture, bringing digital rights debates closer to the popular cultural expressions that vibrate in Pernambuco.

Members of the Tor Project will be featured speakers at the event:

• October 19th, 18:10 to 19:00
• "Tor Stories: Cryptography, Privacy and Anonymity in the Global South" Gus, Tor Community Team Lead

More information: https://criptofrevo.ip.rec.br/

5th Seminar on Cryptography, Politics and Fundamental Rights will host a closing table on October 18 at 18h30 on "Future of Cryptography in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Surveillance and Digital Colonialism."

The featured speakers are:

• Isabela Fernandes (Tor Project),
• Chelsea Manning (Nym Technologies, remote),
• Rodolfo Avelino (CGI.br) and Pedro Amaral (ObCrypto - IP.rec).
• Moderator: André Fernandes (IP.rec).

More information: https://seminariodecriptografia.my.canva.site/

In this two-day The Tech We Want Online Summit, the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) is bringing together key voices working on public interest technologies to start a collective conversation about new practical ways to build software that is useful, simple, long-lasting and focused on solving people's real problems.

The Online Summit is open to everyone, especially technology workers, developers, engineers and programming language specialists who are interested in taking a critical look at current technologies.

Tor's Executive Director, Isabela Fernandes, will join a panel about the trajectories of some open and alternative technologies, and discuss how to tip the scales in our favor of free and open technology amidst a solutionist discourse in an ultra-specialised industry.

• When: October 17 from 13:30 - 14:30 UTC.
• Where: https://okfn.org/en/events/the-tech-we-want-online-summit/

The event brings together digital rights networks from around the world for three days of collaboration building, knowledge sharing, brainstorming, and rejuvenation.

At the Tor and Tails booth you can learn more about tools that can help you be anonymous on the internet. Come to chat with us about how to use the Tor Browser or the Tails OS to protect your privacy online and bypass censorship. Learn more about our community and how to volunteer. And if you would like to partner with us for digital security training in your area.

We will also host a variety of circles & sessions:

• Friday September 27

  • 15:00 Working on the well-being of workers - discussion about policies for well-being of workers and how to build democratic processes within the organization. -- Isabela
  • 16:30 Running Tor relays in/by the Global South - session on how to run Tor relays in people's own contexts, technical requirements, to motivate people in Global South countries to run relays. --Raya

• Saturday September 28

  • Developing robust signalling channel – For users in highly censored regions, gaining access to anti-censorship tools can be difficult since these tools are prime targets of blocking by censors. A signalling channels is a highly available (i.e., difficult for censors to block), typically low-bandwidth, method of communication that aims to provide users access to more robust anti-censorship tools. Typically a user makes a request to a signalling channel and gets a response that includes secret keys and/or addresses of proxies or bridges for users to make a censorship-resistant connection. Despite the existence of many censorship-resistant tools, options for signalling channels are limited. With many cloud providers opting to discontinue support for domain fronting, we are interested in exploring strategies around new signalling channels that might be able to help censored users get essential information to make anti-censorship connections.

• Sunday September 29

  • Leveraging Weblate and automated checks for higher quality localization – In this session we will share best practice on localizing Internet Freedom applications and we will share how Tor Project migrated from Transifex into Weblate, a free software project.
  • Tor Browser, Tails, and You – How do Tails and the Tor Browser currently fit into the digital security toolbox for your communities? How could they become more helpful in that toolbox? Come and discuss it with the Tor Applications Team and the Tails Team.

  For more info on programming, please visit: https://wiki.digitalrights.community/index.php?title=Global_Gathering_2024

FIFAfrica24, set to take place in Dakar, Senegal, offers a platform for deliberation on gaps and opportunities for advancing privacy, free expression, inclusion, free flow of information, civic participation, and innovation online. This year marks the first time that the largest gathering on digital rights on the continent will be hosted in Francophone Africa. Previous editions have been hosted in Uganda, South Africa, Ghana, Ethiopia, Zambia and Tanzania.

Members of the Tor Project will be in attendance and host sessions:

• Tuesday September 24 – Pre-event by invitation only: Protecting human rights defenders and journalists

• Thursday, September 26 – Running Tor relays in the Globa South

  For more info on programming, please visit: https://internetfreedom.africa/fifafrica-agenda/

Matrix is first and foremost built by its community. This event is meant for everyone to learn what everyone is working on, share or hack on projects, or hire experienced members.

Come join us for our talk "Advancing human rights with Tor" on September 21, 2024 at 10.00am local time.

For the full schedule, please visit: https://2024.matrix.org/

Open Source Summit is the premier event for open source developers, technologists, and community leaders to collaborate, share information, solve problems, and gain knowledge, furthering open source innovation and ensuring a sustainable open source ecosystem. It is the gathering place for open-source code and community contributors.

Open Source Summit is a conference umbrella, composed of a collection of events covering the most important technologies, topics, and issues affecting open source today.

Visit their website: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-open-source-summit-ai-dev-china/about/about-open-source-summit/

The 33rd USENIX Security Symposium will take place on August 14–16, 2024, at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown in Philadelphia, PA, USA. The USENIX Security Symposium brings together researchers, practitioners, system programmers, and others interested in the latest advances in the security and privacy of computer systems and networks.

View the symposium program and register on their website: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24

Here's a list of seven papers we are especially excited about:

"Snowflake, a censorship circumvention system using temporary WebRTC proxies" Cecylia Bocovich, Tor Project; Arlo Breault, Wikimedia Foundation; David Fifield and Serene, unaffiliated; Xiaokang Wang, Tor Project https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24/presentation/bocovich

"Stop, Don't Click Here Anymore: Boosting Website Fingerprinting By Considering Sets of Subpages" Asya Mitseva and Andriy Panchenko, Brandenburg University of Technology (BTU Cottbus, Germany) https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24/presentation/mitseva

"Does Online Anonymous Market Vendor Reputation Matter?" Alejandro Cuevas and Nicolas Christin, Carnegie Mellon University https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24/presentation/cuevas

"Fingerprinting Obfuscated Proxy Traffic with Encapsulated TLS Handshakes" Diwen Xue, University of Michigan; Michalis Kallitsis, Merit Network, Inc.; Amir Houmansadr, UMass Amherst; Roya Ensafi, University of Michigan https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24/presentation/xue-fingerprinting

""I just hated it and I want my money back": Data-driven Understanding of Mobile VPN Service Switching Preferences in The Wild" Rohit Raj, Mridul Newar, and Mainack Mondal, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24/presentation/raj

"Security and Privacy Software Creators' Perspectives on Unintended Consequences" Harshini Sri Ramulu, Paderborn University & The George Washington University; Helen Schmitt, Paderborn University; Dominik Wermke, North Carolina State University; Yasemin Acar, Paderborn University & The George Washington University https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24/presentation/ramulu

"GFWeb: Measuring the Great Firewall's Web Censorship at Scale" Nguyen Phong Hoang, University of British Columbia and University of Chicago; Jakub Dalek and Masashi Crete-Nishihata, Citizen Lab - University of Toronto; Nicolas Christin, Carnegie Mellon University; Vinod Yegneswaran, SRI International; Michalis Polychronakis, Stony Brook University; Nick Feamster, University of Chicago https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24/presentation/hoang

DEF CON is one of the oldest continuously running hacker conventions around, and also one of the largest.

Join us at Defcon32! Come by our booth, check out new Tor merch, and listen to our talk "Measuring the Tor network" on Saturday, August 10th at 3.00pm.

Millions of people around the world use Tor every day to protect themselves from surveillance and censorship. While the Tor Browser and its protocol are widely known, the backbone of the Tor ecosystem, its extensive network of volunteer relays, is often subject to speculation and misinformation. The Tor Project is dedicated to supporting this network and fostering a vibrant, diverse community of relay operators.

This talk will focus on our efforts to maintain a healthy network and community, and detect and mitigate attacks -- all with the help of metrics and analysis of usage patterns. By illustrating how we collect safe-enough metrics for an anonymity network, we will offer insights into how we identify unusual activity and other noteworthy events on the network. We will also discuss our ongoing strategies for addressing current and future network health challenges.

If you are interested in understanding the inner workings of the Tor network and its relay community and how we keep this vital ecosystem running, this talk is for you.

For more info, visit: https://defcon.org/html/defcon-32/dc-32-speakers.html