Events

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

The annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) brings together privacy experts from around the world to present and discuss recent advances and new perspectives on research in privacy technologies. PETS/PoPETs is the premier venue for novel applied and/or theoretical research into the design, analysis, experimentation, or fielding of privacy-enhancing technologies.

More info: https://petsymposium.org/

We are inviting nominations for the 2024 Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies! Please nominate your favorite privacy papers published in the past two years (self-nominations are allowed). The deadline for submissions is May 10th.

Please visit the award website for information about the award, submission rules, and past winners: https://petsymposium.org/award/cfn.php

HOPE XV will be the fifteenth Hackers On Planet Earth event.

During April, 10% of all ticket sales go to the EFF! This event promises to be memorable. It is open to all hackers, makers, tinkerers, experimenters, artists, educators and anyone else with an interest in exploring and improving the world we live in and sharing knowledge with others. HOPE is an all-ages event with multiple simultaneous sessions and many other things to do throughout the weekend.

Submissions are now open: https://hope.net/cfp.html

The world’s most important bitcoin voices converge in Prague. This event is aimed at Bitcoiners from all around the world who are familiar with the topics and are looking for deeper insights and to meet like-minded people as well as people wanting to learn more about bitcoin. The goal is to talk about the most important topics, help bitcoin adoption and bring the community together and giving rise to new connections and ideas.

More information: https://www.btcprague.com/