In mid-May, the Tor Project held a nonfungible token (NFT) auction of a generative art piece we called Dreaming at Dusk, created by artist Itzel Yard (ixshells) and derived from the private key of the first onion service, Dusk.
This action was held on Foundation and resulted in a final bid of 500 Ethereum (ETH), roughly $2M USD at the time of the auction, with the proceeds going towards the Tor Project and our work to improve and promote Tor.
There's a new release candidate available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.6.4-rc from the download page on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release likely next week.
Remember, this is a not a stable release yet: but we still hope that people will try it out and look for bugs before the official stable release comes out in June.
Tor 0.4.6.4-rc fixes a few bugs from previous releases. This, we hope, the final release candidate in its series: unless major new issues are found, the next release will be stable.
Changes in version 0.4.6.4-rc - 2021-05-28
Minor features (compatibility):
Remove an assertion function related to TLS renegotiation. It was used nowhere outside the unit tests, and it was breaking compilation with recent alpha releases of OpenSSL 3.0.0. Closes ticket 40399.
Minor bugfixes (consensus handling):
Avoid a set of bugs that could be caused by inconsistently preferring an out-of-date consensus stored in a stale directory cache over a more recent one stored on disk as the latest consensus. Fixes bug 40375; bugfix on 0.3.1.1-alpha.
We are excited to announce that three new members are joining the Tor Project’s Board of Directors: Alissa Cooper, Desigan (Dees) Chinniah, and Kendra Albert! Each new member comes to Tor with a different set of expertise that will help the organization and our community. At the end of this post, you can read each of their bios.
Welcome to the onion space. We've been here since 2014, and we grow every day. In a few months, some onions will rot, while others will blossom. Dusk was the first onion; now there are hundreds of thousands. In an entirely different corner of the universe, where smart contracts thrive, Dusk is being auctioned. You can bid for it by interacting with functions living in a chain of blocks.
There's a new release candidate available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for Tor 0.4.6.3-rc from the download page on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new Tor Browser release likely next week.
Tor 0.4.6.3-rc is the first release candidate in its series. It fixes a few small bugs from previous versions, and adds a better error message when trying to use (no longer supported) v2 onion services.
Though we anticipate that we'll be doing a bit more clean-up between now and the stable release, we expect that our remaining changes will be fairly simple. There will likely be at least one more release candidate before 0.4.6.x is stable.
Changes in version 0.4.6.3-rc - 2021-05-10
Major bugfixes (onion service, control port):
Make the ADD_ONION command properly configure client authorization. Before this fix, the created onion failed to add the client(s). Fixes bug 40378; bugfix on 0.4.6.1-alpha.
Minor features (compatibility, Linux seccomp sandbox):
Add a workaround to enable the Linux sandbox to work correctly with Glibc 2.33. This version of Glibc has started using the fstatat() system call, which previously our sandbox did not allow. Closes ticket 40382; see the ticket for a discussion of trade-offs.
We have a new stable release today. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for Tor 0.4.5.8 on the download page. Packages should be available within the next several weeks, with a new Tor Browser likely next week.
Tor 0.4.5.8 fixes several bugs in earlier version, backporting fixes from the 0.4.6.x series.
Changes in version 0.4.5.8 - 2021-05-10
Minor features (compatibility, Linux seccomp sandbox, backport from 0.4.6.3-rc):
Add a workaround to enable the Linux sandbox to work correctly with Glibc 2.33. This version of Glibc has started using the fstatat() system call, which previously our sandbox did not allow. Closes ticket 40382; see the ticket for a discussion of trade-offs.
Minor features (compilation, backport from 0.4.6.3-rc):
Make the autoconf script build correctly with autoconf versions 2.70 and later. Closes part of ticket 40335.
The Tor Project now has a status page which shows the state of our major services.
You can check status.torproject for news about major outages in Tor services, including v3 and v2 onion services, directory authorities, our website (torproject.org), and the check.torproject.org tool. The status page also displays outages related to Tor internal services, like our GitLab instance.
This post documents why we launched status.torproject.org, how the service was built, and how it works.
