======================================================================== Tor Weekly News Febrary 22nd, 2016 ========================================================================
Welcome to the 2nd issue in 2016 of Tor Weekly News, the weekly newsletter that covers what's happening in the Tor community. Contents -------- 1. Tor Browser 6.0a2 is out 2. Dev Meeting and Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia 3. Monthly status reports for January 4. Miscellaneous news 5. Upcoming events Tor Browser 6.0a2 is out ------------------------ The Tor Browser team put out a new release in the experimental series [1]. It updates Firefox to 38.6.1esr (which includes some important security updates), includes some bugfixes on the Tor side of things, and ships with two new obfs4 bridges. These updates landed first in the stable releases 5.5.1 and 5.5.2. [1]: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-60a2-hardened-released Dev Meeting and Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia ----------------------------------------------------- A group of around 80 Tor contributors will meet in Spain this weekend for the biannual developers' meeting to make plans for the next 6 months and beyond. There is a wiki page with some proposed topics of discussion [2]. Immediately after, in the same city, is the Internet Freedom Festival, a multidisciplinary "unconference" with discussions, workshops, and hackathons addressing community, advocacy, tooling, and more [3]. [2]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2016WinterDevMeeting/AgendaIdeas [3]: https://internetfreedomfestival.org/ Monthly status reports for January ---------------------------------- Tor project members sent in their January reports: Colin [4] worked on a long-term support plan, the user manual, and Canadian exit capacity. The Pearl Crescent [5] and Tor Browser [6] teams did a lot of dev work for the 5.5 stable release and made some setup wizard improvements which are in the alpha releases. David [7] worked on proposals 224 (next-generation hidden services) and 250 (shared random values in the consensus), and started adding some tracepoints to tor for instrumentation during debugging and simulation. Damian [8] made some improvements to his terminal-based relay monitor, Nyx, and to his tor-controlling Python library, Stem. The OONI team [9] released a web-based explorer for the crowdsourced measurements of censorship and network tampering they've been collecting for the past few years. Isabela [10] wrote reports and proposals to sponsors, and discussed future design work with Simply Secure. George [11][12] worked on guard selection and next-generation hidden services in proposals 246, 247, 250, 259, and reviewed some reports from the new HackerOne bug bountry program. Leiah [13] finished up the fundraising campaign with a few graphics. Georg [14] worked on the Tor Browser build, signing, and release processes. The Core Tor team [15] tested guard selection improvements, did some work towards hiding directory authorities (proposal 257), and worked on the Ed25519 implementation. Karsten [16] worked on Metrics (a website with plots of interesting Tor-related numbers), Onionoo (a web API surfacing the real-time consensus data), Globe (a web app built on Onionoo), and CollecTor (an archive of historical consensus data). Isis [17] finished the "bridge guards" implementation (proposal 188), which makes it harder for an adversary to find (and block) the unpublished entry-points into the Tor network. [4]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2016-February/000976.html [5]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2016-February/000977.html [6]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2016-February/000978.html [7]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2016-February/000979.html [8]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2016-February/000980.html [9]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2016-February/000981.html [10]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2016-February/000982.html [11]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2016-February/000983.html [12]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2016-February/000986.html [13]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2016-February/000984.html [14]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2016-February/000985.html [15]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2016-February/000987.html [16]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2016-February/000988.html [17]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2016-February/000989.html Miscellaneous news ------------------ There's a new tor-onions mailing list [18] for discussion around setting up and operating hidden services. It's analogous to the tor-relays mailing list [19], which may be of interest to relay operators. [20]: https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-onions [21]: https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays Upcoming events --------------- Feb 26 - Mar 01 | Tor Dev Meeting | Valencia, Spain | https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2016WinterDevMeeting | Mar 01 - Mar 06 | Internet Freedom Festival | Valencia, Spain | https://internetfreedomfestival.org/ | This issue of Tor Weekly News has been assembled by jl. Want to continue reading TWN? Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteers to watch the Tor community and report important news. Please see the project page [22], write down your name and subscribe to the team mailing list [23] if you want to get involved! [22]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TorWeeklyNews [23]: https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/news-team -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk@lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
