[tor-reports] Sukhbir's September

[Sukhbir Singh]

Hi everyone,

Here is what I did in September, which was quite a busy month:

TorBirdy
========

- Implemented support for Thunderbird 24. The minimum version of
  Thunderbird we support is 10.0, so I spent a considerable amount of
  time ensuring compatibility is maintained between Gecko 17+ and Gecko
  < 17. (The difference is not only in the API but also in the
  preferences.)
    
- Added Thunderbird support to Tor Launcher. 

Added Thunderbird support to Tor Launcher so that we can ship Tor and
related components with TorBirdy, instead of having the user install Tor
separately. We now have such bundles ready (all platforms), where
everything is packaged in one extension.

The bundles are available at:

    https://people.torproject.org/~sukhbir/torbirdy/

Make sure to read:

    https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/torbirdy#TorBirdywithTorandTorLauncher

... before trying out these packages. For now, I am including the Tor
binary (and other components) from the TBB 3.0-alpha3 packages. In the
long run, we should probably have a more secure system. (You should
verify the hashes for now.)

Thanks to Mark and Kathleen for their help with this.

- Improved TorBirdy's documentation.

Wrote a lot of documentation that includes details like the preferences
we change, TorBirdy's preference system, configuration, installation,
and much more. All the documentation is available on our "website":

    https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/torbirdy

- Thunderbird patches.

Unfortunately, this did not work out again. Though we now know what
needs to be done after talking with Mike, but the *how* part is still
unclear.  We did get in touch with the reviewer for some clarifications
and are waiting for a reply.

- Set up the system for signing TorBirdy XPI.

For future TorBirdy releases starting the next version, we will be
signing the XPI (code-signing). More details about this when we do the
release.

- Improved support for Thunderbird Chat.

I spent some time looking at the protocols Thunderbird chat supports and
the chat feature in general. I updated a few preferences to make it more
secure, but as a whole, it respects the proxy settings and does not
introduce things that we should be worried about. I verified this for
all the protocols.

It is therefore possible to use the chat in Thunderbird as a Tor-enabled
IM program, minus of course the fact that it does not support OTR.
Supported networks: Facebook, Google Talk, IRC, Twitter, XMPP.

- Overall, I worked on the following TorBirdy tickets:

    #9648, #9673, #9060, #9772, #7776, #8326, #8936, #8341, #8125,
    #6319, #9846, #9133, #6017, #9130, #9134, #6660, #7060, #8775,
    #8909, #8910, #8911, #9132, #9131.

- Based on the above changes, we will be releasing TorBirdy 0.1.2 this
  weekend, with the most notable change being Thunderbird 24 support
  which many users are waiting for.

GSoC
====

- Mentored Hareesan for the first week of September. He had exams after
  that so did not work for the rest of the month but he has plans to
  stay after GSoC and continue the project, so that's good.

-- 
Sukhbir