Greetings wonderful carbon-based residents of the Internet. I'm pleased to announce the 1.4.0 release of Stem! What is Stem, you ask? For those who aren't familiar with it Stem is a Python library for interacting with Tor. With it you can script against your relay, descriptor data, or even write applications similar to Nyx and Vidalia. https://stem.torproject.org/ So what's new in this release? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ephemeral Hidden Services and Descriptors ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tor's 0.2.7.1 release is bringing with it new hidden service capabilities, most notably ADD_ONION and HSFETCH. Ephemeral hidden services let you easily operate a hidden service that never touches disk... https://stem.torproject.org/tutorials/over_the_river.html#ephemeral-hidden-s... This latest Tor release also brought with it the ability to retrieve a hidden service's descriptor information. Stem knows how to parse, validate, and decrypt these documents... https://stem.torproject.org/tutorials/over_the_river.html#hidden-service-des... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Faster Descriptor Parsing ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ When reading descriptors without validation (which is the new default), documents are now lazily parsed. This provides a very substantial speedup depending on the document's type... * Server descriptors: 27% faster * Extrainfo descriptors: 71% faster * Microdescriptors: 43% faster * Consensus: 37% faster Prefer to keep validation? No problem! Just include 'validate = True' and you'll be good to go... https://stem.torproject.org/tutorials/mirror_mirror_on_the_wall.html#validat... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ As always this is just the tip of the iceberg. For a full rundown on the myriad of improvements and fixes in this release see... https://stem.torproject.org/change_log.html#version-1-4 Cheers! -Damian