May 2016 - tor-project - lists.torproject.org

Ethics Guidelines; crawling .onion
by Virgil Griffith 28 Jul '16

28 Jul '16

Hello all. I am preparing a longer response to the issues Isis et al mentioned. Most are interrelated, but this one is not. And I wanted to get clarification on it. Isis expressed a concern about making a list of bitcoin addresses from .onion, citing, "Consent is not the absence of saying 'no' — it is explicitly saying 'yes'." For what it's worth, ahmia.fi actually supports regex searching right out of the box. In fact, a single line of JSON spits out all known bitcoin addresses ahmia knows about. For example, here's an anonymized list going .onion -> BTC which I mined from Ahmia, * http://virgil.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/btc-on-dot-onion.html [6MB] And here's the same information going BTC -> .onion * http://virgil.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/btc2domains.v2.txt [2mb] If you want to check the results you can ask Juha for the JSON query to do this. Lets go out on a limb and assume that regexs are okay. Is the issue then .onion search-engines? I understand Isis's preference for there to always be affirmative consent but does that mean that until such a standard exists all search engines from onion.link, ahmia.fi, MEMEX, NotEvil, and Grams are violating official Tor community policy? ---- Here's how I currently see this. I put on my amateur legal hat and say, "Well, the Internet/world-wide-web is considered a public space. Onion-sites are like the web, but with masked speakers." * https://www.hks.harvard.edu/m-rcbg/research/j.camp_acm.computer_internet.as… * http://aims.muohio.edu/2011/02/01/is-the-internet-a-public-space/ Ergo, I would argue that, by default, content on .onion is public the same way everything else on the web is. If you don't want to be "indexed", for physical spaces you go in-doors, or for the web you put up a login. As an aside, the web-standard is actually *kinder* than physical public spaces because on the web one can have an unobstrusive /robots.txt saying, "please don't index me". Which is a great thing. Whereas some would say Tor users are "anonymous", others would instead say any and everything Tor is "private". I believe this needs to be clarified. I once proposed to Roger that he delineate the sub-types of privacy in the same way Stallman delineated his "Four Freedoms". Roger replied that he preferred using the broad catch-all term "Privacy". These confusions may be a caveat of using a broad catch-all term. Interpreting broadly, Isis is correct. However, this conclusion has a lot of unpleasant ramifications. Comments appreciated, -V P.S. Mildly related, I saw this today involving DARPA, and Tor. http://thehackernews.com/2016/05/darpa-trace-hacker.html """ The aim of Enhanced Attribution program is to track personas continuously and create “algorithms for developing predictive behavioral profiles.” """ I hope you all are aware this flows directly from MEMEX. Right? This, and MEMEX, seems a much more appropriate target for outrage. A lot of this work that numerous community members have worked on gives even me pause.

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Plan to retire Globe
by Karsten Loesing 29 Jun '16

29 Jun '16

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello everyone, as the subject says, I suggest that we retire Globe (currently available at https://globe.torproject.org/) The main reason is that Globe is serving a similar purpose as Atlas (available at https://atlas.torproject.org/) which it was forked from several years ago. Neither Atlas nor Globe are actively developed, they only receive critical bug fixes whenever necessary. And thanks, Philipp and Isis, for doing that! So, when deciding which of the two services we should keep, I looked at the number of daily requests to both services, which shows that Globe is used a lot less than Atlas: https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/atlas-globe-2016-04-01.png The hope is that retiring Globe could make it more likely that new developers start contributing to Atlas. It would also make it easier for us to add new feature to Atlas, because we wouldn't feel bad for not adding them to Globe, too. In any case, we're getting rid of yet one more thing. Here's a suggested timeline for retiring Globe: - By April 30, we create Trac tickets for all features we like in Globe and that are missing in Atlas. These tickets would go in component "Metrics/Atlas" in Trac. If you want to keep something in Atlas that you like in Globe, this is your chance to make that happen! - By May 15, we'll have reviewed those new tickets and decided which of them we should implement before shutting down Globe. We might send a call for help to tor-dev@ to write these patches. - By May 31 (hopefully), we'll have implemented, reviewed, merged, and deployed the missing features in Atlas, and we'll shut down Globe. We should probably add a static web page pointing to Atlas. If it takes longer than this, it takes longer, but let's use this date for now. Maybe nobody will be missing anything from Globe. We'll see. Suggestions welcome, not only if you strongly object! All the best, Karsten -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJXG5afAAoJEC3ESO/4X7XBj/8H/25hssQXL5QuqVbzngTSJ8AF BchTx9l9lAclddyeaug74obAW01+ljO4PZhEZGr12FrTKtlot3PWlQTykkeqCuKh kbVDHgO4U90qSSsVX2aOB9UVlAfvNpk93c5RqdQVwa/1jx6MaMdUM3OFopm9m8ji ceJqizYBrKfL8sI4ksdz84f9u+fwClI2+2H1RMs5PhFG4gIZ/F/ZzVMbkh2ruITC gNl3tWwj46I1CicPQQfYEtaKsA2VckRNo+8N1pfpSKsHBAP6hdGbKQvTkTxRSsrO MFu+kMaF0wkaT58o2IF2FhrQdnq7rns/zAoG+L2ym+7qqEbuaqb/m3wq1jnNp1I= =NDEg -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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[machine usage] crm, ubuntu1404lts-persona
by Peter Palfrader 07 Jun '16

07 Jun '16

Hello gentle people! I am looking over the machines that tor is paying for, and two of them are the 1984 machine that we have labelled only as crm and ubuntu1404lts-persona. I think they may have been created at one point by Andrew. Does anybody know who might be using these machines? If you have an idea, please let us know. If one of them is your machine, or at one point was, please let us know if it is still useful and we should keep it around. (And please briefly describe what it is being used for.) If I don't hear anything, and nobody objects either, I will stop having them auto-renewed, i.e., I will decommission them. Thanks. -- | .''`. ** Debian ** Peter Palfrader | : :' : The universal https://www.palfrader.org/ | `. `' Operating System | `- https://www.debian.org/

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Proxy Blocking Latency (preprint)
by David Fifield 01 Jun '16

01 Jun '16

Lynn Tsai and I, with the help of others, have been measuring how long it takes for Tor Browser's default bridges to be blocked. https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.08808 (click "PDF") Abstract: Censors of the Internet must continually discover and block new circumvention proxy servers. We seek to understand the pace of this process, specifically, the length of the delay between when a proxy becomes potentially discoverable and when the censor blocks it. We measure this delay by testing the reachability of previously unseen Tor bridges, before and after their introduction into Tor Browser, from sites in the U.S., China, and Iran, over a period of five months. We find that China's national firewall blocks these new bridges, but only after a varying delay of between 2 and 18 days, and that blocking occurs only after a user-ready software release, despite bridges being available earlier in source code. While the firewall notices new bridges in Tor Browser, bridges that appear only in Orbot, a version of Tor for mobile devices, remain unblocked. This work highlights the fact that censors can behave in unintuitive ways, which presents difficulties for threat modeling but also opportunities for evasion. The best summaries are on pages 4 and 5, which show in graphical/tabular form the dates of releases and how long the bridges remained reachable after. We would appreciate any comments or corrections. In particular, the description of the Tor Browser release process could stand some fact-checking by a Tor Browser developer.

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Fwd: Applications extended - APNIC Internet Operations Research Grant
by Virgil Griffith 31 May '16

31 May '16

This seems like a lovely grant opportunity for someone doing BGP or traffic analysis work. Must have some presence in Asia Pacific. -V ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *APNIC Secretariat* <apnic-no-reply(a)apnic.net> Date: Tuesday, 31 May 2016 Subject: Applications extended - APNIC Internet Operations Research Grant ________________________________________________________________________ APNIC Internet Operations Research Grant applications extended ________________________________________________________________________ APNIC is pleased to announce that applications for the APNIC Internet Operations Research Grant have been extended by TWO WEEKS to 15 June 2016 (23:59 UTC). Applicants can apply for funding between AUD 5,000 to AUD 45,000 for research projects on topics related to Internet operations, infrastructure and related protocols, for example: - Network measurement and analysis - IPv6 deployment - BGP routing - Network security - Peering and interconnection Apply now --------- If you have a project that supports the development of an Internet research community whose results can improve the availability, reliability and security of the Internet in the Asia Pacific, then apply now. We encourage members of Network Operators Groups, members/partners of IXPs, operators of root servers, and academics and postgraduate students to submit their proposals. The APNIC Internet Operations Research Grant is administered and managed by ISIF Asia. For more information, please see: http://isif.asia/grant ________________________________________________________________________ APNIC Secretariat secretariat(a)apnic.net <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','secretariat(a)apnic.net');> Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) Tel: 61 7 3858 3100 PO Box 3646 South Brisbane, QLD 4101 Australia Fax: 61 7 3858 3199 6 Cordelia Street, South Brisbane, QLD http://www.apnic.net ________________________________________________________________________

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Tor Hackfest during HOPE?
by Kate 30 May '16

30 May '16

Hi, David Huerta is founder of NYC's hackerspace Resistor and has a very cool day job helping to envision the future of libraries (first locally and then nationally), at the Brooklyn Public Library. He wants to host a Tor hackfest during HOPE. Cheers, Kate Hello, re: latest blog post: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-montreal-building-next-generation-…. Would there be any interest in a Tor Hackfest in NYC? I can bounce the idea off the other NYC Resistor (http://www.nycresistor.com/) kin to see if we can schedule a day or two for late July; Same week as HOPE? We can host groups < 25 people, pro bono. Let me know if there's any interest, .dh huertanix(a)nycresistor.com

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Notes from May 26 2016 Vegas team meeting
by Karsten Loesing 30 May '16

30 May '16

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 See this posting for context: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2016-April/000223.html Notes for May 26 2016 meeting: Georg: 1) Tor Browser 6.0 is ready for QA. Planned release day is May 30. 2) I worked on our search engine problem. Disconnect switched the fallback to DuckDuckGo. 3) I reviewed 2 papers Nick: 1) Tor 0.2.8.3-alpha is almost out. Which TorBrowser will get it? 2) Talked with some folks and Isabela about doing an audit on the Tor code. (Roger set this up; I think an existing funder would be paying?) Seems promising so far. 3) Had meeting with Isabela and team. Productive but team feels stretched. IMO we need: * A sense that everybody is doing their fair share * Nearly all people to be contractually 'allowed' to work on nearly all things. * To track non-coding tasks as well a coding tasks when planning time and allocating people * A better sense of how much volunteers would like to commit, and a way for us to be able to ask the paid people before the volunteers. We have planned to: * Get a working code review system * Add review-points to trac * chop 0.2.9 and future releases down to size * improve our workflow. * have another meeting in july Kate: 1) Rule 41 update —Need to stay with bipartisan talking point: DOJ is trying to get a major policy change enacted with a rule change in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure--DOJ is trying to circumvent Congress. Rep. Poe's office is introducing co-sponsors in two's-- one democrat for each republican. It's going well. 2) CloudFlare update: More allies are joining us; we are planning to track CloudFlare's promises and hold them accountable, probably via an email list. 3) A-Clinic Collaboration - probably not a formal collaboration with this foundation that wants to use onion services to do anonymous health surveys, etc. A letter describing our involvement is still being negotiated. 4) Recruited volunteers to help with HTML tagging so we can upload more things to the Tor website. 5) Press Kit: Volunteer David Stanton is working on user stories document and I am finishing onion services doc as well as document that describes myths about Tor and explains the realities. 6) US Mission in Uganda held an Internet freedom and human rights Twitter event - we participated (5/26) We received some media coverage about the onion services hackfest, including a nice SlashDot piece - BoingBoing: https://boingboing.net/2016/05/26/tor-project-is-working-on-a-we.html - The Register:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/25/nextgen_tor_to_use_distributed_rng_55character_addresses/ - Softpedia: http://news.softpedia.com/news/tor-to-use-never-seen-before-distributed-rng… - IBTimes: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/tor-develops-its-own-random-number-generator-make-… - Hackread: https://www.hackread.com/tor-developers-next-gen-onion-service/ - Slashdot: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/05/25/2347238/tor-to-use-distributed-rng-… - Naked Security: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2016/05/26/tor-takes-on-the-question-what-… FBI is being pressured by the judge to release Tor 0-day in Washington State case Shari: 1) board meeting on Friday; anything you want me to bring up? 2) Monday is a holiday in the U.S. How to handle holidays? 3) Personnel update. Isabela: 1) Organized retrospective meeting with the network team for the team to have a sense of how things are going and where are the pain points we need to improve. Went pretty good for my first irc retrospective :) 2) Working with Alison on updating the SIDA proposal. 3) Working on possible Mozilla grant - at first with TBB and Nathan because we were thinking of applying for mobile browser - now with Karsten because we probably will apply for metrics instead per Mozilla's feedback. 4) focus on making the release 0.2.9 smaller / pick up DRL work (M&E and F-indicators and extension) are the things for me starting next week Mike: 1) I'm wrapping up the last thing before I take a vacation: I'm going to help with the Mozilla proposal(s), and then start my vacation, ideally on June 1st. Karsten: 1) Continued writing a funding proposal for metrics work, together with Isabela and Cass who have been extremely helpful so far. Deadline is May 31st. 2) Just talked to weasel about the virtual machines at one of our hosters basically falling apart. We'll need to migrate them ASAP to a new hoster. Apparently, budget shouldn't be an issue there, because we're freeing up some money by reducing hosting elsewhere, but just in case there's overlap we might be paying a few hundred USD extra. -- Asked Shari for ~200 USD/mo, which she approved. Alison: 1) social contract draft is with Lunar and Matt for one more review before Vegas leads 2) the community council is writing our guidelines -- still in its very early stages 3) sent another update of the membership doc to this team for review - -- next it'll go to tor-internal@ 4) reworking SIDA proposal with Isa 5) OTF concept note for building community capacity within Torservers was invited for a full proposal! 6) Cloudflare meeting (Mike will probably update) 7) support team met yesterday. we hope to integrate this team more into the community team. phoul has done major updates to the support docs and we're now working on plans for distribution and translation and maintenance. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJXTAaJAAoJEC3ESO/4X7XBO5oH/3FH9ZW7O1aJwkIl0vByaPP9 JXDosBBm2FssksZn9z498qQ7o6HkSlfrO0oT3nnjvQlteYGZZQj+gdDuFpiQ8KTD tKlUk753iWDgPrsK0+WMszhKYpe/zNIOQ7GieY0Xx3Nkxmzvc/buMlxA+qHkF09/ NFv6WqJUTy3nZsf8N8JwD2pUiFafXLzthEmrGgLsHxNsIFN1BbdI4npZIueV0Cpw 1cQk01eZKZtoDi03/ilAsVtUoeBYRmjktUgdFIAh9vXputAfG7pgliJCbxj2j+Dw k8p7HfjJQsgistQJJrLVus9Tt1rYQULDqw0r2G9cn6dhuO/zBSNJNBJeqgWH+hE= =FVjF -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Fallback Directory Monitoring
by Damian Johnson 29 May '16

29 May '16

Hi Tim, hi Nick. As requested on ticket #18177 [1] we now have a new DocTor monitor [2] that checks the reachability of our fallback directories. A notification that looks like the following is sent to the three of us and #tor-bots if over 25% of the fallbacks are unreachable... ------------------------------------------------------------ 29/100 (29%) fallback directories have become slow or unresponsive... * 9504CB22EEB25D344DE63CB7A6F2C46F895C3686 => IPv6 ORPort is unreachable (2a03:b0c0:3:d0::2ed:7001:9050) * AEA43CB1E47BE5F8051711B2BF01683DB1568E05 => IPv6 ORPort is unreachable (2001:41d0:a:74a::1:443) * 8B7F47AE1A5D954A3E58ACDE0865D09DBA5B738D => DirPort is unreachable (178.217.184.32:9030) ... etc... ------------------------------------------------------------ A fallback is defined as unavailable if... * We can't connect to its ORPort. * We can't connect to its DirPort. * We can't connect to its IPv6 ORPort (if it has one). * It takes longer than 15 seconds to provide the consensus (download times are usually ~3s). The cron runs once per day. Happy to also send these to tor-consensus-health@ if anybody there wants the notices. Cheers! -Damian [1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18177 [2] https://gitweb.torproject.org/doctor.git/tree/fallback_directories.py

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Monday holiday in the U.S.
by Shari Steele 26 May '16

26 May '16

Hey all. Monday is Memorial Day in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Day The Tor office in Seattle will officially be closed on Monday. All other U.S. Tor people are invited to take a holiday. And those of you who live in other countries, please take off an appropriate holiday wherever you are. :) Our new human resources manager, Erin Wyatt, will be starting on June 6. Coming up with a good holiday policy will be one of the (many) things on her to-do list. Shari

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Re: [tor-project] Onion sites vs onion services vs hidden services
by Nathan Freitas 26 May '16

26 May '16

On Wed, May 4, 2016, at 10:41 AM, Paul Syverson wrote: > On Wed, May 04, 2016 at 07:36:23AM +0000, Yawning Angel wrote: > > On Wed, 4 May 2016 01:30:13 +0000 > > Alison Macrina <alison(a)libraryfreedomproject.org> wrote: > > > So, I want to propose that we choose onion sites or onion services > > > once and for all (I'm in favor of the former because most users have > > > no idea what is meant by "services"; it sounds too vague). Then, > > > whenever we see somewhere on torproject.org or any of our > > > documentation or whatever that still reads hidden services or onion > > > services, that we kill it with fire. > > > > Disagree, because this further reinforces the idea that the internet is > > centered around port 80/443, and is nonsensical given some of our > > prominent use cases ("Ricochet is based around Tor onion services" vs > > "Ricochet is based around Tor onion sites". One of these statements is > > correct, and one is not). > > To further Yawning's point and provide an example of using both terms: > Ricochet is an onion service in which each Ricochet client > creates a local onionsite that others connect to. Actually, for me, the user of the word "service" is something that is a machine-readable endpoint, an API or protocol, while "site" is a meant to have some human-facing aspect that is able to be browsed or read through a web browser or something of that nature. I would say that Ricochet is only an onionservice, while something like SecureDrop or Globaleaks would be an onionsite that offers onionservices as part of the application. +n

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