April 2017 - tor-project - lists.torproject.org

[Proposal] Social Contract
by Alison 11 Apr '17

11 Apr '17

Hi everyone, Last year we wrote a Social Contract with a set of promises to our users about our standards for making Tor. When we agreed on this document, we didn't have a formal set of voting guidelines [1] in place. Now that we have those, I'd like us to officially ratify the Social Contract according to our voting procedure. I am opening up the Social Contract proposal (attached) for discussion. Please first read the voting guidelines linked below, then give your feedback on the proposal in this thread. You may also create a new proposal for discussion. The discussion phase will run until 10 April. Please do not wait until the last minute to give substantive feedback. After the discussion phase, I'll initiate a vote. Alison [1] https://gitweb.torproject.org/community/policies.git/tree/voting.txt

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new mailing list and IRC for Global South discussions
by Alison 11 Apr '17

11 Apr '17

Hi all, We have two new communication channels for discussing all things Tor in the Global South: a mailing list [1] and an IRC channel, which is #tor-south on OFTC. If you aren't sure how to use IRC, here are some instructions [2]. These channels were borne out of two discussions [3][4] at the Amsterdam Meeting about building community in the Global South, aka the majority world. Please join us if you're interested in working on that! Thanks to sukhe for creating the mailing list and ilv for creating the IRC channel (at least, I think it was you, since you're op!). Alison [1] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/global-south [2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC. These instructions are for a Mozilla IRC server, so instead of irc.mozilla.org you'll use OFTC. The OFTC server addresses are: irc.oftc.net:6667 (alternative ports: 6668-6670, 7000) or irc.oftc.net:6697 for SSL (alternative port: 9999) (SSL is recommended). [3] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2017Amsterdam/No… [4] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2017Amsterdam/No…

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SHA2017: Who is coming?
by Nurmi, Juha 10 Apr '17

10 Apr '17

Hi, I am going to SHA2017 this summer. Who is coming? Shall we have a meeting there? Regards, Juha

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Tails report for March, 2017
by intrigeri 10 Apr '17

10 Apr '17

Hi, the report about Tails activity in March is online: https://tails.boum.org/news/report_2017_03/ Spoiler alert: the "Reproducible Builds" section includes amazing news. Due to popular demand, an HTML version is attached, for your offline reading pleasure :) Cheers, -- intrigeri

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Notes from April 6 2017 Vegas team meeting
by Karsten Loesing 10 Apr '17

10 Apr '17

Notes for April 6 2017 meeting: Nick: 1) Network team continuing post-meeting: stuff's ok. 2) new tor-0.3.0.5-rc released; stable should be soon. 3) +1 on isabela's team meeting idea 4) + lots on doing _something_ to get more teamwise coordination. These meetings aren't doing that. 5) Nick's kid on spring break week-after-next; Nick will be offline more than usual Georg: 1) We made progress towards our transition to ESR52; there are first nightly builds available for testing; the announcement went to tbb-dev: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tbb-dev/2017-April/000501.html 2) There was quite some interest in Amsterdam to get micropayment tools integrated into Tor Browser; we should have a position on that and a plan 3) Who is triaging user experience issues on trac (linda?) (the ux team?) (nobody?)? <- currently it seems "nobody" is the answer but Isabela is looking for a better solution Karsten: 1) Resolving remaining issues of OnionPerf deployment. 2) Simulating improved directory-request statistics for user number estimates. 3) Wrote down objectives and key results (OKRs) for Q2/2017. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/MetricsTeam#Objecti… Shari: 1) Heading to San Francisco for quick trip to meet with Mozilla. 2) Job description for grantwriter position was posted today. 3) Plans to talk with flexlibris next week about Global South stuff that came up at the Tor meeting. 4) Working with Jon to finalize dates for Montreal meeting so we can solicit input and start making plans. Isabela; 1) ISC project is over - submitted final report to them and will work on a blog post about our work at orfox - loop the team in it as well 2) Following up with SIDA, OTF proposals (that are in process) 3) working on march report for sponsor4 and build a spreadsheet for sponsor4 progress track 4) trying to finish the user growth strategy update - want to send to vegas leads for feedback first and then to internal 5) My goal right now is to get each team to build a roadmap and to think of dependencies they have with other teams and by when they would need those. Once we have that, my next step will be to figure out dependencies between teams. 6) I am off on Friday April 14.

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March 2017 Transifex report
by Colin Childs 10 Apr '17

10 Apr '17

Hi everyone, Below is the monthly Transifex report for March, 2017: ### Report Attached are daily, weekly and monthly translation graphs. The Y axis is "source words". 13.70K source words 3,222 collaborators 154 languages 42 Project resources 8 languages at 100% completion (across all 42 project resources): Bulgarian (bg) Chinese (Taiwan) (zh_TW) French (fr) French (Canada) (fr_CA) Norwegian Bokmål (nb) Portuguese (pt) Spanish (es) Vietnamese (vi) -- Colin Childs Tor Project https://www.torproject.org Twitter: @Phoul

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SponsorR March 2017 report
by George Kadianakis 08 Apr '17

08 Apr '17

Hello, here is the March 2017 report for SponsorR: - Lots of progress on the implementation of the service-side of prop224: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/20657 and we also made an implementation plan for the client-side coding and splitted it into tickets: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17242 - Wrote a blog post on the onion address UX and how to improve their usability: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/cooking-onions-names-your-onions - Some more improvements to the prop224 spec: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-March/011966.html - Discussed possible improvements to the encoding of onion addresses to make them more resistant to phishing: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-March/012030.html https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-March/012029.html - Discussed additional security verifications that might need to happen to onion addresses: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-March/012015.html - Continued progress on the Name System API proposal. It's now in torspec as proposal 279, and it also received some more feedback on the mailing list: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-March/012077.html https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-March/012020.html

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Fwd: [Netfreedom] Request for help: International Developer Survey
by Shari Steele 08 Apr '17

08 Apr '17

> "2. Share the survey with your networks and encourage them to pass it > along. We would like to get a diverse range of developers to take the > survey.” > Begin forwarded message: > > From: s2e(a)seamustuohy.com > Subject: [Netfreedom] Request for help: International Developer Survey > Date: April 5, 2017 at 7:41:21 AM PDT > To: netfreedom(a)lists.cymru.com > > Hello all, > > In the Guardian Project <https://guardianproject.info/>'s current work with > the FDroid <https://f-droid.org/> community to make it a secure, > streamlined, and verifiable app distribution channel for high-risk > environments we have started to become more aware of the challenges and > risks facing software developers who build software in around the world. > > There are a wealth of resources available on how to support and collaborate > with high-risk users. Unsurprisingly, we could not find any guidance on how > to support and collaborate with developers where the internet is heavily > monitored and/or filtered, let alone developers who might be at risk > because of the software they develop. > > We have started conducting research on developers from a range of closed > and closing spaces. We hope that the results of this research will help > international software projects and organizations better understand and > respond to the unique needs of different international developer > communities. > > Part of this user research was the development of the challenges.tech survey > <https://challenges.tech/> which will be used to help us form a better > understanding of the challenges international developers face, their > motivations, and their priorities. With the help of the Localization Lab > <https://www.localizationlab.org/> we have translated this survey into > Chinese, Spanish, Farsi, French, and Russian. > > We have two requests: > > 1. If you are a developer take this survey <https://www.challenges.tech/> > (It takes about 10 minutes.) > 2. Share the survey with your networks and encourage them to pass it > along. We would like to get a diverse range of developers to take the > survey. > > *https://challenges.tech* <https://challenges.tech> > > We will close down the survey in a month (End of April). We will then replace the > challenges.tech website with the aggregated survey results. We will also > publicly share the overall results our research on the Guardian Project > <https://guardianproject.info/> website in a research report. We hope that > this report will help international organizations and software development > projects understand and respond to the unique needs of different > international developer communities. > > Best, > s2e > > -- > seamus tuohy > Principal Consultant | Prudent Innovation > s2e(a)prudentinnovation.org > PGP: 36AC 272E B7CF EDD5 F907 E488 B619 3EC7 3CF0 7AA7 > _______________________________________________ > Netfreedom mailing list > Netfreedom(a)lists.cymru.com > https://lists.cymru.com/mailman/listinfo/netfreedom

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Core Tor sponsor4 March report
by isabela 07 Apr '17

07 Apr '17

Core Tor team March 2017 Report: For March we did a good chunk of work for Proposal 140 [1] which implements consensus diffs, first we ran again our numbers for it to be able to see how much bandwidth we expect to save [2]. Then we start to work on actually change the code to implement the proposal, we did: => #21651 - Prop140 / compression: Refactor directory cache spooling code [3] => #21645 - Prop140 / compression: Unified directory cache backend [4] => #21644 - Prop140: Fuzz the diff and patch code [5] => fix on the performance of SHA3- keccak. This was caught by a performance report that showed the function was super slow. By fixing this we improve it speed 15%. [6] We finished the implementation of Proposal 274! [7] It will be part of our 0.3.1 release [8]. This work will reduce the onion key rotation rate from the current value (7 days) to something closer to 28 days. Doing this will reduce the total microdescriptor download volume by approximately 70%. We continue with our effort to revise, analyze and write proposals for ways to use less directory bandwidth. One of the ideas [9] was to explore the possibility of saving bandwidth by improving our compression system, we want to check if offering other compression mechanisms that might fit better scenarios where the trade of bandwidth usage for CPU process makes more sense. We finished writing Proposal 278 [10], here is an email to tor-dev [11] where we shared the first draft for feedback from the community, it has a good problem statement that can help understand the benefits of this approach, and some information about the analysis we did. Then we move to work on the actual proposal, below is the work we started in March but that will be merged in April: => #21667: Prop278: Handle new headers in directory.c [12] => #21662: prop278: Add support for LZMA2 and/or Zstandard [13] => #21663: prop278: Refactor the torgzip module to support additional compression schemes [14] At the end of March The Tor Project had its biannual Dev meeting in Amsterdam. There we had a session with our Metrics team lead, Karsten, and Nathan from Guardian Project to discuss Directory Bandwidth Reduction [15]. This meeting was very important as we want to make sure we coordinate with the Metrics team about the work we are doing since it can influence how they count things. And we also want to take the opportunity to get feedback from Mobile, since mobile users with low-bandwidth is one of our target audience for this work. After Amsterdam we had a follow up meeting online early this week (4/4) as well [16]. This is other work we did in March but haven't been merged yet: => Needs Revision: #20021 Require ntor-onion-key in microdescriptors, descriptors [17] => Needs Review: #21642 Prop275: Eliminate "published" times from microdescriptor consensus [18] => Needs Review: #21869 Labeled storage backend for consensus docs and diffs [19] [1] https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/140-consensus-diff… [2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21210 [3] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21651 [4] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21645 [5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21644 [6] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21737 [7] https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/274-rotate-onion-k… [8] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21641 [9] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21211 [10] https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/278-directory-comp… [11] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-March/011959.html [12] https://bugs.torproject.org/21667 [13] https://bugs.torproject.org/21662 [14] https://bugs.torproject.org/21663 [15] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2017Amsterdam/No… [16] https://pad.riseup.net/p/chikeuBN1OUh [17] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/20021 [18] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21642 [19] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21869

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Job Opening - Writer/Editor
by Erin Wyatt 06 Apr '17

06 Apr '17

Hello Everyone, We are beginning the search for our next writer/editor. Sadly, Cass will be leaving Tor Project at the end of the month for another position, though she says she’ll stay involved with Tor. :) She wanted to break the news herself, but she is on vacation for a bit longer and we would like to get the process started. She will follow up with you all soon. The job posting is attached as a PDF and live on our website: https://www.torproject.org/about/jobs-editor.html.en If you know of anyone who would be good at this position, please forward this email or the link to them! Thank you. Have a nice weekend! :) Cheers, Erin Wyatt HR Manager ewyatt(a)torproject.org GPG Fingerprint: 35E7 2A9F 6655 45F9 2CB6 6624 BA0C 9400 F80F 91CE

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