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Sponsor4 work completion report from Core Tor team [final report on this]
by isabela 07 Sep '17

07 Sep '17

Core Tor Team August 2017 report Work completion report: Subobjective 1.1: Reduce Tor processing overhead for low-bandwidth scenarios. Activity: Improve the Directory Authority consensus part of the Tor network in order to optimize low bandwidth users experience. We created a plan[1] to achieve this goal, where we would into each idea we had or could find at our issue tracker or email lists to improve the Directory Authority consensus and implement the most promising ones. Since all this is new at Tor, we had to start by building the tools[2,3] to perform this measurement and these analyses to choose the best ideas to implement for this activity. You will find on this report the list of ideas we identified as the best solutions for this activity goal. We also documented[4] this selection process on our wiki. The design changes ideas we choose gave us 45% of bandwidth reduction for relays and 41% for clients, comparing with the releases prior to the 0.3.1 where these ideas were implemented. A rock on our road for this project was a bug we reported in May related to the implementation of proposals 140 and 278, that cost us some time to figure out. This bug was leading to more bandwidth usage which is completely the contrary of our goal with this project. The bug was fixed and documented on ticket #22702 [5]. Design changes implemented to improve Directory Authority consensus part of Tor network: Idea: Consensus diffs * Proposal 140 [6]. Ticket #13339 [7]. * Idea: Instead of fetching a consensus, clients could fetch a diff from the most recent consensus they have. * Status: Implemented in Tor 0.3.1.x. Idea: Negotiate better compression algorithms * Proposal 278 [8]. Ticket #21211 [9]. * Idea: There are other algorithms like LZMA/LZMA2 or bzip2 that deliver better compression than zlib. We could use HTTP encoding negotiation to select them when available. * Status : Implemented in Tor 0.3.1.x. Idea: Rotate onion keys less frequently * Proposal: 274. Ticket #21641 [10] * Idea: In order to limit the bandwidth needed for microdescriptor listing and transmission, we 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%. * Status: Implemented in Tor 0.3.1.x Idea: Avoid requesting microdescriptors in small batches * Idea: Currently when we want e.g. 21 microdescriptors, we'll probably request them in 3 batches of 7. This makes our compression ratios worse than they would be otherwise. But it ensures that a single cache can't selectively deny us microdescriptors. * Status: Ticket #23220 [11] implements a simple version of this. [1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/NetworkTeam/Sponsor… [2] https://github.com/nmathewson/consensus-diff-analysis [3] https://gitlab.com/ahf/tor-sponsor4-compression [4] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/NetworkTeam/Sponsor… [5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/22702 [6] https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/140-consensus-diff… [7] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13339 [8] https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/278-directory-comp… [9] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21211 [10] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21641 [11] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/23220

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Sukhbir's August 2017
by Sukhbir Singh 06 Sep '17

06 Sep '17

Hi, In August, I worked on the following: * Tor Messenger - Resolved build issues with the ESR52 transition related to the Windows and macOS builds, including deterministic builds for these platforms. - Worked on the following tickets: #10942 #13855 #15161 #16606 #17469 #22005 #22229 This marks completion of the transition to and testing of Firefox ESR52. The next release will be based on Tor Browser tor-browser-52.3.0esr-7.0-1-build1, and THUNDERBIRD_52_3_0_RELEASE on comm-central. * TorBirdy - Released TorBirdy 0.2.3: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/torbirdy-023-released * Community: - Gave two Tor talks in Toronto, Canada 8 Aug 2017: GTALUG 9 Aug 2017: DEFCON416 (Slides: https://people.torproject.org/~sukhbir/talks/toronto-aug-17.pdf) -- Sukhbir

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August 2017 Transifex report
by Colin Childs 06 Sep '17

06 Sep '17

Hi everyone, Below is the monthly Transifex report for August, 2017: ### Report Attached are daily, weekly and monthly translation graphs. The Y axis is "source words". 13.35K source words 3,359 collaborators 154 languages 41 Project resources 9 languages at 100% completion (across all 41 project resources): Bulgarian (bg) Chinese (China) (zh_CN) Chinese (Taiwan) (zh_TW) French (fr) French (Canada) (fr_CA) German (de) Norwegian Bokmål (nb) Portuguese (Brazil) (pt_BR) Spanish (es) -- Colin Childs Tor Project https://www.torproject.org Twitter: @Phoul

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August 2017 Report for the Tor Browser Team
by Georg Koppen 05 Sep '17

05 Sep '17

Hi all! In August the Tor Browser team made two releases, Tor Browser 7.0.4[1] and Tor Browser 7.5a4[2]. Both releases updated Firefox to 52.3.0esr and bumped the respective Tor versions included. Moreover, we added a fix to avoid scary warnings when dealing with .onion services that don't have a TLS certificate[3]. In addition to that, the alpha release provided a number of improvements and bug fixes that needed more testing: selfrando enabled Tor Browser bundles for 32-bit Linux users[4], regression fixes around our external helper app dialog[5], and better W^X enforcement for Tor Browser on Windows[6] to mention just the highlights. Non-release work focused on remaining Sponsor4 items: we tested the Gitian replacement we have been working on for the past months and are switching over to it while I am writing this status report. The next alpha release is supposed to get built with rbm/tor-browser-build to give it a wider testing and iron out remaining issues. We documented and fixed the first issues when building Tor Browser for 64-bit Windows.[8] And, finally, our UX redesign of Tor Launcher got a first prototype we can experiment with and improve upon.[9] The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in August is accessible using the `TorBrowserTeam201708` keyword in our bug tracker.[10] In September we plan to get our first alpha builds out which are based on rbm/tor-browser-build. Moreover, we finally plan to integrate FPCentral as our Panopticlick instance into our QA system.[11] Additional items on our ToDo list are: enabling sandboxing in Linux bundles in the next alpha release[12], making progress with our Tor Browser for 64-bit Windows project, getting the proposed Tor Launcher improvements better tested and finetuned, and starting to update the security slider by taking past year's Firefox vulnerabilities into account[13]. All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the `TorBrowserTeam201709` keyword in our bug tracker.[14] Georg [1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-704-released [2] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-75a4-released [3] https://bugs.torproject.org/21321 [4] https://bugs.torproject.org/20848 [5] https://bugs.torproject.org/22618 [6] https://bugs.torproject.org/22563 [7] https://bugs.torproject.org/23213 [8] https://bugs.torproject.org/23229 [9] https://bugs.torproject.org/23261 [10] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~TorB… [11] https://bugs.torproject.org/6119 [12] https://bugs.torproject.org/22692 [13] https://bugs.torproject.org/23409 [14] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=accepted&status=assig…

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Damian's Status Report - August 2017
by Damian Johnson 03 Sep '17

03 Sep '17

Hi all, no pretty pictures this time but here's what I've been up to this last month... http://blog.atagar.com/august2017/ Cheers! -Damian

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Ricochet is in the wrong language
by Andri Effendi 03 Sep '17

03 Sep '17

Hi All, I am trying to run ricochet on MacOS. I recently had to do a clean install of my OS so I am in the process of reinstalling all the software. Why is Ricochet now in spanish when I open it? I have downloaded it from https://ricochet.im/releases/1.1.4/ricochet-1.1.4.1-macos.dmg Not sure what to do to get it in English again. Kind Regards, -- Andri Effendi <fusionman133(a)gmx.de> Organiser of The Free Software Movement in Sydney www.freesoftware.org.au/sydney/ GPG fingerprint: 8438 138D ECDA 05E0 591F F2B4 4721 0F03 AC24 DF73 Confidentiality cannot be guaranteed on emails sent or received unencrypted. Sent with GMX - Email Made in Germany

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SponsorR Status Report August 2017
by George Kadianakis 03 Sep '17

03 Sep '17

Hello, here is the August 2017 report for SponsorR: - We are near the end of our work here! We've successfuly merged upstream both the service-side and the client-side of prop224 (#20657 & #17242)! Running an HS v3 hidden service should work fine from latest master. That's basically the minimum viable product for next generation hidden services. Now we start a period of testing, bugfixing and maintainance until the stable 0.3.2 release. Expect a blog post about our work when we have killed most serious bugs. - We fixed various high severity bugs that could influence reachability and correctness of prop224: #23110, #23157, #23311, #23335, #23343. - We have also prepared fixes for various blocker prop224 bugs that we will get fixed real soon now: #23360, #23327, #23056, #23346, #23331, #23355, #23361, #23123

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August 2017 report for the metrics team
by Karsten Loesing 01 Sep '17

01 Sep '17

Hello Tor, hello world! Below you'll find the highlights of Tor metrics team work done in August 2017. On behalf of the Tor metrics team, Karsten Published a blog post [1] summarizing achievements made in the past 12 months with support of Mozilla's Open Source Support (MOSS) program. [1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/we-enhanced-security-and-integrity-tor-met… Formalized the steps for sanitizing bridge descriptors [2] that are collected and published by CollecTor. [2] https://metrics.torproject.org/bridge-descriptors.html Released Onionoo releases 4.0-1.3.0 [3], 4.1-1.4.0, and 4.1-1.4.1 [4] which add a new "version" parameter, remove bridge clients objects' beta fields "countries", "transports", and "versions", contain configuration improvements, and update dependencies. [3] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-August/012387.html [4] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-August/012433.html Released CollecTor 1.2.1 [5] with a fix for handling bridge network statuses containing zero entries. [5] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-August/012402.html

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August 2017 TC Report
by Tommy Collison 01 Sep '17

01 Sep '17

Quick report on what I got up to in August. Renaming this from "Grants Report" to "TC Report" because sometimes I do things that aren't grants. Grants: - Got awarded a grant from OTF. - Got awarded a grant from MDF. - Submitted a (different) grant to OTF. - Submitted a grant to Knight Foundation. - Drafted a letter of inquiry for Tor outreach funding but haven't sent anywhere yet. - Researched other funding sources. Comms: - Published a blog post about Tor Browser downloads. [1] - Edited a blog post about our MOSS final report. [2] - Edited an upcoming blog post about Orfox updates for Isa. - Added some copy to our statement on racists being bad [3] and dealt with the fall-out on the twitterz. - Worked with Steph on a blog calendar so that we post something at least once a week. Misc: - Voted on our membership guidelines -- you should too! - Put all of my New York apartment things in a box and then, a week and 2,865 miles later, unpacked them all in a different apartment in Seattle. All of the movers asked "Microsoft or Boeing?" and so I got to tell them about Tor. Anything that should be on my radar? TC [1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-downloads-2017 [2] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/we-enhanced-security-and-integrity-tor-met… [3] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-project-defends-human-rights-racists-o…

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UX team August summary
by Linda Naeun Lee 01 Sep '17

01 Sep '17

Hi all, Qe finalized the design and copy of Tor launcher (#23261 <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/23261>). You can see the final version, version 8, mocked up here <https://marvelapp.com/3f6102d>. Mark built a working prototype of this new design, and we're getting ready to push changes. I'm personally very excited for this new version of Tor launcher. It's more clear on what options to choose, shows all the network settings on one screen, and communicates more succinctly. We finished three iterations of the Onion Browser branding survey, which aims to quantify how likely they will pick Onion Browser from an app store of browsers that claim to be affiliated with Tor, and what they would find more helpful in signaling the recommendation for Onion Browser and Tor. The next steps are to host the survey ourselves (so we don't rely on a third party collecting user information), and run the survey! We hypothesize that the takeaway will be "okay, no one knows Onion Browser was the recommended one," but are interested in verification, quantification, and use thought processes. We've settled into a rhythm of triaging tickets and getting new tasks to do each week, and using our weekly team meeting to talk about one of our big projects with other teams' members. Now that we're doing this, we feel like we can better be that internal service to other teams at Tor. Not to mention that it feels more productive. Cheers, Linda N. Lee Current Key: https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=lindanaeunlee GPG Fingerprint: FA0A C9BE 2881 B347 9F4F C0D7 BE70 F826 5ED2 8FA2

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