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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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March 2017 Report for the Tor Browser Team
by Georg Koppen 05 Apr '17

05 Apr '17

Hi all! In March we made three releases, Tor Browser 6.5.1[1], 7.0a2[2], and 7.0a2-hardened[3]. Tor Browser 6.5.1 was the first point release in the 6.5 series fixing mainly regressions we found after 6.5 got out and containing version bumps to a variety of our components to close security holes. We needed to put some effort into creating a new patch for our W^X JIT implementation as the backported patch we used got broken by a security fix. The alpha and the hardened releases shipped tor 0.3.0.4-rc but included otherwise nearly the same changes as the stable one. Besides work related to our releases we focused mainly on making our build system faster and more scalable[4], and on moving to Firefox ESR 52[6]. We organized our tickets in a way that blockers for our switch to ESR 52 in our nightly builds were easily visible by using the keyword `tbb-7.0-must-nightly`. We solved all of them and are about to start nightly builds with a browser based on ESR 52. Bundles should be available from tomorrow on.[6] We made further progress on our build system improvements as well and nightly builds using rbm, our new reproducible builds manager, should be available this month, too.[7] The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in March is accessible using the TorBrowserTeam201703 tag in our bug tracker[8]. In April we plan to get a set of new releases out (6.5.2, 7.0a3, and 7.0a3-hardened) and focus on getting the alpha series into a stable shape. We have created special keywords to track both the work needed for the alpha and the work to get it stablilized while retaining all the properties outlined in our design documentation. Those keywords are: `tbb-7.0-must-alpha` and `tbb-7.0-must`. If there is time left we plan to work further on making our build system faster and more scalable. We intend to set up regular nightly builds which would allow us to quantify the build time improvements we expect from the new build infrastructure.[9] All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the TorBrowserTeam201704 tag in our bug tracker.[10] Georg [1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-651-released [2] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-70a2-released [3] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-70a2-hardened-released [4] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17379 [5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~ff52-esr [6] https://people.torproject.org/~linus/builds/ [7] See https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17379 and child tickets [8] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~TorB… [9] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21286 [10] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~TorBrowserTeam2017…

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Damian's Status Report - March 2017
by Damian Johnson 04 Apr '17

04 Apr '17

Hi all! My status report this month includes a few trip photos so think I'll just provide a link this time... http://blog.atagar.com/march2017/ Cheers! -Damian

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UX Team Summary (March 2017)
by Linda Naeun Lee 03 Apr '17

03 Apr '17

Hello all, Here's what we've been up to in March. ᕦ(^o^)ᕤ 1: Performed user tests on the mobile security slider [1]. We redesigned the security slider for mobile devices, and in the process, altered the settings and text. From testing, we found out that people expected the slider to operate differently (some dragged the slider, some clicked at discrete points, some people clicked on the words below the slider), and we've used this feedback make sure that all of these interactions have a response. Participants read all of the text in the interface and felt better about the new naming convention, but more improvements could be made to correctly communicate what these settings are for. 2: Designed the portals for torproject.org [2], especially the support page [3]. We've designed the support page, and are now working on the content that will go on the page. Alison and Colin are writing up frequently asked questions and their respective answers to those questions. We're going to focus heavily on assisting with the download and installation process by OS, and cover the most commonly asked questions sent to help@tpo. Brainstorming at the dev meeting clarified what purposes the other portals can serve as well. 3: Brainstormed improving tor launcher, browser fonts, and security slider for tor browser. All of these were a result of dev meeting goodness. We plan to make design changes to tor launcher to make it easy to use (we should do this now), then work on automating the connection process by pinging relays and bridges to see which ones are reachable (proposal almost finalized), and eventually work on a meek-fronted scheme that interacts with bridgeDB for safe connections (proposal pending). We are unsure how the browser fonts affect the end users, and if it bugs them enough for them to switch. We also noted that the security slider is hard to adjust, and is global, which makes user usually default to the lowest security setting required by any of the sites they regularly frequent. 4: Attended rightscon and interacted with human rights activists, policymakers, and funders [4]. I, Linda, attended this event, and found it quite energizing. It's not everyday that you can interact with at-risk users from all over the world. I also learned a lot, which I liked. 5: Made tor-official images and banners [5]. Elio made some pretty nice looking images! We plan to use them eventually, when tpo.org is redesigned. [1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/UX/OrfoxSecuritySlider#Te… [2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/UX/TorProjectWebsite [3] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/UX/SupportPage [4] https://www.rightscon.org/program/ [5] https://github.com/uracreative/tor-assets ٩(◕‿◕)۶, Linda -- 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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