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March 2017 Transifex report
by Colin Childs 09 Apr '17

09 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 07 Apr '17

07 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 03 Apr '17

03 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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3 Apr 2017 network team meeting: status reports and meetbot notes
by Nick Mathewson 03 Apr '17

03 Apr '17

Hi! I'm trying to be a little more proactive in sending out links to our meetbot logs for the network team. We're also trying a new format where we put our status reports on a pad in parallel and talk about them during the meeting. So I'm going to paste from the pad into this mail, and include a link to the meetbot log at the end of the mail. If you want to ask us about something you see here, please use a public mailing list: sending emails to individual developers is a tiny bit creepy sometimes. ================================================== Weekly network team meeting 3 April 2017 New format! To discuss: * Rotating roles * This pad format * putting out 0.3.0 -- anything else? * New dirauth in 030 stable? * GSoC * We didn't triage 0.3.1 in Amsterdam. =================================================== username: last week: * * this week: * * nickm: last week: * got back from amsterdam; that went well, both in terms of work done and in negative d(drama)/dt * Resurrected calltool, my assembly-reading objdump-parsing callgraph generator. Needs more work; output still isn't right. available at https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/nickm/calltool.git/ . output is not to be trusted yet. * a couple of small cleanup patches (remove tor-checkkey, use openssl includes less) * general consensus diff backend hacking (sponsor4) * lots of talking about crypto, followups, etc this week: * I'm hoping to put out 0.3.0.5-rc. Help? * I'm hoping to start merging mikeperry's netflow patches. Help? * Gotta go through all our notes from the meeting and see what turns into a to-do item. * Going to see how far I can get on the consensus diff implementation. It would be cool to have it working by some time next week, but that's ambitious. * We've got to look at gsoc applications; they're due today. * Enjoy the lovely boston weather. asn: last week: - returned from amsterdam - wrote a blog post about UX of onion addresses. hopefully publishing today. - started looking into ed25519 blinding stuff. - replied to some of the email backlog. this week: - figure out what to do with ed25519 key clamping and AONT construction - review ed25519 blinding code. update spec. add docs. - maybe start thinking about cpath crypto API for prop224. not sure if i will have time. pastly: 1. Finishing up work on getting my kist code ready to be reviewed by my employer so I can share it with Tor to get feedback. As part of that, I'm planning on implementing run-time switching between schedulers with function pointers. For example, scheduler_run would be a function pointer to scheduler_run_vanilla or scheduler_run_kist based on the UseKIST torrc option. Changing UseKIST and reloading Tor would just update pointers and clean up memory if necessary. Does that sound like a mergable idea? (yes, sure, assuming it's clean :) -NM) 2. I saw that the network team is working on a new responsibility rotation, including front-line support in #tor. First, I'd like to volunteer to help with front-line support. (sounds good! we should all take turns. -NM) Second, I think +R should be removed from #tor, at least when I am actively online. We get roughly zero spam right now, but we also get very little support requests. I think this is relevant to this meeting if network team is wanting to get more active on the front-line. (not a network-team call afaik -NM) catalyst: last week: * returned from AMS * polished my 13790 patch * started looking at 0.3.1.x milestone bugs this week: * find a few 0.3.1.x milestone bugs to work on ("revision_stalled" etc. where the user has been unresponsive about revisions) * learn more about PT and anti-censorship Sebastian: Rust team founded with Alex and Chelsea Lots of Rust hacking We can link Rust now :) Started a consdiff implementation. No unsafe code, 50% performance of C impl without tweaks (C is somewhat optimized) dgoulet: last week: - Amsterdam was very productive for me. Worked a bunch with asn on prop224 implementation. Came back quite unhealthy so I'm working through that. I've emptied my email stack for now. I still have quite the TODO (network team related and other Tor things) so I'll try to go over it this afternoon. - Bad relay world is moving with some discussions and soon blog post. this week: - I'm planning this week to finalize #20657 once and for all then go crazy on testing and fuzzing (for which I had a good workshop in AMS, thanks nickm!) haxxpop: last week: * Rewrite the get_responsible_hsdirs according to the comments of dgoulet and asn https://github.com/haxxpop/tor/pull/3/commits this week: * I will refactor that get_responsible_hsdirs if there are more comments from the team * Maybe find some other prop224 stuff to do ahf: since last meeting: - Worked on prop#278 issues: #21667 + #21662 + #21663. - Implemented proposal #274 in issue #21641. - Helped review #21643, #21645, and #21651. - Looked into a PT regression I caused in #21757 and thereafter investigated if the regression would impact tor-fw-helper. Looked into how tor-fw-helper worked, what it is, and if there was still a need for the tool. Discussed deprecation strategy with Nick. - Looked into our old IPv6 roadmap, issues related to IPv6 code as preparation for the Amsterdam meeting and GSoC proposal. - Went to Amsterdam, met and talked to a lot of new people. - Hosted a sponsor 4 session with Karsten (metrics team) + Nathan (guardian project). - Joined Sebastian and Chelsea's work on Rust porting. Read up on Rust. this week: - Finishing prop#278 related issues: currently working on splitting them up into reviewable patches that fits the relevant issues. - Walk over my Amsterdam notes for different ideas and projects. - Look into next steps for Sponsor#4 tasks. - Need to talk to Karsten about the possible impact some of the sponsor4 stuff might have to the metrics team. (happy to talk, possibly after the meeting/tomorrow! -karsten) isis: since last meeting: - wrote more of the paper/design spec that is due for my OTF deliverable (#10 on https://people.torproject.org/~isis/otf-etfp-sow.pdf) - took two days off last week since the dev meeting went over the weekend - read a bunch of appengine documentation to get the meek reflector for bridgedb working - sketched out some UX stuff for the distributor and the API that will be available to TB - several talks with different rustlang developers who are excited and want to know what we want out of rust this week: - still cruching a bit to finish the OTF deliverables by the 22nd, so more of the same work Mike: Last week: * I spoke at IETF * Recovered from AMS * Finishing up the Firefox code review. About 1 more day of work. This week: * Resume working on Prop#254 * Do some followup from AMS * More Meetings yawning: this week: * Maybe poke at my optimized lattice crypto code some more. Isabela: Last week: Worked on user growth strategy update - hope to share it by eow Worked on final report for ISC Tried to catch on AMS meetings notes This week: Get user growth strategy update done catch up with the team on follow ups from the meeting work on March report for sponsor4 =============================== Meetbot logs from the IRC meeting: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-dev/2017/tor-dev.2017-04-03-17.00.html -- Nick

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March 2017 report for the metrics team
by Karsten Loesing 03 Apr '17

03 Apr '17

Hello Tor, hello world! Below you'll find the highlights of Tor metrics team work done in March 2017. On behalf of the Tor metrics team, Karsten Published a blog post on recent improvements [1] to the Atlas web application [2], including improved error handling, UX improvements, and standards compliance. [1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/atlas-recent-improvements [2] https://atlas.torproject.org/ Created a project page for metrics-lib on Tor Metrics [3] with a set of easy tutorials and the most recent JavaDocs. [3] https://metrics.torproject.org/metrics-lib.html Moved specification pages for CollecTor [4] and Onionoo [5] to Tor Metrics with the longer-term goal to bring all user contents related to Tor metrics together on a single website. [4] https://metrics.torproject.org/collector.html [5] https://metrics.torproject.org/onionoo.html Met with several folks not directly involved in the metrics team at the Tor meeting in Amsterdam and sketched out how we could improve directory-request statistics, what metrics and measurements could look like in 5 years [6], and what the metrics team and the OONI team could collaborate on in the nearer future [7]. [6] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2017Amsterdam/No… [7] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2017Amsterdam/No… Wrote down a set of objectives and key results for the metrics team to work on in Q2 2017 [8]. [8] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/MetricsTeam#Objecti…

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