[tor-bugs] #2671 [Tor Relay]: Better communication for authority operators, core developers in emergency situations

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#2671: Better communication for authority operators, core developers in emergency
situations
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 Reporter:  nickm      |          Owner:       
     Type:  task       |         Status:  new  
 Priority:  normal     |      Milestone:       
Component:  Tor Relay  |        Version:       
 Keywords:             |         Parent:  #2664
   Points:             |   Actualpoints:       
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Comment(by arma):

 Lots of topics here jumbled together.

 I think one of our main issues is in being able to contact people who are
 offline.

 Part of the challenge there is that Tor people have many things they do at
 once, and sometimes that means being offline, out of the country, etc. I
 don't think people would enjoy having pagers, and even if they did the
 pagers wouldn't work well for plenty of the locations Andrew, Jake, and I
 go.

 So one longterm way to improve things is to make it so there are fewer
 bottleneck people, that is, there are several people who can actually help
 to solve an issue, not just several people who can contact the one person
 who can fix it. Easier said than done of course.

 My preference would be to handle more of our "emergency" issues
 transparently in the open. In my opinion many of the security things we've
 dealt with over the past year did not need to be done secretly with
 pairwise OTR conversations, or even with sekrit lists of pgp-encrypted
 mails. They are issues, we can solve them relatively quickly, the odds
 that somebody will lurk around waiting to find a vulnerability and then
 leap on the opportunity are low. By being more open we will involve more
 of the community, and _create_ more people who can help out in future
 cases. Talking amongst a small closed community doesn't scale as you say,
 and worse it doesn't fix the scaling problem. Plus it takes more energy
 and coordination amongst those trying to keep the secret, and we don't
 have enough people to waste time on that.

 I don't mean to say that no event is so serious that it needs to be kept
 private until after it's resolved. But I think we're being too
 conservative on too many issues, and it's impacting both our productivity
 and our community growth.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/2671#comment:2>
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