Tor Weekly News — December 11th, 2013

Wed Dec 11 12:39:00 UTC 2013

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Tor Weekly News                                      December 11th, 2013
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Welcome to the twenty-fourth issue of Tor Weekly News, the weekly
newsletter that covers what is happening in the Tor community.

Introducing a new Lead Automation Engineer
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The Tor Project welcomed a new member, Nicolas Vigier, in the role of
Lead Automation Engineer. He swiftly got down to business by putting out
a call [1] for automation-related feedback “from developers of any tor
components”, promising a summary of “the current status regarding build,
packaging, testing, and what should be done” to improve the automated
processes involved in Tor development, as well as “some proposals and a
general plan for the work to be done during the coming months”, an early
version of which is already online [2]. A warm welcome to him!

   [1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-December/005906.html
   [2] https://people.torproject.org/~boklm/automation/tor-automation-review.html

Freedom of the Press Foundation launch a support campaign for Tor
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In his report for November [3], Roger Dingledine wrote: “We've also been
pondering lately how to do a fundraising or donations drive, to help
move us off our reliance on government funders.” The good news is that
Tor has many supporters.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation just started a campaign to support
encryption tools for journalists [4] that is going to last for two
months. The campaign is gathering funds for Tor core development work,
the Tails live system [5], the encrypted mobile communication tools
RedPhone and TextSecure [6], and the encrypted email platform LEAP [7].

Spread the word and help make the campaign a success [8]. Direct
donations to The Tor Project are also always possible [9].

   [3] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-December/000396.html
   [4] https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/blog/2013/12/freedom-press-foundation-launches-campaign-support-encryption-tools-journalists
   [5] https://tails.boum.org/
   [6] https://whispersystems.org/
   [7] https://leap.se/
   [8] https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/
   [9] https://www.torproject.org/donate/

More monthly status reports for November 2013
---------------------------------------------

The wave of regular monthly reports from Tor project members for the
month of November continued, with reports from Roger Dingledine [3],
Georg Koppen [10], Karsten Loesing [11], Matt Pagan [12], Nicolas
Vigier [13] Philipp Winter [14], Damian Johnson [15], and Noel David
Torres Taño [16].

  [10] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-December/000397.html
  [11] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-December/000398.html
  [12] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-December/000399.html
  [13] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-December/000400.html
  [14] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-December/000401.html
  [15] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-December/000402.html
  [16] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-December/000403.html

Miscellaneous news
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David Fifield has produced updated “pluggable transport bundles” [17]
based on the 2.4.18 browser bundles. Be sure to upgrade!

  [17] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/pluggable-transports-bundles-2418-rc-1-pt1-and-2418-rc-2-pt1-firefox-17011esr

David also announced [18] great progress in integrating our current set
of pluggable transports within the new Tor Browser 3 build
infrastructure.

  [18] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-December/005913.html

Thanks to Himanshu from India, Andrew Lewman was able to deploy a new
script [19] to list mirrors of the Tor Project's website [20]. The new
code will ensure that mirrored files are “100% the same as those on
torproject.org (hashing, pgp signatures, etc)” and will remove and
re-instate mirrors accordingly.

  [19] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-mirrors/2013-December/000394.html
  [20] https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/mirrors.html.en

Thanks BarkerJr [21], DevRandom [22], and Userzap [23] for setting up
new mirrors!

  [21] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-mirrors/2013-October/000381.html
  [22] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-mirrors/2013-November/000384.html
  [23] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-mirrors/2013-November/000389.html

Nathan Freitas announced that Orfox was going to replace Orweb [24] in
the Guardian Project set of secure communication tools. Orfox is based
on the Firefox engine and is likely to behave more like the Tor Browser.
“However, Orfox is still very early (not alpha yet) and has not been
fully tested. I would either do your own testing and report back to us,
or only use the app for non sensitive/critical browsing for now”, Nathan
added [25].

  [24] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2013-December/031331.html
  [25] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2013-December/031340.html

arkmd reported [26] that TorBirdy was saving unencrypted drafts on the
remote server on their system. Sukhbir Singh has not been able to
reproduce the issue so far [27] but he is thinking of disabling the
automatic save feature entirely [28].

  [26] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-December/005901.html
  [27] https://bugs.torproject.org/10309#comment:4
  [28] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-December/005903.html

Christian announced [29] that Globe is “now officially hosted on the
torproject servers”. Credits to Karsten Loesing and Peter Palfrader for
setting up the infrastructure. Have a look at this new Tor relay and
bridge explorer [30]!

  [29] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2013-December/031353.html
  [30] https://globe.torproject.org/

ghostmaker advertised [31] “a small new tool for Windows called
InjectSOCKS that can force other Windows software to do TCP connections
via SOCKS.” InjectSOCKS source code and binaries are available from the
project page [32].

  [31] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-December/005908.html
  [32] http://sourceforge.net/projects/injectsocks

The Tails team has issued a call for testing regarding incremental
upgrades [33] — one more step on the path to providing Tails users with
easy upgrades.

  [33] https://tails.boum.org/news/test_incremental_upgrades/

The release schedule for Tails 0.22.1 [34] has been published by
intrigeri. The expected release date for this point release is January
21th.

  [34] https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-dev/2013-December/004405.html

Tor help desk roundup
---------------------

Multiple users have asked the help desk specifically for assistance with
IPv6 bridges. Currently getting IPv6 bridges is not too easy, but the
issue is known [35] and should be solved as the bridge distributor is
improved. IPv6 bridges are functional in (at least part of) China, but
we do not have many of them to distribute. Please set up an IPv6 bridge
if you can: it's only one “ORPort” line to add [36] to the usual
configuration [37].

  [35] https://bugs.torproject.org/9127
  [36] https://people.torproject.org/~linus/ipv6-relay-howto.html
  [37] https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html.en#RunningABridge

Upcoming events
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Dec 27-30 | Tor @ 30th Chaos Communication Congress
          | Hamburg, Germany
          | https://events.ccc.de/congress/2013/

This issue of Tor Weekly News has been assembled by Lunar, harmony,
dope457, Matt Pagan, Roger Dingledine and Karsten Loesing.

Want to continue reading TWN? Please help us create this newsletter.
We still need more volunteers to watch the Tor community and report
important news. Please see the project page [38], write down your
name and subscribe to the team mailing list [39] if you want to
get involved!

  [38] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TorWeeklyNews
  [39] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/news-team
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