Tor Weekly News — June 24th, 2015

Harmony harmony01 at riseup.net
Wed Jun 24 15:12:01 UTC 2015


========================================================================
Tor Weekly News                                          June 24th, 2015
========================================================================

Welcome to the twenty-fifth issue in 2015 of Tor Weekly News, the weekly
newsletter that covers what’s happening in the Tor community.

Contents
--------

 1. Adopt an onion with Nos Oignons
 2. Miscellaneous news
 3. Upcoming events

Adopt an onion with Nos Oignons
-------------------------------

Alongside the thousands of individual Tor relay operators who donate
their time, expertise, and resources in order to build a fast and stable
Tor network, a number of Tor relay organizations (independent of the Tor
Project itself) have been set up in several countries. These groups make
use of the benefits that formal non-profit status brings — such as
funding opportunities, resource pooling, and legal advice — to set up
and operate fast, secure Tor relays, and often to represent Tor and Tor
users in local-language media. Torservers.net — the Germany-based relay
organization and umbrella group for these projects — currently lists [1]
fourteen partner organizations in eleven countries, with more on the
way.

Nos Oignons [2], the French Torservers.net partner, runs five
high-capacity relays on three machines that together handle a fiftieth
of current Tor traffic. The bandwidth for one of these is generously
provided by the registrar and hosting company Gandi [3], but the other
two are funded by the organization itself, at a cost of around 300 euros
per month. With only three months’ worth of financing left, Nos Oignons
is holding its first funding drive [4] to ensure these major relays stay
online for the benefit of all Tor users.

If you donate more than 2 euros to Nos Oignons between 15th June and
15th August, you can suggest a name for their next Tor relay. The
current set are named after the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, Ursula K.
Le Guin’s “Ekumen” universe, and the protagonist of Walter Tevis’ novel
“Mockingbird”, so use your imagination! At the end of the fundraiser,
three entries will be chosen at random and the team will pick one of
them; see the campaign page (or the English announcement [5]) for
information on how to take part.

  [1]: https://www.torservers.net/partners.html
  [2]: https://nos-oignons.net
  [3]: https://www.gandi.net
  [4]: https://nos-oignons.net/campagne2015/
  [5]: https://nos-oignons.net/pipermail/announces/2015/000005.html

Miscellaneous news
------------------

Anthony G. Basile put out version 20150616 [6] of Tor-ramdisk, featuring
updates to core software.

  [6]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2015-June/038199.html

meejah announced [7] that txtorcon, the Twisted-based asynchronous Tor
controller, now supports David Stainton’s “tor:” endpoint parser.  “This
means two things: txtorcon now depends on txsocksx, and you can do
"client-type" things directly with endpoints”. See meejah’s message for
more details.

  [7]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-June/008961.html

Jesse Victors published his second Tor Summer of Privacy status
report [8] for the OnioNS (Onion Name System) project, detailing further
work to decentralize the system and improvements to event logging.

  [8]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-June/008964.html

Arturo Filastò published a summary [9] of the costs incurred by OONI’s
next-generation data-processing pipeline since March.

  [9]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/ooni-dev/2015-June/000295.html

Thanks to Ana Lucia Cortez [10] for running a mirror of the Tor Project
website and software archive!

 [10]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-mirrors/2015-June/000904.html

Upcoming events
---------------

  Jun 24 02:00 UTC | Pluggable transports/bridges meeting
                   | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Jun 29 18:00 UTC | Tor Browser meeting
                   | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Jun 29 17:00 UTC | OONI development meeting
                   | #ooni, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Jun 30 18:00 UTC | little-t tor patch workshop
                   | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Jun 30 - Jul 02  | Many Tor people @ 15th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium
                   | Philadelphia, USA
                   | https://petsymposium.org/2015/
                   |
  Jul 01 13:30 UTC | little-t tor development meeting
                   | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Jul 03 19:00 UTC | Tails contributors meeting
                   | #tails-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   | https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-project/2015-June/000242.html


This issue of Tor Weekly News has been assembled by Harmony and other
contributors.

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 [11], write down your
name and subscribe to the team mailing list [12] if you want to
get involved!

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


More information about the tor-news mailing list