Tor Weekly News — March 11th, 2015

[Harmony]

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Tor Weekly News                                         March 11th, 2015
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Welcome to the tenth issue in 2015 of Tor Weekly News, the weekly
newsletter that covers what’s happening in the Tor community.

Tor 0.2.6.4-rc is out
---------------------

Nick Mathewson announced [1] the first release candidate in the Tor
0.2.6 series; the next release will hopefully be the stable version.

This update “fixes an issue in the directory code that an attacker might
be able to use in order to crash certain Tor directories”, as well as
various other bugfixes and improvements. See Nick’s announcement for a
full changelog, and get your copy of the source code from the
distribution directory [2].

  [1]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2015-March/037191.html
  [2]: https://dist.torproject.org/

More monthly status reports for February 2015
---------------------------------------------

The wave of regular monthly reports from Tor project members for the
month of February continued, with reports from Sebastian Hahn [3], Arlo
Breault [4], Karsten Loesing [5], and George Kadianakis [6].

Israel Leiva reported on behalf of the GetTor project [7], while the
Tails team also resumed publishing status reports, with one report for
the second half of 2014 [8] and one for the beginning of this year [9].

  [3]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2015-March/000772.html
  [4]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2015-March/000773.html
  [5]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2015-March/000774.html
  [6]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2015-March/000775.html
  [7]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2015-March/000776.html
  [8]: https://tails.boum.org/news/report_end_of_2014
  [9]: https://tails.boum.org/news/report_2015_01-02

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

Ximin Luo announced [10] preliminary Debian packages for the meek
pluggable transport [11]. See Ximin’s message for installation
instructions.

 [10]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-March/008369.html
 [11]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek

Sukhbir Singh announced [12] a second alpha version of Tor Messenger,
the torified instant-messaging client with multi-protocol support and
Off-the-Record encryption. While not yet ready for public use, Linux
bundles are available for developers and advanced users who want to try
out this exciting new software and provide feedback; if you run into any
new issues, open a ticket on the bug tracker [13] and select the “Tor
Messenger” component.

 [12]: https://trac.torproject.org/
 [13]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-March/008363.html

The Tails team set out [14] the release schedule for version 1.3.1 of
the anonymous live operating system.

 [14]: https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-dev/2015-March/008354.html

For the past few years, Tor has taken part in Google’s Summer of Code
mentoring program, with many positive contributions made and several
projects launched or redeveloped as a result; this year, however, the
program has been scaled back somewhat, and longstanding participants
like the Tor Project, Mozilla, and the Linux Foundation have been
“dropped to make way for newcomers”, as Damian Johnson noted in his
monthly report [see above]. If you’d still like to join the community of
Tor developers, don’t be deterred: see the Volunteer page [15] for a
wealth of ideas for getting started.

 [15]: https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer

The British Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, “charged
with providing independent and balanced analysis of policy issues that
have a basis in science and technology”, issued a briefing paper on the
subject of “the darknet and online anonymity” [16].

 [16]: http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/POST-PN-488/the-darknet-and-online-anonymity

arm [17] is the status monitor of choice for Tor relay operators
everywhere; unfortunately, the name is easily confused with that of the
ARM processor family, so lead developer Damian Johnson is poised [18] to
change the program’s name to “Seth”: “Any strong reasons to pick
something else? Nothing is set in stone yet so still open to
alternatives.”

 [17]: https://www.atagar.com/arm/
 [18]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-March/008398.html

Tor developer and Nos Oignons member Lunar gave a lengthy and detailed
interview [19] to France Culture’s “Les Nouvelles vagues”, offering an
introduction to Tor and online privacy.

 [19]: http://www.franceculture.fr/emission-les-nouvelles-vagues-le-secret-35-bienvenue-sur-tor-l%E2%80%99internet-secret-2015-02-18

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

  Mar 11 13:30 UTC | little-t tor development meeting
                   | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Mar 11 16:00 UTC | Pluggable tranports meeting
                   | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Mar 16 18:00 UTC | Tor Browser online meeting
                   | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Mar 16 18:00 UTC | OONI development meeting
                   | #ooni, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Mar 17 18:00 UTC | little-t tor patch workshop
                   | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Mar 24 - 25      | Roger and Jake @ RightsCon 2015
                   | Manila, Philippines
                   | https://www.rightscon.org/manila/


This issue of Tor Weekly News has been assembled by Karsten Loesing, the
Tails team, and Harmony.

Want to continue reading TWN? Please help us create this newsletter.
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 [20]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TorWeeklyNews
 [21]: https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/news-team