[tor-reports] Status report July 2012

[Jacob Appelbaum]

Hi,

July was an insane month for me. I feel like I'm still hardly able to
come up for air. I flew to Europe twice and around the US as well.

I started the month in Florence, Italy for the TorDev meeting. I
traveled to the Tuscany countryside to have a big OONI related meeting
with Arturo and Isis; we also had a nice game of Mao or three with other
Tor hackers. That was basically the first half of July and resulted in a
lot of progress on various projects.

Everyone that wanted GPG hardware should have it now.

I traveled to Spain for PETS2012. PETS was awesome as usual.

I briefly flew home for a wedding and some laundry. I also had a few
meetings in Seattle and Los Angeles. The meeting in Los Angeles was a
Google event about illicit networks; I had a chance to ask Eric Schmitt
about integrating Tor into Android - I received a really disappointing
answer about "ensuring that it is impossible to use Tor for evil" while
ignoring that Google makes no such absolutist efforts for its services.
Bah. The rest of the meeting was really solid and I enjoyed it.

I flew back to Spain to give an invited keynote at GUADEC, the main
European Gnome meeting.

GUADEC was a really great meeting and as a result, we're now discussing
privacy on the desktop in a big way. This includes an incognito guest
mode that includes Tor for network traffic; with such a guest mode,
guest users would not change the state of the computer nor leave traces
on the network. It also includes a privacy control panel and systemd now
has taken some hints from my anti-forensics work:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/commit/?id=7212a8a99ee863698f5feaa00abb4b99f3996a1a

I released version 0.0.1 of tlsdate and packaged it for Debian; it was
rejected because of a few minor nitpicks. The package will be
resubmitted for version 0.0.2 of tlsdate. I may try to get this out at
Toorcamp or it may slip.

I did various OONI related things - some of which were just improvements
on plugins that already exist, others were related to processing work,
presenting the data, etc.

Sukhbir and I made a TorBirdy release. Mozilla rejected it because their
review process is extremely difficult.

I worked on my two FOCI paper submissions. Those papers mark the end of
my work with UW/Tor and I'm now back to Tor full time. We gave these
talks yesterday at USENIX/FOCI and they were well received.

I worked on my NAT paper but I didn't finish it to my linking. Karsten
is probably about to strangle me, so it's nearly first in my queue.

I've also been working quite extensively in the last few months with
Nadim on Cryptocat related stuff. Not the least of which is this idea
that we need to start calling HTTP over .onions 'HTTPO' but also other
stuff relating to Cryptocat's security models, mpOTR, OTR, data
retention, etc.

Ian asked me to take up a development role on OTR and I agreed. Largely,
I think this won't take up a lot of my time but it is important for our
users that someone is working on this stuff. I also asked Roger about
hosting the code in our git repo and he seemed to think this was a fine
idea, as source forge is not the best place for such a project.

All the best,
Jake