[tor-reports] Isis' September 2012 status report

[Isis]

Isis' Status Report, 2012 September
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# Non-coding things

After going to visit my dad, I calmed down a little bit and realised that
being uberdepressed, while perhaps helping my oh-so-goth image, wasn't helping
be get anything important done, so I went to the RFA meetings in Washington
DC.

As an anarchist, it's a little weird to talk to sit on a Senator's couch and
talk to them and their staffers. And quite hypocritically, I had to make a
list before going of things *not* to say...censoring myself on the topic of
anti-censorship. It was probably for the best though, because I felt I was
already getting the wtf-is-this- scrawny-dready-thing-on-my-settee look, and
blurting out "make total destroy!" or "kill it with fire!" likely wouldn't've
helped.

Weirdness aside, it was actually incredibly interesting. Of note, I met a
staffer working for Berman (Republican) who starting asking me advice because
they were open-sourcing their "public markup app" on github the next day and
they were nervous about it. I asked what the app was, and they said it would
allow the public to see legislature drafts before they are proposed, and
comment/change them. I asked if it would allow me to do Ctrl-A Del, and they
said affirmative. Not totally, but: My Team. :D

Also, many of the other people being funded by RFA's F2C are old friends of
mine working on awesome projects, and I realised that the people in charge of
the F2C program are have been friends of some of my activist friends for
roughly a decade, which makes me feel more comfortable with all of this iffy
state money business.

I also went to the EFF's Pioneer awards. I met Lucky Green, and remarked to an
EFFer that "the old guard of cypherpunks has such whimsical nyms" and they
snarked back, "Yeah, 'cause 'Isis Lovecruft' and 'Moxie Marlinspike' aren't
whimsical as all hell." Nick Mathewson and Mike and a few others later played
Illuminati! (the boardgame) and then hacked on Tor things at Noisebridge.

I also met Jeremie Zimmerman, who is working on La Quadrature du Net. If I
have time this week, I was thinking of going to Paris to meet with them and
talk about their ideas of what future EU policy regarding internet censorship
is going to look like, and how OONI can help La Quadrature shape that for the
better.

I'm on a plane right now to Bruxelles, Belgium. I've never been before! To
quote The Damned: Neat, neat, neat. Jake, Arturo, and I are going to meet with
some of Google's Mlab team to discuss further development and deployment. I'm
really looking forward to working with the Mlab folks, they are super helpful
and nice.  We're also going to an EU commission workshop/conference on
surveillance, which is rather impossible to find any details on (that might be
a good sign?).

# Development

I worked nearly 200 hours, mostly coding. I had to play ketchup from last
month's fiascoes. Ninety-six of those hours were in one week; I ate cold rice
with soymilk poured on top; my brain was like "FFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUU". Also,
somewhere in there, I moved into a new house, with a bunch of scientists,
mostly biohackers, but there are a few other physicists. I might be the only
one without my Ph.D. yet. One of my roommates is currently prototyping a DNA
laser printer, which will allow custom organisms to be constructed,
i.e. custom viruses that could cure as-yet-incurable conditions like certain
types of blindness, HIV, schizophrenia, and perhaps even my Celiac's
Disease. Three other roommates have a brainslicing robot which takes
incredibly precise 40nm slices and then takes a high-resolution image, which
can hopefully be used to reconstruct a neurological model of the original
brain donor.

## OONI

For OONI, I worked on a couple packet level tests, cleaned up a lot of
documentation, wrote utilities for *all of the things* (including a bunch of
Tor utilities for things like building custom circuits), and then boring stuff
like fixing/creating a bunch of logging/error/exception classes. I wrote a
class decorator -- I've always wanted a reason to use one of those -- for
timing out a Twisted defer.Deferred.

## Bridge Reachability Testing

For Bridge Reachability Testing, I rewrote bridget completely, and then George
wanted me to test bridges with pluggable transports, which I thought was no
problem, but then I started finding tons of bugs, and realised it was a much
bigger problem than I suspected, and it included rewriting the entire thing
all over again to deal with rewriting the generated torrc's Bridge line
properly. I keep thinking I'm done, and then finding more bugs. Dealing with
multiple Tor processes, asynchronous programming, and being careful not to
burn bridges or hammer directory authorities is actually quite
challenging. Some of the tickets I killed were #6968, #6969, #6970, and #6971,
and https://github.com/meejah/txtorcon/issues/15 as well as a few others that
I can't look up because there's an Atlantic Ocean underneath me. I'm trying to
remember to use Trac more.

<(A)3
isis agora lovecruft