[tor-reports] May status report

[Jacob Appelbaum]

May has been a month of travel, speaking, and hacking on various
projects. I think I was "home" for two or three days in May...

I started off the month by speaking at Farmhouse Conf in Los Angeles.
They invited me back for the next and last event in the series:

  http://farmhouse.la/conf/4

I flew up to San Francisco and met with some Tor hackers; Mike and I
made some good progress discussing various things related to Tor
Browser. I also attended a human rights award event hosted by Global
Exchange to accept an award for a friend.

I was invited to speak at the Oslo Freedom Forum where I gave a workshop
with Danny O'Brien. During this conference I was helping a Tor user who
was under heavy attack.


http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/hanging-out-with-human-rights-heroes-at-the-oslo-freedom-forumn


http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2013/05/islam-internet-and-privacy?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/dissidenceanddiscretion

I talked at length with a great journalist from Norway and he will run a
really long (~10-20 page) article on the OFF/Malware/Tor intersection.

The Oslo Freedom Forum has invited me back for next year to run a
workshop or a series of workshops. More on this at the dev meeting, I hope.

I was also invited to attend the Stockholm Internet Forum - I had a
pretty weird experience. On more than one occasion, I had discussions
with Carl Bildt which felt less than stellar. It made the news as well.

I was invited to visit the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore,
India. I spoke at two panels in one week at the National Law School
(NLS) of Bangalore, India. All in all, I gave about seven or eight talks
and as many workshops in seven days.

The NLS conference:

  http://www.consilience.co.in/

The NLS debate:


http://www.deccanherald.com/content/335424/039failure-media-failure-state039.html

GeekUp hosted me for a really long two hour talk of sorts about society,
technology and how it all ties together:

  http://geekup.in/2013/ioerror

I was asked to keynote Random Hacks of Kindness hosted by CIS - it was
pretty awesome to introduce a bunch of people to Tor and to ooniprobe; a
half dozen people around the CIS are now interested in adding code that
helps detect or understand surveillance and censorship in the Indian
context.

I did a few other miscellaneous things around the CIS and Bangalore.
They do great work, produce amazingly relevant research and the people
there are friendly in ways that impress me. It feels like the early
internet days in India and they inspire great hope for India, as well as
the rest of civil society in the world.

I did a few interviews with the press - or I should say, the press
showed up and I tried to make it uniformly positive. Sadly, as the press
often does a few of them really misrepresented things; annoying but so
it goes...


http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/uid-will-result-in-loss-of-freedoms-wikileaks-backer/article4763595.ece


http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/uid-will-create-a-digital-caste-system-jacob-appelbaum-113053100728_1.html

These were actually printed in the papers too. India has a very rich
printed media ecosystem.

I've prepared everything for the release of tlsdate 0.0.7 - this is a
huge step forward and adds basic support for around two dozen operating
systems. It also fixes some bugs and generally is in great shape.

I've been hacking on ooniprobe setup as there are lots of weird issues
with various different platforms. Homebrew is likely to include
ooni{b,probe} in the near future too. Hooray.

I showed a few specific people at the Center for Internet and Society of
Bangalore, India how to use ooniprobe. We discovered lots of interesting
stuff. They're interested in testing every network in India and
regularly. CIS is pretty much the most awesome internet related group of
people in India that I've encountered in all of my travels to India over
the last few years.

I'm forgetting lots of other things, I'm sure.

All the best,
Jacob