[tor-reports] Pearl Crescent status report for February 2014

[Mark Smith]

Tor-related work that the Pearl Crescent team (Kathy and me) did in 
February:

* Finished adding a "Use Default Bridges" option to Tor Launcher.
   Mike recently merged these changes into master, so they will soon
   appear in TBB 3.6 builds.  The user interface may evolve in the
   future; see for example ticket 11071.
     https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10418
     https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/11071

* Worked with the Tails developers to incorporate a few Tor Launcher
   enhancements that will allow Tails to use Tor Launcher as a
   standalone Tor configuration utility.  Thanks to anonym for
   the patches!
     https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10876
     https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/11074

* Improved the user experience for non-English speaking users by
   incorporating the translated Tor status and error messages from
   Vidalia into Tor Launcher.  This turned out to require quite a
   bit of work, but since the status messages are seen by TBB users
   each time they start the browser, the benefit is large too.  These
   changes should appear in TBB 3.6 and possibly in a 3.5.x release.
     https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10604

* Helped a little with various TBB 3.5.x and 3.6 (PT) issues.
   See the list marked with % below.

* Spent time triaging and addressing various Tor Launcher issues in
   a continuing effort to add polish to that extension and to
   (hopefully) make life easier for the support team.  See the list
   marked with %% below.

* Started to review the notes from the 2014 Winter Dev Meeting with
   an eye toward understanding where we should contribute, ensuring
   that bugs are filed for components we own (e.g., Tor Launcher), etc.

Plans for March:
* Contribute to TBB 3.6 in whatever way we can.
* Make more progress on 4234 (Firefox-based updater for TBB).
* Continue the efforts to add polish to Tor Launcher.
* Finish reviewing the notes from the 2014 Winter Dev Meeting.
* Work on (or find someone else on the TBB team to work on)
   the hang issues that people suspect are caused by bugs in the
   Firefox socket transport code (e.g., tickets # 9531 and 10804).

-------
% Other TBB tickets that we helped with in February:
     https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/4261
     https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/7265
     https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9531
     https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/11069

%% Other Tor Launcher tickets that we helped with in February:
     https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10610
     https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10804
     https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10806
     https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10894

-- 
Mark Smith
Pearl Crescent
http://pearlcrescent.com/