[tor-reports] Roger's May 2014

[Roger Dingledine]

1) Participated in the Usenix Security PC meeting, which was a two-day
ordeal where we produced the program for Usenix Security:
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity14/technical-sessions
While there, I did a Tor talk for local grad students and professors:
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/eecs/etc/events/showevent.cgi?3137

2) Attended an OONI / M-Lab / Google / Georgia Tech / Stonybrook dev
meeting. The science of measuring network interference is still a hot
topic, and I think we're making great progress at growing the community
and coming to some consensus on what is important to work on.

3) Met with our SponsorF program manager to brainstorm ways to make the
other research groups most useful to the world in the remaining year of
the project.

4) Talked to many people at IEEE Security & Privacy ("Oakland"). More
details at the bottom of the SponsorF May report:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2014-June/000558.html

5) Helped Karen frame a funding proposal to better study (and fix)
Tor performance in low-bandwidth environments. This topic remains
messy and tough:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/4487
but it also remains very important for many of our global users.

6) Helped Mike put together a preliminary funding pitch for fixing key
Tor Browser missing features / bugs that threaten security, usability,
and privacy.

7) Turned down my NDSS 2015 program committee invite -- it is open access
and I would like to support it, but the time commitment for these huge
conferences is just too large to do more than one a year. :(

8) Started to help organize and invite people to the Paris dev meeting:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2014SummerDevMeeting
So far we have 45 people signed up, and it's looking like it will be
a great gathering. There's so much going on in Tor-land! If I've
accidentally skipped you, please contact me.

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My June will include:

9) New research funding is looking likely to investigate and improve
hidden service scalability and performance. It would be neat to put
more energy into making hidden services work better for the masses
(which in turn might make the masses find hidden services more useful,
and broaden the variety of services in the world).

10) Help with the EFF Tor Relay Challenge:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-challenge-2014

11) Help assign PETS stipends:
https://petsymposium.org/2014/stipends.php

12) Participate in a circumvention researcher summit with Google in
Seattle. My hope is that many of the research groups in this area will
realize areas of overlap, and start collaborating better.

13) Attend the final PI meeting for SponsorF. I got signed up for
a one-hour talk to give us an overview of the state of censorship
circumvention research and tools, how it's changed over the past four
years, and brainstorm with the audience where we want to go from here.

14) Do my reviews for FOCI:
https://www.usenix.org/conference/foci14
Plus participate in the PC meeting to decide the program.

15) Continue to plan for, and then actually arrive at, the Paris dev meeting.

--Roger