[tor-reports] George's status report: March 2015

[George Kadianakis]

# Activities of March 2015

- Wrote a proposal for increasing the requirements to become an HSDir:
  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-March/008532.html
  That's trac ticket #8243.  

- Helped write a blog post crowdsourcing ideas for our upcoming
  crowdfunding campaign:
  https://blog.torproject.org/blog/crowdfunding-future-hidden-services

  Also compiled a wiki page with the various projects that have been
  proposed:
  https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/CrowdfundingHS2015
  I haven't updated it since the blog post got published.
  
- Did some analysis on the utilization of Tor bridges based on their
  bandwidth histories:
  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-March/008541.html

- Helped develop various techniques and fixes for increasing
  resistance to DoS attacks on hidden services. That's trac tickets
  #15463, #15515, etc.

- Shared some thoughts on the encrypted services project:
  https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/15271

- Reviewed #13736. Also reviewed Karsten's Metrics integration of the
  hidden service statistics. You can now find all these statistics
  using the "Hidden Services" tag of https://metrics.torproject.org/ .

# Activities for April 2015

- Work on upcoming hidden service statistics (#15272). On this note,
  Karsten has already done nice work on #15513, and David has been
  working on his HSDir health measurements.

- Work more on anti-Dos for hidden services (#15463).

- I should update the Tor website to mention Ahmia on the hidden
  service configuration page. And also open a ticket for this task.

- I should also help decide on whether we should allow efficient
  port-scanning of hidden services or not. Apprently we made it harder
  to port scan hidden services with #13667 and we should think whether
  we still want to keep this defence. The argument for ditching it, is
  that we know people will port scan anyway, and with #13667 applied
  they hurt the network much more.

- Work more on the upcoming crowdfunding campaign.