[tor-reports] SponsorR July 2016 report

[George Kadianakis]

Hello,

here is the July 2016 report for SponsorR:

- Attended and participated in the quarterly SponsorR meeting.

- After many many months of development the codebase of proposal 250 got merged
  upstream! That's the shared randomness project, tracked under ticket #16943.

  This is great news as it marks the beginning of deployment of "next gen hidden services".

  The code is already being tested by the dirauth moria1. You can see moria1's
  votes here:
    http://128.31.0.34:9131/tor/status-vote/current/authority
  See how its votes contain "shared-rand-participate" which signifies that the dirauth
  supports the shared randomness protocol.

  We also killed various post-merge bugs that appeared (#19551, #19561, #19555).

- On the topic of advocacy, we did a talk at the HOPE conference, explaining
  various technical aspects of hidden services.

- We also wrote a blog post about how Tor hidden services can be used to
  enhance the security of Internet of Things solutions like Home Assistant:
    https://blog.torproject.org/blog/quick-simple-guide-tor-and-internet-things-so-far

  And we wrote another blog post about new techniques for detecting malicious
  HSDir nodes: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/new-research-northeastern-university

- We continued our research on improving the performance and reachability of
  hidden services when hosted on unstable networks (like mobile phones):
     https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/16387

  During our research we found a bug where hidden service on mobile phones
  would needlessly rotate their intro points causing reachability problems to its
  clients: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19522

- Continued work on the Tails server project:
    https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-ux/2016-July/001079.html

- Discussed ways to integrate Tor HSes with Namecoin and other naming systems:
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-July/011245.html