[tor-reports] George's status report: June 2016

[George Kadianakis]

# Activities of June 2016

- Continued reviewing, testing and fixing bugs on the shared randomness
  subsystem (prop250). Our branch has been updated and is ready for merge (#16943).

  Also wrote a patch for updating dir-spec.txt with the changes that are
  going to be induced by prop250 to consensuses and votes (#17435).

- Revisited the overlap descriptor logic of prop224 and specified improvements
  to the system: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-June/011059.html

- Did some software development:

  Wrote a patch for #17688 [Our default Guard value is still 3 if no latest consensus or no params]
  and a patch for #19454 [tor crashed when "HeartbeatPeriod 0"]

  Reviewed #18322 [Core Tor/Tor]: Log unparseable votes so they can be analysed (inbox tor-bugs)
  and #18571 prop224: Encode/Decode descriptor implementation

  Did some analysis in #19162 [Make it even harder to become HSDir].

  Handled four more bug reports through our bug bounty program. Also sent an
  email summarizing the current status of our bug bounty program and future
  steps.

  Helped with SponsorU triaging and prioritizing of guard tasks.

- Investigated various issues with the hidden service protocol when used by
  unreliable devices like mobile phones on 3G. Ideally, hidden services should
  be able to support those kind of devices as well, without any reachability
  issues: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/16387

  Through this discussion we also found a bug in the intro point retry logic
  for hidden services:
    https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19522

- Suggested ways to improve the current PT webpage:
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-June/011044.html

- Suggested BridgeDB statistics that could be of interest:
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2016-June/000424.html

- Discussed the possibility of combining Tor hidden services with freenet:
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-June/011108.html