[tor-reports] Pearl Crescent Report - May 2016

[Mark Smith]

[This is a re-send. I submitted this last week, but my message never 
appeared on the tor-reports list.]

Work completed by the Pearl Crescent team during May 2016
(Kathy Brade and Mark Smith):

* Tor Browser and Torbutton:

Again this month we mainly worked on Firefox Tor Browser 6.0 tasks. The 
work we did included reviewing patches and creating patches for new 
fingerprinting and security issues.  Here are some of the interesting 
tickets we worked on:
       "Review Firefox Developer Docs and Undocumented bugs since FF38esr"
       https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18545

       "SVGs should not show in Page Info when disabled"
       https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18770

       "6.0a5 is not starting on OS X if put into /Applications"
       https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18947

       "reinstate the update.xml hash check"
       https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19121

We also fixed minor bugs that only needed preference changes and 
reviewed patches for many Tor Browser tickets, including 18619, 18743, 
18884, 18914, 18915, 18950, 18958, 18976, and 19065.

We helped test Tor Browser 6.0.

We participated in a discussion about browser sandboxing (a potential 
contract deliverable for Fall 2016).

* Tor Browser Updater:

This month, we fixed some updater-related bugs that we did not have time 
to complete before Tor Browser 6.0a5 as well as some new issues that 
were discovered after the release of 6.0a5:

       "Mac OS: meek-http-helper profile not updated"
       https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18904

       "add automated tests for updater cert pinning"
       https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18912

       "Mac OS: alpha channel upgrade is not smooth"
       https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18928

       "Mac OS: HTTPS-E missing after update"
       https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18951

We also did our best to test the updater that is included in Tor Browser 
6.0 (since it will not be exercised by end-users until they update to 
6.0.1).

* Tor Launcher: No activity this month.

* Miscellaneous Activities:
        We participated in the weekly Tor Browser meetings on IRC, we
        monitored other meetings such as the UX meeting, and we
        participated in various design discussions on IRC as well as
        on the mailing lists.

* Planned for June:
      - Assist with follow up work for the Tor Browser 6.0.x stable
        releases. Specifically, we expect some followup work due to
        the Mac OS changes that were made for Gatekeeper (#13252) and
        there may be some updater bugs to fix as well (based on blog
        comments made about Tor Browser 6.0).

      - Work on items for Tor Browser 6.5alpha. This may include
        experimenting with "side-by-side" storage of user data on
        Linux and Windows. See:
          https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18367 and
          https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18369

      - Work on fixes for other Tor Browser "loose ends", e.g.,
          #17858 (Creating incremental MARs for hardened builds)
          #17891 (Window classes change after update restart)
          #18292 (staged updates fail on Windows).
          #18913 (about:tor should not have chrome privileges)

* As Time Permits:
      - Work with UX researchers to ensure that their Tor Launcher
        research is productive. See the discussions on the UX
        mailing list or visit:
        https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorLauncherUX2016

      - Work on other Tor Browser, Tor Launcher, and Torbutton usability
        issues.

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