[tor-reports] Damian's Status Report - March 2015

[Damian Johnson]

Hi all, March has been a busy month! My fingers are in quite a few
pies but they're all still baking so this is gonna be a short one...

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Google Summer of Code
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Sweet, delicious chaos! Forty-five applications rolled in this year
which needless to say is keeping us busy. Best of luck to everyone
that applied!

Selection announcement is April 22nd.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Nyx Curses Usage
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Still a work in progress but I'm abstracting direct Curses usage out
of Nyx. Short term this provides better thread safety, and long term
could allow direct Windows support through PDCurses. Work on this
will continue all through April.

Overhaul aside, brainstormed project ideas with GSoC applicants
including...

 * Better dialog for event selection
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18499

 * Hostnames and geoip information for connections
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18547

Also cleaned up our ticket queue and made Nyx a bugtracker page...

  https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/nyx/bugs

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Few other noteworthy things...

 * Stem now provides shorthand aliases for fetching descriptors. This
   makes scripting as simple as...

    import stem.descriptor.remote

    print 'Current exits are...\n'

    for desc in stem.descriptor.remote.get_consensus():
      if desc.exit_policy.is_exiting_allowed():
        print(" * %s: %s" % (desc.nickname, desc.exit_policy))

 * Better descriptor validation for non-ascii content.

 * Worked with Sebastian, who's writing a guide for using Stem to
   better test Tor. He found some interesting testing issues on OSX.

Cheers! -Damian