[tor-talk] Tor Weekly News — January 28th, 2015

Harmony harmony01 at riseup.net
Wed Jan 28 12:08:44 UTC 2015


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Tor Weekly News                                       January 28th, 2015
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Welcome to the fourth issue in 2015 of Tor Weekly News, the weekly
newsletter that covers what’s happening in the Tor community.

The future of Private Browsing Mode
-----------------------------------

Mozilla Firefox, on which Tor Browser is based, offers users a “Private
Browsing Mode” that aims solely to prevent browsing information from
being saved locally. As Georg Koppen pointed out [1], “The question is
now how to treat the other privacy-relevant areas like cross-origin
linkability or fingerprinting?”

Georg proposed a “Private Browsing Mode+”, which would integrate the
disk-avoidance, anti-tracking, anti-fingerprinting, and
location-concealing elements of a privacy-preserving browser in a more
logical way.

  [1]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tbb-dev/2015-January/000217.html

Miscellaneous news
------------------

After a “pretty big overhaul” [2], Damian Johnson announced that
Stem [3], the Tor controller library, now “lazy-loads” descriptors,
resulting in a considerable speed increase when reading network
documents [4]. “Note that descriptor validation is now opt-in rather
than opt-out, so if you’d prefer validation over performance you’ll now
need to include ‘validate = True’.”

  [2]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-January/008211.html
  [3]: https://stem.torproject.org/
  [4]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/stem.git/commit/?id=3dac7c5

The Tails team set out [5] the release schedule for Tails 1.3, and also
published its Code of Conduct [6].

  [5]: https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-dev/2015-January/007945.html
  [6]: https://tails.boum.org/contribute/working_together/code_of_conduct/

Arturo Filastò reported [7] on OONI-related activities at the Nexa
Center’s NNTools2015 event [8].

  [7]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/ooni-dev/2015-January/000238.html
  [8]: http://nexa.polito.it/nntools2015

Patrick Schleizer wondered [9] how Tor Browser could be made to act more
like a “system tor”, and sketched out a possible plan [10]: “What do you
think about this proposal in general?”

  [9]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2015-January/036581.html
 [10]: https://bugs.torproject.org/14121

Upcoming events
---------------

  Jan 28 13:30 UTC | little-t tor development meeting
                   | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Jan 28 16:00 UTC | Pluggable transports meeting
                   | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Feb 02 18:00 UTC | Tor Browser online meeting
                   | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Feb 02 18:00 UTC | OONI development meeting
                   | #ooni, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Feb 03 18:00 UTC | little-t tor patch workshop
                   | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Feb 03 20:00 UTC | Tails contributors meeting
                   | #tails-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   | https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-dev/2015-January/007860.html


This issue of Tor Weekly News has been assembled by Harmony.

Want to continue reading TWN? Please help us create this newsletter.
We still need more volunteers to watch the Tor community and report
important news. Please see the project page [11], write down your
name and subscribe to the team mailing list [12] if you want to
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 [11]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TorWeeklyNews
 [12]: https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/news-team


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