[tor-dev] GSoC: BridgeDB Twitter Distributor

[Kostas Jakeliunas]

Hi all,

I'm excited to be able to spend another summer-of-code together with
Tor (how impudent!) :) My name is Kostas (wfn on OFTC), primary mentor
is isis and secondary mentor is sysrqb.

I'll be working on writing a new BridgeDB Distributor[1]. I've set my
primary task to designing and implementing a Twitter-distributor-bot
(see proposal[2]): a Twitter bot answers personal (direct) messages,
does rate control if needed, and gives bridge lines to users.

There should be enough time to at least start on another distributor
(right now I'm thinking about an XMPP-based one, as the
federated-network-nature allows for some neat censorship circumvention
approaches.) But there's also value in implementing a generic/core
distributor that could give bridges to third-party distribution
systems over a (say) RESTful API. Will see how things go, but core
task for now is a twitter-based distributor.

For further ideas, discussion, etc., see a separate tor-dev@ thread:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-April/006742.html

Ideas are very much welcome indeed!

[1]: https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#newBridgedbDistributor
[2]: http://kostas.mkj.lt/gsoc2014/gsoc2014.html

--

Kostas.

0x0e5dce45 @ pgp.mit.edu