[tor-dev] Stem Release 1.4

[Damian Johnson]

Greetings wonderful carbon-based residents of the Internet. I'm pleased to
announce the 1.4.0 release of Stem!

What is Stem, you ask? For those who aren't familiar with it Stem is a Python
library for interacting with Tor. With it you can script against your relay,
descriptor data, or even write applications similar to Nyx and Vidalia.

  https://stem.torproject.org/

So what's new in this release?

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Ephemeral Hidden Services and Descriptors
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Tor's 0.2.7.1 release is bringing with it new hidden service capabilities,
most notably ADD_ONION and HSFETCH. Ephemeral hidden services let you easily
operate a hidden service that never touches disk...

  https://stem.torproject.org/tutorials/over_the_river.html#ephemeral-hidden-services

This latest Tor release also brought with it the ability to retrieve a hidden
service's descriptor information. Stem knows how to parse, validate, and
decrypt these documents...

  https://stem.torproject.org/tutorials/over_the_river.html#hidden-service-descriptors

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Faster Descriptor Parsing
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When reading descriptors without validation (which is the new default),
documents are now lazily parsed. This provides a very substantial speedup
depending on the document's type...

 * Server descriptors: 27% faster
 * Extrainfo descriptors: 71% faster
 * Microdescriptors: 43% faster
 * Consensus: 37% faster

Prefer to keep validation? No problem! Just include 'validate = True' and
you'll be good to go...

  https://stem.torproject.org/tutorials/mirror_mirror_on_the_wall.html#validating-the-descriptors-content

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As always this is just the tip of the iceberg. For a full rundown on the
myriad of improvements and fixes in this release see...

  https://stem.torproject.org/change_log.html#version-1-4

Cheers! -Damian