Tor Weekly News — August 20th, 2015

Thu Aug 20 08:51:17 UTC 2015

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Tor Weekly News                                        August 20th, 2015
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Welcome to the thirty-second issue in 2015 of Tor Weekly News, the
weekly newsletter that covers what’s happening in the Tor community.

Contents
--------

 1. Tor Browser 5.0.1 is out
 2. Tor talks at Chaos Communication Camp 2015
 3. Happy sixth birthday, Tails!
 4. Miscellaneous news
 5. Upcoming events

Tor Browser 5.0.1 is out
------------------------

The Tor Browser team put out a new stable version [1] of the
privacy-preserving browser. Version 5.0.1 fixes a crash bug in the
recent 5.0 release that was hindering some users’ attempts to access
popular websites like Google Maps and Tumblr. There are no other changes
in this release.

Thanks to the new automatic update mechanism in the Tor Browser 5.x
series, you are probably already running the upgraded version! If not,
head to the project page [2] to get your copy.

  [1]: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-501-released
  [2]: https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html

Tor talks at Chaos Communication Camp 2015
------------------------------------------

There was a heavy Tor presence at the recent Chaos Communication
Camp [3] near Zehdenick, Germany, and as usual there were some
Tor-related talks by community members that are now available to watch
online. Tor and Debian developer Lunar, one of the minds behind Debian’s
pioneering and highly successful reproducible builds project [4] (itself
inspired by the Tor Browser team’s work in this line [5]) gave a talk
entitled “How make your software build reproducibly” [6].

Tor Project Director of Communications Kate Krauss, meanwhile,
participated in a talk entitled “What’s the catch?” [7], addressing the
subject of free software projects receiving funding from State
organizations, and the ways in which this does or does not affect the
work of these projects.

Tor developers also participated in the “Tor Services using GNS” session
of the Youbroketheinternet village [8]. The session was about Tor using
GNS as its name resolution system, and about various ways that we could
integrate GNUNet and other anonymity systems with Tor. It was decided
that the discussion will continue on the tor-dev mailing list.

  [3]: https://events.ccc.de/camp/2015/wiki/Main_Page
  [4]: https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds
  [5]: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/deterministic-builds-part-one-cyberwar-and-global-compromise
  [6]: https://media.ccc.de/browse/conferences/camp2015/camp2015-6657-how_to_make_your_software_build_reproducibly.html
  [7]: https://media.ccc.de/browse/conferences/camp2015/camp2015-6900-what_s_the_catch.html
  [8]: https://events.ccc.de/camp/2015/wiki/Session:Tor_Services_using_GNS

Happy sixth birthday, Tails!
----------------------------

In the small hours of Sunday night, the Tails project turned six years
old [9]. It may still have most of its milk teeth, but the anonymous
live operating system is already the security tool of choice for a wide
range of users. It has been endorsed by Reporters Without Borders,
groups campaigning against domestic violence, and the team behind the
Academy Award-winning documentary CITIZENFOUR (among many others), as
Voice of America reported last month [10].

The Tails team has laid out its vision for the next two years in its
draft 2016-2017 roadmap [11], and you can read a summary of its current
activities in the last monthly report [12]. Congratulations to the team
on reaching this anniversary!

  [9]: https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-project/2015-August/000297.html
 [10]: http://www.voanews.com/content/digital-solution-helps-shield-online-activists/2873529.html
 [11]: https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/roadmap_2016-2017/
 [12]: https://tails.boum.org/news/report_2015_07/

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

Hot on the heels of last week’s 2.4 release, Karsten Loesing put out
version 2.5 [13] of Onionoo, the Tor network data observatory. This
release adds a new optional field named “measured” to Onionoo’s details
documents. “The main idea behind this new field is that relay operators
and Tor network debuggers can now figure out easily whether a relay is
affected by not being measured by a sufficient number of bandwidth
authorities and as a result has lower usage than it could handle”,
writes Karsten. The new field is not yet shown in Onionoo web interfaces
like Globe and Atlas, but it is accessible through the Onionoo API. For
more details, see the relevant ticket [14].

 [13]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-August/009291.html
 [14]: https://bugs.torproject.org/16020

David Fifield announced that the recent outage affecting meek’s
Microsoft Azure backend is now resolved [15]. Most users will have
switched to the workaround version included in the most recent Tor
Browser releases, but if for some reason you are still using the old
configuration, it too should now be working once again.

 [15]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2015-August/038780.html

David Stainton asked for brief code review of his Twisted-based Tor HTTP
proxy [16]. “Is this project worthy of your precious 10 minutes to
review it... so I can improve the code quality?”

 [16]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-August/009260.html

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

  Aug 24 17:00 UTC | OONI development meeting
                   | #ooni, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Aug 24 18:00 UTC | Tor Browser meeting
                   | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Aug 25 18:00 UTC | little-t tor patch workshop
                   | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   | 
  Aug 26 13:30 UTC | little-t tor development meeting
                   | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Aug 26 14:00 UTC | Measurement team meeting
                   | #tor-project, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Sep 02 02:00 UTC | Pluggable transports/bridges meeting
                   | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  Sep 03 19:00 UTC | Tails contributors meeting
                   | #tails-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   | https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-project/2015-August/000296.html
                   |
  Sep 27 - Oct 03  | Tor summer dev meeting 2015
                   | Berlin, Germany
                   | https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2015SummerDevMeeting
                   |
  Oct 01 - Oct 03  | ADINA15: A Dive Into Network Anomalies
                   | Rome, Italy
                   | https://ooni.torproject.org/event/adina15/

This issue of Tor Weekly News has been assembled by Harmony, Karsten
Loesing, and George Kadianakis.

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 [17]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TorWeeklyNews
 [18]: https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/news-team