[tor-reports] Report from LSM2013

Wed Jul 17 12:53:40 UTC 2013

Lunar this is a great report and I feel like I was there... thanks for
writing it and see below for a few additional thoughts/questions:

On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 3:53 AM, Lunar <lunar at torproject.org> wrote:

> Hi!
>
> Here is a report about my attendance at the 14th edition of Libre
> Software Meeting. This conference is one of the big free software events
> in Europe for french speakers. This year it was happening in Brussels,
> Belgium.
>
> The first two days of the event were dedicated to outreach. People had
> set up tents [1,2] outside Place de La Monnaie, right in the city
> center. A lot of people doing shopping were passing in front of the
> booths with organizations like Mozilla, LibreOffice, Brussels LUG, and
> half a dozen others.
>
> [1] https://twitter.com/rmll2013/status/353572456021250049/photo/1
> [2] https://twitter.com/rmll2013/status/353523042145669120/photo/1
>
> It was a little bit last minute, so I took some space on a table and
> laid out material about Tor and Nos Oignons. At some point, I realized
> that I was missing something big to attract people's attention. Got a
> marker and wrote “Avoid online surveillance: use Tor!” in french and
> english on a white poster. It attracted at least 3-4 people to the
> table.
>

How could we change this?  Small Tor signs (these can be made on standard
size paper - easy to travel with but durable materials)  Suggestions
welcomed -

>
> Several people saying “Yeah, I've heard of it but I've never needed it”
> which I usually answered with something like “Good, but you should still
> try it in case you find yourself on a censored network someday” and
> “Still, if you use Tor, it means better anonymity for every other user”.
>
> Almost all the flyers Keilley had sent me were given out in that one
> day. Many stickers too. The flyers [3,4] we had made in time for Nos
> Oignons were definitely helpful as it was the only material I had about
> Tor in french. The inner page contains a good narrative as there's both
> a graphical view of the network (“Here's the top 700 relays”) and a
> diagram of onion routing (“So the client picks three of them…”).
>
> [3]
> https://nos-oignons.net/Diffusion/nos-oignons-flyer-grand-public-201306-fr.pdf
> [4]
> https://nos-oignons.net/Diffusion/nos-oignons-flyer-grand-public-201306-en.pdf
>
> I only had a single troll that wanted to talk about abuse of the
> network. I expected more of those.
>
> Booths were also there on Sunday but I've skipped that part to finish up
> my slides. That was a good strategy as it took me the whole day to get
> them right.
>
> The talk [5] was initially proposed in french. As most talks about Tor
> have been in english, and several recorded, it made sense. But language
> politics can be complicated in Belgium and the schedule already had too
> many presentations in french so I've obliged to the organizers' request
> to do it in english.
>
> [5]
> https://schedule2013.rmll.info/programme/technique/internet/article/anonymity-and-censorship?lang=en
>
> 40-50 people attended the 40 minute talk. See recording [7] and
> slides [8]. We had not much time left for questions, but they were about
> MAC addresses and about hiding Tor usage from one's ISP.
>
> [7]
> http://video.rmll.info/videos/anonymity-and-censorship-circumvention-with-tor/
> [8]
> https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/presentations/2013-07-08-LSM2013.pdf
>
>
I'm going to take a look first BUT any objections to posting this video on
our press page?

> It looks like I am able to acceptable talks in english, as I've got a
> lot of positive feedbacks. The only downside was some french speakers
> who had trouble understanding me. Even people who knew about Tor told me
> they've learned something, and a few of them were happy about the case
> study.
>

Congrats!

>
> During the rest of the week, I regularily used an empty table to setup
> an ad-hoc booth with what I had left of Tor flyers and stickers. I had
> several people coming up between conferences to ask questions, get
> details or learn about Tor.
>
> A volunteer working on the french localization in Mozilla asked me why
> we were not shipping the Torbutton anymore. When I told them about our
> issues with upstreaming patches, they were not happy. One good thing,
> they told me about Transvision [8], which allows to search for a
> translated string in all Mozilla products. This is a really useful tool
> to find the correct translation for a menu entry in manuals or Tor
> Browser extensions.
>
> [8] http://transvision.mozfr.org/
>
> We chatted for a while with the developer of the discontinued
> OnionCoffee. They were curious to know what the project was up to these
> days. They've also asked if OONI had probes for BCP38 or other UDP
> interferences, but my knowledge was short on these matters. They are
> still subscribed to tor-talk there is too much traffic for them to
> follow.
>
> I got a nice success story: they were a dozen kids with the Tor Browser
> Bundle on USB sticks in high school to access Facebook and other
> censored websites. At some point the teachers figured out and switched
> to more social means (they gave punishments when they could catch
> someone on FB).
>

Would like to know more - this happened recently (past 6 months) here in
the Boston area.  This is a potential new area for us to structure some
outreach to - since the kids are current and future Tor users
:-)

>
> A french expatriate asked me how they could watch replays from a french
> TV channel on their VOD websites. The access is restricted to IP
> addresses identified as french. I've explained the procedure, but the
> network was too flacky at that time for a demo.
>
> It was pretty cool to do boothing. A bit hard to handle all by myself,
> but interesting nevertheless. It requires quite an amount of energy, and
> probably more promotion material, but people are really supportive of
> what we do these days. :)
>

Yup!  It's not easy work for sure and I agree we need more promotional
materials.  Usually companies have a standard "Booth Kit" that the use
consistently then add to depending on the audience.  We can do a simple
version of this for Tor if those who are doing events such as this would
find it helpful.

Great to hear people are supportive of what we do.... on that note I'm
populating the CRM.  Do you have contacts from the event we could add to
it?  I can send you a simple template to fill out or if it's a small list
of people you can just email them to me.

>
> Final note: people really really like the new t-shirt. I was asked
> several times if I had some to sell.
>

Awesome!  :-) - soon we will be able to point them to our store for the new
designs.  Next time I could have small business cards with the shirt and
the URL for the store so you can just hand them out....

Thanks again Lunar for this recap - really helpful.

>
> --
> Lunar                                             <lunar at torproject.org>
>
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>

-- 
*Kelley Misata*
*Outreach and Communications*
*The Tor Project*
*www.torproject.org*
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