[tor-reports] George's status report: March 2014

[George Kadianakis]

# Goals of March 2014

- I summarized the [tor-dev] discussion on the implications of
  switching to a single guard and derived some conclusions:
  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-March/006458.html

  That thread recently got some responses that I haven't entirely read yet.

  In the meanwhile I started writing the corresponding proposal. Here
  is a draft accompanied by Nick Hopper's useful feedback:
  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-March/006570.html

- At the same time, some flowering occured in the obfsproxy garden:

  obfsproxy now has SOCKS5 support; code sponsored by Yawning! This is
  good news for people who want to use their VPN, etc. over obfsproxy.

  On the way there, we also did two obfsproxy releases.
  Latest one is obfsproxy-0.2.8.

  Meanwhile, obfsproxy is gearing towards supporting outgoing proxies itself (#8402).
  Yes, that's:
    <Tor> -> <obfsproxy client> -> <another SOCKS/HTTP proxy> -> |INTERNET| -> <obfsproxy server> -> <Tor>

  We also fixed a particularly nasty bug in scramblesuit (#11100).

- Discussed GSoC with some of the potential students and nitpicked
  Juha's time plan further.

- Made a weird educational video for pluggable transports:
  https://people.torproject.org/~asn/marketing.gif

- With Yawning's help, we triaged all the Trac tickets in the
  components of "Pluggable Transports" and "Obfsproxy".

  We killed some obsolete tickets, keyworded some others and created
  some new ones wherever it seemed useful.

  Some keywords we started using:
  'needs-tor-change' -- for PT tickets that would require modification of little-t-tor
  'needs-spec-change' -- for PT tickets that would require
                         modification of pt-spec.txt (and hence {py,go}ptlib/liballium etc.)
  'pt-combiner' -- for PT tickets that had to do with the PT combiner project 
  And we also assigned 'research and 'easy' to some already existing tickets.

  While doing so, we identified various self-contained coding tasks
  that volunteers could perform:
  https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/PluggableTransports#Helpneeded
  My plan is to use that list next time a bored individual walks
  by #tor-dev asking "what should I do to help Tor development?".

# Goals for April 2014

- Find out the new issue with #11156 and fix it. Also review some
  other tor-pt tickets (#9650, #10801).

- Merge the remaining scramblesuit patches that need to be fixed in
  obfsproxy. Release some more obfsproxy.

- Read the newest feedback in the guard analysis thread and continue
  writing the proposal.

- Think of an implementation plan for the guard node changes and
  potentially start actual implementation.
  
- Continue work on BridgeT with hellais.

- Look more into bridge and pluggable transport stats. The graphs in
  metrics look better now, but many bridges are still not publishing
  their stats:
  https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html#userstats-bridge-transport

  I should figure out which bundled bridges don't report stats and
  probe their operators.

- Proceed with GSoC.