[tor-reports] Pearl Crescent Report – December 2014

[Mark Smith]

Happy (almost) new year!

Tor-related work that the Pearl Crescent team did in December
(Kathy Brade and Mark Smith):

* Firefox updater for Tor Browser:
We finished adding support for signed MAR files, at least to the point 
of merging the changes into the TB 4.5 alpha branches.  Thank you to 
Georg for his assistance and feedback.
   "Sign our MAR files"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13379

We also assisted with various deployment bugs that involve the updater, 
including:
   "Generation of incremental mar files is not reproducible"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13776

   "Create update related information per channel"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13857


* Tor Browser and Torbutton:
We did some testing of the TB 4.5-alpha-2 candidate builds.

We did some planning for 2015.

We helped with bug triage, code reviews, and development of fixes. 
Related tickets:
   "Tor Launcher/Torbutton should provide a Security Slider"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9387

   "Torbutton New Identity error with regard to NoScript"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/11449

   "environment variable to skip TorButton control port verification"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13079

   "Inspector raises the canvas prompt when hovering over images"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13439

   "Circuit display is broken if bridges are being used."
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13671

   "Torbrowser 4.X.Y crashes on start when using MS EMET 5.1"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13893

   "bug in tor-browser-linux64-4.0.2_en-US (wrong path)"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13975


* Tor Launcher:
We helped with triage for a couple of Tor Launcher related bugs:
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13920
   "If the ports tor wants to use are already in use, try different
    ports before freaking out."

   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13993
   "Tor seems to get started twice in Tor Browser 4.5-alpha-x"


* We participated in the weekly Tor Browser dev meetings on IRC and
   in various design discussions on IRC and on the mailing lists.


* Planned for January 2014:
     - Help with deployment of signed MAR files, fix updater issues
       that occur in the field, and improve the update user
       experience.

     - Assist with getting Tor Browser patches merged into Firefox
       for the upcoming ESR 38 release.

     - Assist with various Tor Browser, Tor Launcher, and Torbutton
       issues.  There are still many TB 4.x bugs that need initial
       triage or follow up work.

     - Investigate travel for the UX Meeting and the 2015 Winter Dev
       Meeting.

-- 
Mark Smith
Pearl Crescent
http://pearlcrescent.com/