[tor-reports] George's status report: July 2015

[George Kadianakis]

# Activities of July 2015

- Participated at the hidden services hackfest in DC. We did many things and
  even wrote a blog post about it that you can find at:
     https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-service-hackfest-arlington-accords

  As part of the hackfest, I helped develop the various technical proposals that
  we published. 
     https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-July/009079.html
     https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-July/009066.html
     https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/special/torspec.git/log/?h=xxx-direct-onion
  See the blog post for a brief description of each proposal.

- After the hackfest, I worked with dgoulet to pin down the shared randomness
  proposal that we've been discussing over the hackfest. We published a draft
  here that has received lots of useful feedback:
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-August/009189.html

- We published our analysis of the introduction point stability statistics we
  collected. Feel free to check it out:
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-July/009109.html

- Worked on fixing the current guardfraction bug (#16255). I provided a patch
  which needs some further modifications after discussing it with Nick.

- Helped review #14846. 
  
# Activities for August 2015

- Continue working on the hidden service proposals. Specifically, the shared
  randomness proposal (prop250) and the guard discovery proposal (prop247) need
  some more modifications after the first rounds of [tor-dev]
  attention. Hopefully all proposals will receive even more attention soon.

- I also hope to do the first steps on coding the shared randomness proposal (prop250).
  This means that we first need to understand the consensus voting code, and see
  how consensus flavors work, etc. 

- Finish up the guardfraction patch (#16255) and get it merged.

- Work more on the new data structures and algorithms for entry guards that
  we've been discussing with Nick etc.

- Catch up and reply on mailing list threads that I've been queueing up.