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

[George Kadianakis]

# Activities of December 2014

- I spent a large part of December working on the SponsorR project,
  and specifically on hidden service statistics.

  Together with Karsten and Aaron we revised proposal [0] and
  implemented it. We then asked for review and feedback by the
  community [1]. After a few days, Nick merged the patch to
  little-t-tor with the statistics disabled by default. We then sent
  out a first mail asking for people to run our branch with statistics
  enabled.

  As of now, we are receiving daily statistics from about 40 relays,
  and Karsten did a preliminary analysis of the data [2].

- Continued work on the guardfraction project.

  After a useful review of the python script by Nick, I pushed a patch
  that addresses his comments.

  As a first step towards deployment, I helped weasel deploy the
  script on his directory authority. The script now runs as a cron job
  and archives the consensuses that are being produced. In the future,
  when #9321 gets merged to Tor, weasel should be able to turn on the
  feature and his dirauth will also vote guardfraction data.

- Released obfsproxy-0.2.13 (!) that fixes bugs #13587, #9823 and #14038.

- Attended that CCC conferece...

  during which I helped a bit with that weird lizard attack.

  Had a nice chat with Christian Grothoff about hidden services,
  gnunet, GNS and the zkey format, etc. I need to write down this
  discussion soon.

  Talked hidden services with various people. Also had an interesting
  discussion with Gareth Owen about his talk and results.
  
  Did a small SponsorR meeting with Karsten during which we discussed
  various techniques for extrapolating the HS data.

# Activities for January 2015

- Look into the HS stats we collected with Karsten and prepare some
  nice graphs for the upcoming SponsorR meeting. Also, we should write
  a nice blog post with our findings.

- Write a blog post about the upcoming crowdfunding campaign!

- After the upcoming SponsorR meeting happens, we will need to roadmap
  and organize the SponsorR work that we will be doing the following
  months.

- I need to open a few tickets about the HSDir flag inspired by the lizards.

  First of all, authorities recently changed the required period for
  becoming an HSDIr from 26 hours to 96 hours. We should document this
  and maybe even make it a consensus parameter. Also, we should
  revisit our "Getting the HSDir flag should require more effort"
  ticke (#8243).

- I need to fix the issues that weasel found in my guardfraction
  scripts. Also in a few days I should ask him if the guardfraction
  script has been working fine on his dirauth. Then maybe I should ask
  more people to set it up on their dirauths, and maybe ask Nick to
  merge #9321 in Tor.

[0]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/asn/torspec.git/tree/proposals/238-hs-relay-stats.txt?h=hs_stats
[1]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-December/007968.html
[2]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13192#comment:41