[tor-reports] SponsorR December 2016 report

[George Kadianakis]

Hello,

here is the December 2016 report for SponsorR:

- The shared randomness subsystem has successfuly been deployed on the real Tor
  network!  A supermajority of the authorities now supports the protocol so
  random numbers are generated every day. Here is the latest one:
    shared-rand-current-value 8 PmPuJTmf3WuMS9Oj8wRE+3HFnza2HhbUHiGkaORk664=

  We are now working on smaller shared randomness deployment tasks like
  integrating shared randomness info to the consensus health website and to DocTor.

- The prop224 branch that implements the ESTABLISH_INTRO cell got merged upstream:
     https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19043

- The prop224 branch that implements INTRODUCE1 and INTRODUCE_ACK cells got
  further review as well:
     https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/20029

- We finalized the prop224 client authorization design and merged the changes
  to torspec:
     https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-December/011712.html

  We are now working on updating the older prop224 HSDir code to conform to the
  newest spec changes:
     https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/20852

- We discussed how prop224 will be enabled using torrc options and what's the
  ideal UX for doing that:
     https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-December/011725.html

- We started a discussion on how onion addresses should be encoded and whether
  they should contain version fields and checksums. No definite results yet,
  but discussion is ongoing:
     https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-December/011734.html

- During the month of December we wrote many blog posts informing people about
  the onion services ecosystem:
     https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-heart-onionshare
     https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-heart-onion-messaging
     https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-heart-ahmia-project
     https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-heart-apt-transport-tor-and-debian-onions
     https://blog.torproject.org/blog/cooking-onions-finding-onionbalance

  We also wrote a blog post informing users of the RSOS feature of Tor 0.2.9.8:
     https://blog.torproject.org/blog/whats-new-tor-0298