[tor-talk] Tor Weekly News — April 29th, 2015

[Harmony]

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Tor Weekly News                                         April 29th, 2015
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Welcome to the seventeenth issue in 2015 of Tor Weekly News, the weekly
newsletter that covers what’s happening in the Tor community.

Contents
--------

 1. Tor Browser 4.5 is out
 2. Miscellaneous news
 3. Upcoming events

Tor Browser 4.5 is out
----------------------

Mike Perry announced [1] the first stable release in Tor Browser’s 4.5
series. This version includes numerous major new features and updates,
and represents a significant advance in user-friendly security
technology.

The most visible new features have been covered in previous issues of
Tor Weekly News. Tor Browser’s onion menu has been reorganized for ease
of use, and now includes a diagram showing the locations and IP
addresses of the relays that make up the Tor circuit used to access a
website — one of the features most missed from the now-defunct Vidalia
controller. The “security slider”, accessible in the onion menu’s
“Privacy and Security Settings”, can be set at one of four levels
depending on a user’s needs, disabling browser features which may give
adversaries an opportunity to attack, at the cost of making some web
pages less usable.

Tor Browser’s “first-party isolation” feature has been expanded: when
you visit a website, all requests for the content on that domain name
(including third-party elements like advertising beacons, analytics
trackers, and content delivery networks) will be made over the same Tor
circuit, and each domain name is restricted to its own Tor circuit,
which is maintained for as long as the site is in active use. This makes
an adversary’s tracking of a Tor user’s activity across different sites
even harder than it was already, while ensuring that the usability of
websites is not affected by sudden changes of exit relay.

For full explanations of these and other features — including better
desktop integration, a new search provider, improvements to the software
signature process, and more — please see the team’s announcement. Users
of what was the 4.5-alpha series will be prompted to update
automatically by their Tor Browser, while users of the stable 4.0.8 will
receive the same prompt in about a week’s time, “because [the] changes
are significant”. And if you don’t already have a working copy of Tor
Browser, head to the download page [2] to get started. Congratulations
to the Tor Browser team on reaching this milestone!

  [1]: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-45-released
  [2]: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html

Miscellaneous news
------------------

Karsten Loesing announced [3] that the onionoo-announce mailing list
will be shut down in favor of posting announcements about major Onionoo
protocol updates to the tor-dev mailing list [4], “because each Tor
mailing list makes it more difficult for new contributors to decide
which of them to subscribe to”. If these announcements are relevant to
your work, please be sure to subscribe to tor-dev — you can set your
mail client to filter for the keyword “Onionoo” if you’d rather not
receive other Tor development-related messages.

  [3]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/onionoo-announce/2015/000004.html
  [4]: https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev

Also in Onionoo news, Thomas White announced [5] that his mirror of the
service is now also available at an onion address.

  [5]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2015-April/037619.html

Lucas Erlacher announced [6] version 0.3.0 of OnionPy, “a pure-python
Onionoo request wrapper that supports transparent caching”. The new
release respects Onionoo’s “version” field in query responses.

  [6]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-April/008755.html

Upcoming events
---------------

  May 03 19:00 UTC | Tails contributors meeting
                   | #tails-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   | https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-project/2015-April/000187.html
                   |
  May 04 18:00 UTC | Tor Browser online meeting
                   | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  May 04 18:00 UTC | OONI development meeting
                   | #ooni, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  May 05 18:00 UTC | little-t tor patch workshop
                   | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net
                   |
  May 13 02:00 UTC | Pluggable transports/bridges meeting
                   | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net


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  [7]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TorWeeklyNews
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