[tor-talk] A community concern that needs to be addressed,

[Roger Dingledine]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 08:49:04PM -0400, myzeus at openmailbox.org wrote:
>  I feel like Tor has become increasingly user-friendly
> and the Tor Browser Bundle is by far less 'intimidating' to perform
> first time configuration than it was a few years ago.

Yay! Sign me up. There are many millions of people around the world
who can benefit from the things that Tor Browser can do for them,
but there's still a lot of work to be done.

In fact, wait a minute, I already wrote this text before. :) Here is the
middle chunk of my blog post from last December 1st -- I still believe
it all now, and I think it gives us some good ideas for a future roadmap
of Tor's priorities.

"We have much more work ahead of us in the coming years. First and
foremost, we care about our users and the usability of our tools. We
want to accelerate user growth: The Tor network sees millions of users
each day, but there are tens of millions more who are waiting for it to
be just a little bit faster, more accessible, or easier to install. We
want to get the word out that Tor is for everyone on the planet.

We also need to focus on outreach and education, and on helping our
allies who focus on public policy to succeed. Tor is still the best
system in the world against large adversaries like governments, but
these days the attackers are vastly outspending the defenders across the
board. So in addition to keeping Tor both strong and usable, we need to
provide technical advice and support to groups like EFF and ACLU while
they work to rein in the parts of our governments that have gone beyond
the permissions and limits that our laws meant to give them.

>From an organization and community angle, we need to improve our stability
by continued work on transparency and communication, strengthening our
leadership, choosing our priorities well, and becoming more agile and
adapting to the most important issues as they arise.

Taller mountains await after these: We need to tackle the big open
anonymity problems like correlation attacks, we need to help websites
learn how to engage with users who care about privacy, and we need to
demonstrate to governments around the world that we don't have to choose
between security and privacy."

--Roger