Blogs

New releases read more »

• On February 13, we released a new stable version of Tor, 0.2.1.23. Tor 0.2.1.23 fixes a huge client-side performance bug, makes Tor work again on the latest OS X, and updates the location of a directory authority.
• On February 21st, we released an update Tor stable in 0.2.1.24. Tor 0.2.1.24 makes Tor work again on the latest OS X – this time for sure!
• On February 22, we released the latest in the -alpha series, 0.2.2.9-alpha.
• On February 15th, we released an updated Tor Browser Bundle; version 1.3.2.
• On February 27th, we released an updated Tor Browser Bundle, version 1.3.3.
• On February 18th, Tor for the Nokia Maemo mobile platform was announced. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-nokia-n900-maemo-gsm-telephone.

Interested in coding on Tor and getting paid for it by Google? If you are a student, we have good news for you: We have been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2010 together with The Electronic Frontier Foundation! Woo! read more »

As you may have noticed, the blog is having problems keeping up with the load. It seems the blog has become very popular over the past month. Even with caching enabled, the blog can't keep up. Another reason for the issues is that we're caught in a tricky balance between making the CAPTCHA easy to pass for humans with legitimate comments versus automated comment spammers. And then there are the human comment spammers which can pass any CAPTCHA we put up with varying degrees of success. We're up to hundreds of spam comments per day. We don't want to use a third party CAPTCHA or comment service because then we're giving up all our viewers to their tracking mechanisms. There's already enough surveillance on the Internet. Therefore, comments are disabled for the next day while we assess the load on the blog.

We are working on forums, right now they are tied up in making sure they are functional without javascript. We will announce and release them when they are ready. read more »

Experts in China tell us Tor is not being singled out, that all "circumvention" tools are being subjected to the censorship regime of the Great Firewall of China as politically sensitive anniversaries come about. We also hear people in China need their privacy too, even if they never leave the Chinese Internet.

However, it appears China is getting better at blocking Tor. Here's a graph of returning users to the Tor Network from China:

However, most Tor users in China switched to non-public relays, called bridges, over the past few months. Interestingly, the GFW has also started blocking some of the more popular bridges: read more »

The Tor Project has been working very closely with Nathan Freitas and The Guardian Project to create an Android release. This is an early beta release and is not yet suitable for high security needs. The Android web browser is not protected by Torbutton and we have not yet developed an anonymous browser on the Android platform. Please be cautious with this release, it's probably pretty fragile and it's certainly not ready for serious use.

We've codenamed the Tor on Android project Orbot; Orbot is a single Android package that provides a new Tor controller, Privoxy as our trusty little HTTP proxy, libevent, and Tor itself. This Android package is using the C reference implementation of Tor. Orbot should be orders of magnitude safer than other Tor implementations on Android and it's our official release. Everything you'll need for using Tor is in the package. :-) read more »

Tor 0.2.1.23 fixes a huge client-side performance bug, makes Tor work again on the latest OS X, and updates the location of a directory authority.

Tor 0.2.1.24 makes Tor work again on the latest OS X -- this time for sure!

The Windows and OS X bundles also come with a newer version of Polipo that fixes some stability and security problems.

People using Tor as a client should upgrade:
https://www.torproject.org/easy-download

Changes in version 0.2.1.23 - 2010-02-13
Major bugfixes (performance): read more »

• We were selecting our guards uniformly at random, and then weighting which of our guards we'd use uniformly at random. This imbalance meant that Tor clients were severely limited on throughput (and probably latency too) by the first hop in their circuit. Now we select guards weighted by currently advertised bandwidth. We also automatically discard guards picked using the old algorithm. Fixes bug 1217; bugfix on 0.2.1.3-alpha. Found by Mike Perry.

We're always working on expanding the number of different devices and platforms where Tor runs. Today we've published an installation document that should help users of the Nokia N900 telephone to use the Tor network.

Tor is configured as a client by default. The Tor status applet will also run privoxy and configure the system wide preferences appropriately while Tor is enabled. Transparent proxying is not possible with the default N900 kernels at this time.

Please note that this is an experimental configuration. The web browser on the N900 does not have the protections that Torbutton provides.

For basic circumvention needs this configuration should be usable out of the box. At the moment, we're not seriously investigating Torbutton support for the N900 mobile web browser. If there is significant user demand for a mobile Torbutton this may change. read more »

As announced here, http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Feb-2010/msg00033.html, we now produce rpms and debs of Tor and Vidalia for easier installation.

When using ubuntu, opensuse, fedora, centos/redhat, or debian, you can simply add our repositories to your package management application (yum, apt, apttitude, zypper, etc) and always have the latest -stable or -alpha tor and vidalia.

This is a direct result of hiring Erinn in December.