My January was very uneventful. It started with finishing up the Tor related paperwork for 2013 - which I think made Melissa happy with me. This is important, we should all work to make Melissa happy at all times. :)
After I was mostly caught up with Tor paperwork - I took some badly needed time off. I went to Thailand and met some people for diving in the southern part of the country; I badly needed a vacation after December and most of 2013. I found myself in a country in a declared state of emergency - though it was the most peaceful and calm revolution I've seen in the last few years. This was mostly in Bangkok - I met a few Tor users and talked with others about how to protect themselves from surveillance. I think we'll have a new Tor relay on the Thai island of Koh Lanta soon but I'm not sure. I returned to Berlin after a few weeks and immediately was swept up in the media firestorm about the latest issues surrounding anonymity. After a couple of weeks offline, I basically did a month of public speaking engagements, trainings and interviews in a single week. It reminded me of why I needed to go offline! Leif, Aaron and I did a Tor workshop which was filled with all sorts of folks at an event called http://www.einbruch-der-dunkelheit.de/ which was sponsored by the Berliner Gazette. I was on a panel with some folks to discuss lessons learned about anonymity, document leaking and whistle blowing. I attended Transmediale and with Laura Poitras and Trevor Paglen, the three of us gave the keynote Art as Evidence: http://www.transmediale.de/content/keynote-art-as-evidence - I was also mobbed by a bunch of press about anonymity related topics. This included an interview with journalists from SVT who are working on a documentary about issues surrounding Tor. They were intensely personal which was a bit uncomfortable but they were balanced and understood the importance of cryptography to protect privacy. I understand that the director, Bo, will be at the Tor Dev meeting. I suggested that he interview a set of specific people - I hope that he'll meet with everyone and give everyone a chance to speak. As a side note, I was totally flattered by Bruce Sterling who wrote the following about our panel: "This was one of the most interesting cultural panels I've ever seen. That atmosphere in that hall was extraordinary. A lot of people must have left that room with a different conception of the world they inhabit." http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2014/02/transmediale-panel-trevor-paglen-jacob-appelbaum-laura-poitras/ I'm convinced that we need to step up our discussions in the areas and various fields of art and culture. This is important for changing minds and specifically for changing behavior. The number of people who approached me after the keynote about using Tor and asking how they can learn more about practical cryptography was overwhelming. I was invited to speak the Council of Europe with Christian Grothoff, Douwe Korff and others to speak. It was a really great experience: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2325775/the-council-of-europe-wants-action-on-eavesdropping https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY5zu7u5Ucs https://twitter.com/coe/status/428139438737072128 I did some automation work on Tor router related stuff - I think I've found a reasonable way to generically turn any RaspberryPi, Novena or whatever hardware platform into a box to help users with anonymity. This is probably going to become an art project with Trevor Paglen as a proof of concept. While in Thailand, I also tried to do some extreme dogfooding - I've now switched to using Tails almost exclusively and to using all software with Tor. The only thing I'm missing now is synchronous voice communications and an easy way to test pluggable transports. I wrote a very simple patch for xmpp-client to ensure that jabber.calyxinstitute.org users use the Tor hidden service - though I didn't send it to agl until yesterday or so. In other news, phw pointed out an important fact to me last night - we have a Tor office in Berlin! My apartment! (Lets move it somewhere else! Please!) There are now a handful of Tor developers partially living with me and we're working around the clock on all sorts of fun projects. It also helps with my personal problem of keeping my apartment free from non-Tor developing intruders. Hooray! I'm sure that I missed some stuff. My February will include tor-fw-helper related tasks, Tor Router stuff, helping Aaron with some OONI related tasks, being overwhelmed by the press, the Tor Developer meeting, hopefully some Debian packaging of a few Tor related pieces of software and rebuilding/configuring some computers. All the best, Jake _______________________________________________ tor-reports mailing list [email protected] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-reports
