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Planet FSFE

Free Software Efforts (2017W37)

I’d like to start making weekly reports again on my free software efforts. Part of the reason for these reports is for me to see how much time I’m putting into free software. Hopefully I can keep these reports up.

Debian

I have updated txtorcon (a Twisted-based asynchronous Tor control protocol implementation used by ooniprobe, magic-wormhole and tahoe-lafs) to its latest upstream version. I’ve also added two new binary packages that are built by the txtorcon source package: python3-txtorcon and python-txtorcon-doc for Python 3 support and generated HTML documentation respectively.

Recent Atlas Improvements

This post was originally posted to the Tor Project blog. If you would like to comment on this post, please do so there.

Atlas is a web application to learn about currently running Tor relays and bridges. You can search by fingerprint, nickname, country, flags and contact information and be returned information about its advertised bandwidth, uptime, exit policies and more.

Screenshot of Atlas

Screenshot of Atlas

I’m taking this opportunity to introduce myself. I’m Iain R. Learmonth, or just irl on IRC. I began contributing to Atlas in June last year, and I’m currently serving as the maintainer for Atlas. We have made some usability improvements to Atlas recently that we are happy to share with you today.

The Internet of Dangerous Auction Sites

It might be that the internet era of fun and games is over, because the internet is now dangerous. – Bruce Schneier

Ok, I know this is kind of old news now, but Bruce Schneier gave testimony to the House of Representatives’ Energy & Commerce Committee about computer security after the Dyn attack. I’m including this quote because I feel it sets the scene nicely for what follows here.

Last week, I was browsing the popular online auction site eBay and I noticed that there was no TLS. For a moment, I considered that maybe my traffic was being intercepted deliberately, there’s no way that eBay as a global company would be deliberately risking users in this way. I was wrong. There is not and has never been TLS for large swathes of the eBay site. In fact, the only point at which I’ve found TLS is in their help pages and when it comes to entering card details (although it’ll give you back the last 4 digits of your card over a plaintext channel).

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