Tor

Duration and Period

I’m in the process or tidying up the bot behind TorAtlas and I’ve chosen to write it in Java. My undergraduate degree had a lot of Java in it, but that was while ago now, and there are some cool new features I’ve learnt about including Period and Duration.

Some of the tweets coming from the bot talk about how long a relay has been contributing to the Tor network. When fetching the details document I look at the first_seen field and get this as a ZonedDateTime to make sure I’m doing all my calculations in UTC. I then use the between() method on various ChronoUnits to work out how long between the first time the relay was seen and now, and then I produced something human readable from this:

Automatic Updates

We have instructions for setting up new Tor relays on Debian. The only time the word “upgrade” is mentioned here is:

Be sure to set your ContactInfo line so we can contact you if you need to upgrade or something goes wrong.

This isn’t great. We should have some decent instructions for keeping your relay up to date too. I’ve been compiling a set of documentation for enabling automatic updates on various Linux distributions, here’s a taste of what I have so far:

Free Software Efforts (2017W40)

Here’s my weekly report for week 40 of 2017. In this week I have looked at censorship in Catalonia and had my “deleted” Facebook account hacked (which made HN front page). I’ve also been thinking about DRM on the web.

Debian

I have prepared and uploaded fixes for the measurement-kit and hamradio-maintguide packages.

I have also sponsored uploads for gnustep-base (to experimental) and chkservice.

I have given DM upload privileges to Eric Heintzmann for the gnustep-base package as he has shown to care for the GNUstep packages well. In the near future, I think we’re looking at a transition for gnustep-{base,back,gui} as these packages all have updates.