Join Tor's Summer of Privacy

by phoul | March 2, 2018

 

Back in 2014, we ran Tor Summer of Privacy, a chance for developers to contribute code and help make Tor even stronger. Each coder was paired a core Tor developer who mentored them, provided guidance and encouragement, and helped with rubber-duck debugging. 

This year, in order to encourage developers to contribute to the world’s strongest privacy tool, we’re running Summer of Privacy again! The program is open to anyone, but the mentorship opportunities make it an especially good fit for students. After our Outreachy internships, this is the second paid opportunity to get involved with Tor so far this year.

Use your skills 

We have a handful of projects in mind for this year. Our volunteer page has full details -- we’ve got projects covering almost every part of Tor, from creating a Tor client in Python to stripping metadata from file uploads in Tor Browser. If none of our projects jump out at you -- get in touch with us and propose your own! If your project idea is accepted, we’ll mentor you and help bring it to life.

Tor’s Summer of Privacy program matches Google’s Summer of Code student stipends. 

Applying

Applying for the Tor Summer of Privacy is as easy as sending a project proposal to our Summer of Privacy mailing list. If you’re looking for an idea of what proposals should look like, see these examples of GSOC projects from previous years.  Our application phase officially begins on March 12th and ends on March 26th. We will announce the successful applications on April 20th.

So, what are you waiting for? :)

Comments

Please note that the comment area below has been archived.

As someone from Africa: The problem is that upload bandwidth is really low in general here, and the bandwidth is very expensive for someone to operate a Tor relay here, as well as the unknowns of how to deal with abuse and whether our ISPs will allow it. That said there are apparently some relays in South Africa.

Also if there's for example something like DigitalOcean that provides VPSs in some place in Africa then that can help as well.

This probably is irrelevant, but I hear there is actually very good cell phone coverage in Somalia and that most people there use cell phones for everything (paying for groceries, socializing when its unsafe to go out, etc). So if there were some way to provide Tor via cell phones, we could increase the user base.

An open network using cellphone or wifi (& ir) is impossible & Tor should be useless.
Internet is a luxury product & tor can run where the freedom of speech & privacy are a stable fundamental right since a long time (not available in north africa, war_occupied zone, no-man-land). It seems that south africa could be a very good candidate.

is israel an african region ?
they need promote trans, gay_lesbian, etc. movement (even the idiot & handicapped are welcome) and accept them as a whole part of the community like do the u.s.a. : tor is a necessity.

Yes, unfortunately many people do not have cell phones which support Tor. They are optimized for battery life, not for processing power. The bandwidth is very limited, too, so Tor would consume a monthly allotment and leave nothing for the user :(

Anonymous (not verified) said:

March 02, 2018

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nice !
you are speaking about improving the network is not it ?
if it is about TorBrowser , my firefox user.js is more hardened & more secure than TB.
- are you looking for a new concept of TB , a new skill in coding ?
- should it be possible that a TB (reproducible/verified) be adapted/tied at our personal user.js of firefox ? like that the users will use the same tor for the network (surfing) but some of us will have a second security layer (our user.js) for registering, posting, mailing ... is it not the case yet or was it not the case in a recent past ? privacy without security is for teacher/pupil _ parent/children_tutor/prisoner : obsolete and vicious.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

March 02, 2018

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A related suggestion: a security audit of any Tor product would always be welcome. E.g Tor Browser would ideally be re-audited every two years, Tor Messenger might be nearing the point where it can be audited, etc.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

March 02, 2018

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> stripping metadata from file uploads in Tor Browser

A related and very valuable project would be to fix the shortcomings of mat, an easy to use command line application used in Tails which strips metadata from pdf, jpg, png etc. At least it was supposed to. The Tails devs were shocked to find that apparently mat didnt strip metadata from embedded images and embedded links in pdf documents that they carefully removed pdf from the file types supported by the Tails version of mat. (From memory--- I might have some details wrong.) So fixing the pdf routines in mat to strip metadata from embedded images and links would be very valuable, and might even meet the needs of the above cited project.

You can join by

o downloading the appropriate (Windows, Linux, Mac) version of Tor Browser bundle

https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en

o verifying the detached signature

https://www.torproject.org/docs/verifying-signatures.html.en

o installing TB by unpacking the tarball on your computer

https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en

o using the start-tor-browser script to start browsing using Tor Browser (see the "Using Tor" section on the download page).

Alternatively, you can download Tails from Tails Project (an allied open source project)

https://tails.boum.org/getting_started/index.en.html

or you can try these other Tor Project products:

https://www.torproject.org/projects/projects.html.en

If you like using Tor, it would be very good to make a contribution to ensure that Tor continues to be available in the future

https://donate.torproject.org/pdr

If you have a server with suitable bandwidth, you can run your own Tor relay:

https://blog.torproject.org/new-guide-running-tor-relay

You can also volunteer your time/skills

https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en

You can request an email account here:

https://webmail.no-log.org/
https://mail.riseup.net/
https://webmail.boum.org/

(But be aware that on at least one occasion, Riseup has been served with an NSL and was forced to comply after attempting to resist in a US Court; Riseup was forbidden from telling anyone about the NSL until the Court relented over the objections of an unknown government. Further an agent of the CZ government attempted to use Hacking Team to put an implant on the Riseup mail server, as was revealed when a huge trove of HT emails were leaked (possibly by an employee who had grown concerned about HT's ugly client list). Similar cautions hold for all pro-privacy websites--- you can expect the bad guys to try to infect users with malware. For example, in 2012 GCHQ attempted to phish users in the #tor chatroom on IRC, as is described in their presentation which was leaked by Snowden.)

Colorado (not verified) said:

March 07, 2018

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I want to help. How do I run a relay? Do I need to upgrade my Tor? Do I need to erase the previous version and download a new one? if so, which one? How long do I keep this running and how often? What will this do for Tor? Thanks, all:) Noob

Anonymous (not verified) said:

March 07, 2018

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Just want to once again thank all Tor Project employees, node operators, volunteers and users for providing and using Tor products.

And to thank TP for using the word "privacy" in your motto. Please never forget