Congestion control arrives, ban on Tor overturned in Russia, GSoC [HTML]

Published on 2022-06-03

Congestion Control Arrives in Tor 0.4.7-stable!

https://blog.torproject.org/congestion-contrl-047/

We've released Tor 0.4.7.7, the first stable Tor release with support for congestion control. Congestion control eliminates the speed limit of current Tor, as well as reduces latency by minimizing queue lengths at relays. This results in significant performance improvements in Tor, as well as increased utilization of our network capacity. That means: faster Tor!

Tor Browser users: Upgrade to the latest version of Tor Browser, and you'll get the speed improvement benefits made possible with congestion control.

Exit relay operators: In order for users to see the benefits of congestion control improvements, we need our Exit relay operators to upgrade to the new Tor 0.4.7 stable series, asap! Packages for Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora/CentOS/RHEL are already available.

All relay operators: Non-exit relay operators do not need to upgrade for congestion control to work, but this also means you may be surprised by the network effects of congestion control traffic running through your relays. You may need to set bandwidth limits.

Ban on Tor's website overturned in Russian court

With the help of digital rights group Roskomsvoboda, we successfully overturned a ban on the Tor Project's website in Russia! This means that the Russian governmental agency responsible for censorship will have to remove Tor from its block list.

While this is a huge victory for Tor and internet freedom, the fight is not over.

We will be returning to court for more hearings and litigation, and this time, Google is included as a third party in the case, as the Russian authorities are demanding that Tor Browser for Android be removed from the Play Store. We will keep you updated on new developments as they happen. Today, we celebrate the victory! Read more about the case on Roskomsvoboda's blog in Russian.

The Tor Project + OONI + Google Summer of Code

We are happy that the Tor Project is again participating in Google Summer of Code. Mentorship programs are very important for open source projects as they help us have one more way of bringing new contributors to our projects. Starting in June this year we will have three contributors working with mentors and their projects through Google Summer of Code:

Arti 0.4.0 is released: Robustness and API improvements

https://blog.torproject.org/arti_040_released/

Arti is our ongoing project to create a working embeddable Tor client in Rust. Arti 0.4.0 wraps up our changes to the configuration logic (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/285), detects several kinds of unsafe filesystem configuration (https://docs.rs/fs-mistrust/latest/fs_mistrust/), and has a refactored directory manager to help us tolerate far more kinds of bootstrap failures (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/329).

Next, we're working for feature-parity with Tor in netflow resistance and congestion control. We hope to have some progress by our next release, but we might not be finished by then.

We need your help to test Arti, find bugs, and suggest improvements! Visit our blog for more details about Arti 0.4.0 and how to get involved.

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