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Self-hosting the Tor Project user forum

We launched the Tor Project users forum to continue to grow the Tor community and experiment with new ways to gather feedback and provide support. After a year and a half of utilizing free cloud hosting graciously provided by the team behind Discourse, in early June we moved our forum to the Tor Project's own server infrastructure.

Apart from giving us more control over the forum's configuration, we can now provide an experimental onion service for our users accessing the platform via the Tor network. Be sure to bookmark the new address: forum.torproject.org. (For the time being, the old address will automatically redirect visitors to the new one.)

If you ran into any issues following the migration or want to learn more about 2FA, check out our blog post.

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Call for Testers - WebTunnel, a new pluggable transport for bridges, now available for deployment

We're excited to announce WebTunnel, a new bridge pluggable transport (PT) for the Tor ecosystem. It is a censor resistant proxy that try to imitate HTTPS traffic, based on HTTPT 23 research. We are currently operating a trial soft launch for WebTunnel, and encourage bridge operators to set up WebTunnel bridges to discover issues within the implementation of this new pluggable transport.

Check out our forum post with more info on how it works, the technical requirements and how to report issues.

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Empowering human rights defenders in Brazil, Ecuador & Mexico

When we established our Global South Strategy in 2017, we created a user feedback program to improve the user experience of our products involving ethical usability research with at-risk communities alongside digital security training. In 2021 we expanded this program to Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico based on the increasing threats and violence against marginalized groups, activists, journalists, and human rights defenders. We also partnered with the Guardian Project and Tails - two other organizations who are equally committed to defending human rights and internet freedom with privacy preserving technology.

During the past two years we have collaborated closely to combat internet censorship and surveillance to provide digital security training workshops in the three countries, reaching 47 human rights organizations and training 674 journalists and defenders. The program focused on applications such as Onion Browser, Orbot, Tails, and Tor Browser, with improvements made based on user feedback and pain points identified during the sessions. The workshops highlighted challenges faced by participants, such as expensive and unreliable internet access, browsing data monetization, and difficulty distinguishing between censorship and connectivity issues. The training aimed to provide participants with self-defense measures, knowledge of tools, and the ability to identify censorship and use circumvention techniques.

In June we shared our findings which were used to develop improvements for the applications, including a new circuit display and refined connection settings for Tor Browser, simplified usage steps and improved user experience for Orbot, and restructuring of documentation and validation of features for Tails.

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Tor Relay Operators - Proposal for New Policies and Proposals

In the past, our approach to organizing the Tor relay operator community was highly informal and relied heavily on discussions and interactions in meetups and similar events between operators, Directory Authorities, and The Tor Project staff. However, as the Tor Community expands and its members become less interconnected, there is now a necessity to establish a well-defined process for presenting and evaluating proposals and policies to the relay operator community.

Find out more about how we have revised the process for submitting policies to the Tor relay operator community, how proposals are approved, and the relationship between Tor Community proposals and the Tor Project.