Notes from Jacob Appelbaum's excellent Tor: Anonymous Communications for the Dept. of Defense... and You. This talk was enthusiastic and geeky but in a friendly, inviting "change the world" way. Time for Vancouverites to run their own Tor servers!

Lots of security nuances that I will not attempt to summarize.

• single relay is a single point of failure
• make it so that no single server has all the info
• torify == make a program route through tor e.g. torbutton for firefox a program's traffic
• you can be identified by things like your browser size
• vidalia - control panel
• Tor Browser Bundle - Windows only, porting to Mac & Linux
• gettor@torproject.org - bootstrap getting tor via email e.g. gmail over SSL
• email bridges@torproject.org get access to bridges
• moving to a world where internet is series of 'small broken internets'
• torweather - cheap and cheerful nagios like utility for monitoring tor servers
• looking for Canadians and others to run Tor servers
• 59 Tor servers in Canada, only 5 in Vancouver "proper". Why? Because servers are expensive? Because Canadians use USA based servers?
• To run a Tor server:
• you need a computer
• one port reachable from the internet
• 20KB of bandwidth
• Performance: Check out their white paper:Why Tor is slow and what we are going to do about it!
• Who uses Tor:
• bloggers and journalists
• UN Aid workers
• Police, Military
• Mobile clients:
• Android to be first class client, working on Android IP anonymity, iPhone is not because you have to jailbreak
• It's 2009 but no SSL everywhere, why? this leaks information which could compromise you e.g. Facebook
• Q: how long to write your own Tor client? A: 1 week because the protocol is simple and documented like an RFC