"Mission accomplished!" I said. No aircraft carrier, but none the less you’d think I would learn from transnational snafus.
Much of March was still out of commission, but I’ve felt better a few weeks now so maybe this time it’ll hold? We didn’t get to a root cause so likely that whatever nailed me will crop back up someday. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. After all, there’s only so many orifices a doctor can probe… right? (he says hopefully)
What could be funner than that, you ask? Taxes! And dentists! And paperwork! Kidding aside, last couple months had some great tor stuff too.
ORPort Descriptor Downloads
Stem can now download descriptors through ORPorts just like Tor!
reply = stem.descriptor.remote.get_server_descriptors(
endpoint = stem.ORPort('12.34.56.78', 90),
)
This came from a desire to health check my relay, but dovetails nicely with the ORPort capabilities that will be the big feature of Stem’s 1.7 release.
Stay tuned!
Descriptor Compression
Recently Tor added ZSTD and LZMA support and Stem now supports them too. ZSTD and LZMA’s higher compression ratio comes at a CPU cost and are less available, so when using these to save bandwidth you should provide a fallback…
reply = stem.descriptor.remote.get_server_descriptors(
compression = (
Compression.LZMA, # higher compression but often unavailable
Compression.GZIP, # decent compression and always available
)
)
Summer of Privacy
A very, very warm welcome to Dave Rolek! Dave will be expanding Stem’s ORPort and hidden service v3 capabilities this summer as part of Tor Summer of Privacy.
Congrats, Dave!
Smaller things these last couple months include…
- Expanded Nyx’s FAQ to clarify how to get started and explain why apt-get often doesn’t work.
- Further expunged Nyx’s old name. Thanks to Homebrew for deprecating its old port. One of these days I should reach out to the Wikipedia editors as well…
- Stem now supplies a user agent when downloading descriptors, so relays can distinguish Tor and Stem clients from others.
- Formalized the procedure we use when checking membership activity to better avoid surprises and encourage past volunteers to get back involved.
- Finally got around to swapping this blog to https. Yeah, yeah, I know…