Greetings fellow onion enthusiasts! Like the rest of the summer August has been less tor-ry than usual. This month went toward eviscerating my home in an act of utter apartment seppuku.
Truly it’s amazing how much stuff closets accumulate. Dumped my every worldly possession in a pile and now dealing with the mess. I’ll be at this through September as well but so far so good. Eight full grocery bags of stuff to rid myself of and counting. Fun project!
Stem 1.7 Release Prep
As for the technical front… *sigh*. I told Matt I would release Stem 1.7 when he asked for it but six weeks later and still no release. Dealing with several pre-release issues…
- Mike found several issues with Stem’s event exception handling. Pretty big miss on my part: an uncaught exception in a user’s event handler broke Stem’s ability to provide any further events.
- Stem’s integration tests caught a couple compatibility regressions with Tor. The first was an intentional break in Hidden Service configuration and the second was a tor crashing bug. These led to discussions with the Network team about our testing process.
- Debian dropped distutils from its Python 3.x standard library, breaking our compatibility with it.
- Hands down the neatest new feature in Stem 1.7 is the ability to download descriptors through tor ORPorts. Our tutorials now describe this.
- Leveraging Tor’s new ‘GETINFO md/all’ command to get microdescriptor information.
- Corrected issues with comparability and hashing in our base ControlMessage class.
Tor Summer of Privacy
This month Dave concluded his Tor SoP project. Honestly we didn’t get too far. I’ll probably advertise this project again in next year’s GSoC/SoP. That said, Dave sent quite a bit of code at the end so much of August went toward reviewing that.
PS. Already half way through September? Yikes. Between the tardiness of this report and spring cleaning I’m gonna skip my September update. I won’t be in Mexico but hope you all have fun!