<p> The Tor project has seen an increased focus on Internet censorship as many more users adopted Tor to get around blocking. In the past year, Tor was a popular means of bypassing censorship in Iran, China, and around the world. Firewall operators have been noticing. Tor has also had to contend with new organized efforts to block access to the network, and has rolled out the “bridges” blocking-resistance system in earnest. Alongside the perpetual need to get more Tor nodes, it’s become important to get users to run bridges – and to experiment with ways of communicating bridge addresses to users affected by censorship. </p> <p> The current censorship landscape will be explored, along with the bridge mechanism and efforts to recruit more bridges. There will also be an update on how Tor developers are responding to the growing pains and dealing with scaling challenges associated with Tor’s popularity. You’ll also hear about the challenge of counting the number of users on an anonymity network, and how client software can force the use of encryption to protect users from some attacks after their traffic leaves the Tor network. </p>
<p> <strong> Seth Schoen </strong> is a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He has worked at EFF for eight years, helping other technologists to understand the civil liberties implications of their work, the EFF staff to better understand the underlying technology related to EFF’s legal work, and the public to understand what the technology products they use really do. He helped create the LNX-BBC live CD and has researched phenomena including laser printer forensic tracking codes, ISP packet spoofing, and key recovery from computer RAM after a computer has been turned off. He is secretary of the Noisebridge hackerspace. </p>
<p> <strong> Jacob Appelbaum </strong> is a photographer and independent computer security researcher. He is currently employed by the Tor Project. He is ambassador for the art group monochrom and has researched cold boot attacks and MD5 collisions, among other projects. Jacob is a founder of the hackerspace Noisebridge, located in San Francisco. </p>