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=== This is the sixth release candidate for the 0.1.0.x series. This is an actual release candidate--it's going to be the final release if there are no bugs--we promise. :) We fixed the last known major problems: we don't use threading on netbsd now, and the new libevent 1.1 detects and disables the broken kqueue that ships with OS X 10.4.0. Libevent 1.1 also has __significant__ performance improvements if you're using poll or select. Try it, you'll like it. Please report any bugs, either in the installers or in Tor operation, so we can get it perfect for an actual release: http://bugs.noreply.org/tor http://tor.eff.org/download.html o Bugfixes: - Implement --disable-threads configure option. Disable threads on netbsd by default, because it appears to have no reentrant resolver functions. - Apple's OS X 10.4.0 ships with a broken kqueue. The new libevent release (1.1) detects and disables kqueue if it's broken. - Append default exit policy before checking for implicit internal addresses. Now we don't log a bunch of complaints on startup when using the default exit policy. - Some people were putting "Address " in their torrc, and they had a buggy resolver that resolved " " to 0.0.0.0. Oops. - If DataDir is ~/.tor, and that expands to /.tor, then default to LOCALSTATEDIR/tor instead. - Fix fragmented-message bug in TorControl.py. - Resolve a minor bug which would prevent unreachable dirports from getting suppressed in the published descriptor. - When the controller gave us a new descriptor, we weren't resolving it immediately, so Tor would think its address was 0.0.0.0 until we fetched a new directory. - Fix an uppercase/lowercase case error in suppressing a bogus libevent warning on some Linuxes. o Features: - Begin scrubbing sensitive strings from logs by default. Turn off the config option SafeLogging if you need to do debugging. - Switch to a new buffer management algorithm, which tries to avoid reallocing and copying quite as much. In first tests it looks like it uses *more* memory on average, but less cpu. - First cut at support for "create-fast" cells. Clients can use these when extending to their first hop, since the TLS already provides forward secrecy and authentication. Not enabled on clients yet. - When dirservers refuse a router descriptor, we now log its contactinfo, platform, and the poster's IP address. - Call tor_free_all instead of connections_free_all after forking, to save memory on systems that need to fork. - Whine at you if you're a server and you don't set your contactinfo. - Implement --verify-config command-line option to check if your torrc is valid without actually launching Tor. - Rewrite address "serifos.exit" to "localhost.serifos.exit" rather than just rejecting it. ===
Three Years of A New Kind of Science
Today it is three years since I published my book A New Kind of Science. It seems like a lot longer than that--so much has happened in the intervening time. What started as a book is steadily emerging as a major intellectual movement with its own structure and community. The first year after the book came out was dominated by a certain amount of "paradigm shift turbulence." But by the second year, many serious projects were starting, and indicators like the publication rate of NKS-based papers began to climb. Now, in the third year, a recurring theme has been the emergence of a growing group of exceptional individuals who are planning to base their careers on NKS. There are scores of NKS-based Ph.D. theses underway, and all sorts of NKS-based corporate ventures--as well as our own growing NKS R&D operation in Boston. Later this year, the first full-length independent book based on NKS will be published, and the first independent NKS conference will be held. In late June, we will be holding our third annual NKS Summer School--for which there were a record number of exceptional applicants. We are planning to have our next major NKS conference in spring 2006; we'll be announcing the details shortly. There will also be an NKS mini-course at our Wolfram Technology Conference this October. This year I myself have mostly been in a tool-building phase, working on major new Mathematica technology that, among other things, will be very important for NKS research--and which I can't wait to use. There's a lot more in the pipeline too. We're developing plans for a new kind of publishing medium for NKS (partly based on the Complex Systems journal that I've been publishing since 1986). We're also planning later this year to start regular "live experiments," in which I'll be leading public web-conferenced explorations into the computational universe. Also in the next few months we're planning to release a rather unexpected consumer-oriented application of NKS, which I expect we'll all be hearing quite a bit about. As we begin the fourth year of NKS, I feel more optimistic than ever before about its promise--and its significance in science, technology, the arts, and beyond. It will be fascinating to see where the most important NKS-based breakthroughs come from, and what they will be. I hope you'll have the opportunity to take part in the excitement of the upcoming years of early NKS growth. -- Stephen Wolfram http://www.wolframscience.com
