The 31c3 talk proposals are due this coming Sunday: http://events.ccc.de/2014/07/12/31c3-call-for-participation-en/
I wonder what would be the most useful topic for this year? In brainstorming with folks on IRC, here are four options: -------- 1) An update on pluggable transports: obfs3, obfs4, FTE, librtc and uproxy, and other acronyms you don't recognize. Many transports are now integrated into the default Tor Browser, we're starting to get some more useful usage statistics, and pluggable transports have played an important role in various countries in recent years. Plus we're soon going to start some projects on evaluation and comparison of transport designs, e.g. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/SponsorS/PluggableTransports/Proposal One of the most intriguing pieces of pluggable transports lately is the convergence of "make it hard to DPI for the protocol so the censor can't block it" with "make it hard to DPI for the protocol so the global surveillance adversary doesn't know to add that flow to its database". In particular, systems like Flashproxy might be especially effective against the global surveillance adversary, since the many transient addresses that separate the users from the known Tor relay addresses make it harder to build a list of users that are worth watching. 2) News on the Tor Browser front: all about our deterministic builds, and what they get us, and who else is jumping on the bandwagon. A discussion of the upcoming secure update mechanism, and what security properties it does/doesn't get us. Tradeoffs with blocking or not blocking ads, or with enabling or disabling javascript. 3) Double down on the transparency push: walk through all the entries in https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors and explain what we're doing for each of them. I think it would be useful for more of the Tor community to know more details here, but I'm not sure how to do it in a way that doesn't just turn into a big laundry list, like the 29c3 talk did: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/Fahrplan/events/5306.en.html 4) Some sort of more generic Q&A where we raise a bunch of topics to start, and then inefficiently take questions from the audience, try to make sense of them, and then talk about whatever comes to mind in response. -------- Two lessons I've learned from recent CCC talks: A) Social commentary works much better than technical things. That is, the audience respects us for our technical work, and now they want to hear our perspective on what's going on in the world. So while my instinct is to use the talks to make the audience more technically competent and thus more able to help us in this growing global conflict, the talks that work best these days are more like social rallies. B) It won't work to pick a more technical topic and ask for a smaller room to focus on the people who most want to help. The room will still get mobbed by thousands of people who are there 'for the show'. We learned this lesson in 29c3. And to be fair, Tor is a major component in the modern security and privacy conversation, so following what Tor has to say, even if you're not planning to do anything to help, makes sense. Is there a fifth topic I should be considering? So far item 1, the pluggable transport one, seems most plausible to me. --Roger -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk@lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk