Friday, July 16, 2010: 6:00 pm (Tesla): 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.

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.

Hosted by Jacob Appelbaum and Seth Schoen