EFF and TOR in Google's Summer of Code!

Karsten sez, "The Tor Project together with The Electronic Frontier Foundation have been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2009! We are now looking for great students to join us in summer and work on either EFF's Switzerland project or on Tor. See the linked blog post for more information. Thanks!"

This will be our third Google Summer of Code after 2007 and 2008. In our first year we had four students working on making relays work better (and not crash) on Windows, on a library and tool to try alternative path selection algorithms, on a fuzzing library to look for parsing problems, and on scalability and privacy for hidden services. In our second year we had seven students. One of our successful students of the 2008 program wrote a nice blog post reviewing how GSoC went for him, for the other students, and for the project in general.

We have made resolutions for our third GSoC participation to make it even more successful than in the past years. We have set ourselves the limit of accepting no more than 4 students (plus up to 2 students mentored by EFF). Rather than being persuaded by all those great applications, we want to focus on the most promising projects and students. We plan to assign up to 3 mentors to each student to provide optimal support. We will try harder to encourage students to interact with the community and become a part of it. It may be challenging to discuss project ideas on a mailing list or in a chat room with dozens or hundreds of unknown people listening. But communication is an important part of the GSoC experience (if not the most important).

(Thanks, Karsten!!)

[#1 posted by Ernunnos, March 22, 2009 4:00 PM]

Yay! More efficient Nigerian fraud!

[#2 posted by Kieran O'Neill, March 22, 2009 6:04 PM]

Of course, Ernunnos. The only things people use privacy for are fraud and other nefarious activities. We should all have every aspect of our lives open to the public, just in case.

[#3 posted by Anonymous, March 22, 2009 8:03 PM]

Google needs a TOR client for Android. It would be a great poke in the eye to companies like-- I don't know-- AT&T who seem all too willing to hand over personal info.

[#4 posted by Ernunnos, March 24, 2009 12:15 PM]

I don't know about privacy, but I do know about TOR. And I've never seen TOR used for anything but fraud. And I see a lot of TOR traffic. I'm willing to grant that it may have beneficial uses in theory, but in my opinion, anyone who designs a product on the basis of theory, without taking into account the way it is actually used by real people is a failure as a designer.

In theory, if everyone paid perfect attention to the road and drove under the speed limit, seatbelts and air bags wouldn't be necessary. In theory, if everyone abstained from sex outside of marriage, and there were no rapists, the Pope would be right and condoms wouldn't be necessary to prevent HIV. In theory, TOR is a great product for promoting private communications. In practice, the world is an ugly place, full of imperfect people, and you need to account for that.

In the real world, car designers who eliminate de safety features are considered criminally negligent, the Pope is downright evil, and the designers of TOR are at best dangerously naive.