Google Summer of Code accepts Tor for 2008 program

Jacob sez,

> The Tor project was accepted into the Google Summer of Code program for 2008!

The Tor project is looking for a few good happy mutants. Are you a hacker interested in contributing to a successful open source project? Do you qualify for the GSOC? Are you interested in helping solve some of the practical issues a large and successful anonymity network faces?

It appears that many of the BB happy mutants enjoy Tor - Perhaps this is a good chance for a few good students to be paid to hack on the project!

Tor, of course, is The Onion Router, an anonymizing system for beating censoring firewalls like those in China, Syria and the Denver International Airport. Link (Thanks, Jacob!)

• [zuzu]

  @4 Jacob

  Why is I2P better? I tried to read the tech docs for I2P and they were unavailable (dev.i2p.net is down?). It’s hard to even begin to vet something when I can’t easily read the specs for the protocol…

  Their DNS for i2p.net seems to be down. It looks like i2p2.de works as an alternate domain for the same site, however.
  

  Also, what’s up with the licensing for I2P? It’s like five different licenses depending on the component and then they’re all dual licensed on top of that?

  Yeah, but it looks like it could all be boiled down to BSD or GPLv2 if you wanted.
  

  In addition, Tor and I2P aren’t the same type of network. I2P is primarily something all parties need to participate in. Tor allows (by default) interaction with the “outside” world. Tor also has the ability to provide fully anonymous services.

  I2P also has outnodes and “eepsites” — basically the .tor and .i2p TLD do that same function respectively to their networks.
  

  Furthermore, the Tor network has a great deal of bandwidth. I run many high bandwidth nodes. Tor is only slow at times because of the number of nodes that are spread across the planet. It takes a while to route packets from China to Germany and out of India.

  Does that mean using high traffic services such as BitTorrent is now ok according to Tor etiquette?
  

  With that said, I find it strange that when I attend security or privacy conferences, I never meet I2P developers. I’ve never read any papers about their project or the protocol. I’ve seen one talk about I2P at the last CCC Congress and it was given by a user of I2P.

  Maybe it’s a social networking problem? their .de domain suggests attending the CCC wouldn’t be that far to go.
  

  There’s room in the world for both projects.

  Agreed.

• [zuzu]

  Tor is nice, but I2P is better. I wish people would evangelize I2P half as much they do as Tor. The I2P network has enough bandwidth to support BitTorrent traffic, unlike Tor, for starters.

• [Al Billings]

  Zuzu, I know the guys that work on Tor. They even came to Mozilla to give a presentation on Tor and ways to make it work better with Firefox.

  I’ve never heard of I2P and see no reason to trust it. For all I know, it is run by the Department of Homeland Security.

• [Agent 86]

  So, apparently TOR slows everything down? Are we talking noticeable lag, that it would interfere with online gaming, or just an extra second of load time for every page I load?

• [ioerror]

  (Disclaimer: I help with the Tor project)

  Zuzu, Why is I2P better? I tried to read the tech docs for I2P and they were unavailable (dev.i2p.net is down?). It’s hard to even begin to vet something when I can’t easily read the specs for the protocol…

  Also, what’s up with the licensing for I2P? It’s like five different licenses depending on the component and then they’re all dual licensed on top of that?

  In addition, Tor and I2P aren’t the same type of network. I2P is primarily something all parties need to participate in. Tor allows (by default) interaction with the “outside” world. Tor also has the ability to provide fully anonymous services.

  Furthermore, the Tor network has a great deal of bandwidth. I run many high bandwidth nodes. Tor is only slow at times because of the number of nodes that are spread across the planet. It takes a while to route packets from China to Germany and out of India.

  With that said, I find it strange that when I attend security or privacy conferences, I never meet I2P developers. I’ve never read any papers about their project or the protocol. I’ve seen one talk about I2P at the last CCC Congress and it was given by a user of I2P.

  I really wish the developers of I2P would submit their project to the privacy enhancing technology workshop this year. I’d love to read a paper about their ideas, I’d like to know how the project is going, what the network is like, what kind of principles guide the project, etc.

  There’s room in the world for both projects.

• [KlokWerk]

  Tor is slow, but it’s fairly random in HOW slow. I believe it depends on the exact route you end up getting sent through. If it’s too slow, sometimes I’ll request a new identity and end up with a faster connection as it routes me some other way.

  As for using it in gaming, er, no. Maybe if you like playing chess. Gaming is highly sensitive to latency. However, for surfing the web, it’s good enough, and I’m sure it’s already giving no end of trouble to our overlord masters who seek to slap us with a Real Identity.

  It’s going to be interesting seeing how projects that seek to identify individuals on the web clash with projects like Tor, which work to prevent such things.

• [Restless]

  @3: In my experience, it’s more like the twenty extra seconds to load a web page. You definitely pay for anonymity with speed and convenience.

• [unnes]

  Google-sponsored CP! （　ﾟДﾟ）

• [Nick Mathewson]

  Hi all, and thanks for the link!

  Two things prospective students should be aware of:

  1) The Tor Project is in Google Summer of Code 2008 under the umbrella of our friends at the EFF. So if you’re looking down the organization list and not seeing Tor, that’s why: click on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s project list instead.

  2) In case Tor isn’t your cup of tea, you should definitely consider the 100+ other organizations that have been accepted to the program this year. There are some really great projects on the list!