Tor is an EFF-supported software project that provides anonymized traffic routing that defeats eavesdropping and censoring firewalls used by repressive governments (among others) to control what network users can do. Like practically every security app, it has a user-interface that often daunts newcomers (the current Tor UI requires that you configure it via the command-line).
It's time to fix that. EFF is sponsoring a competition to produce a friendly graphical user interface for Tor: something that combines security with ease of use, so that even non-geeky political dissidents can be made safe from official punishment for their network use.
Edward Tufte and Bruce Schneier are judging the contest, and every submitter gets a t-shirt!
* Allow the user to fully configure Tor rather than manually searching for and opening text files.
* Let users learn about the current state of their Tor connection (including which servers they are connected to, and how many connections they have), and find out whether any of their applications are using it.
* Make alerts and error conditions visible to the user.
* Run on at least one of Windows, Linux, and OS X, on a not-unusually-configured consumer-level machine.
Update: Roger Dingledine from Tor sez, "our current interface isn't quite so bad as you make it out. Clients
on OS X just install and run, and the SwitchProxy firefox plugin makes
configuration really easy. Windows needs you to install Privoxy but there
are still no command lines. It's only if you want to do more esoteric
things, or relay traffic for others, that it starts to get tricky."
