Tor meetup Athens, Greece, 06/01/2018 Duration: ~4 hours
More than 40 people showed up at the meetup in Athens that was happening (https://www.hackerspace.gr/wiki/Tor_MEETUP) during a public holiday.
[Tor meetup 1/2] We started with a general Tor presentation (https://people.torproject.org/~andz/presentations/enucomp-keynote-parnaiba-br-2017.pdf), followed by a Q&A session and a general discussion about type of relays, adversaries, tor design decissions and use case scenarios.
References and descriptions of tools and services used:
- Tor Metrics - https://metrics.torproject.org/
- Tor Atlas - https://atlas.torproject.org/
- World City Map of Tor nodes (tormap) - https://tormap.void.gr/
- OrNetStats - https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/
[Tor meetup 2/2] We split in 2 groups: 1. A general ask me anything, how to install the Tor Browser, usage of Tor in different platforms (eg. Windows) and mobile phones. Some questions about stream isolation, path selection and guard nodes. Lots of questions about bridges and pluggable transports too. That ended up to discussion about onion service development and further meetups with people.
- A group specifically about Tor relays operators, how one can setup a relay, hardware and bandwidth requirements, successful/unsuccessful stories of administering and hosting relays in universities. Furthermore discussed about the situation in Greece that there are no exit relays and what we can do to improve this. As a best case scenario from people related with a university we discussed how we could work on a structure in a Greek university or elsewhere something like an "umbrella" entity/organization that can help with requests for comments from lawyers, journalists or other groups that may not be aware of how Tor works and the help that offers to people that want to protect its anonymity or circumvent internet censorship. At the end we had a talk about bridge relays and censorship circumvention protocols (AKA pluggable transports) that may help users in different parts of the world to the access Tor (eg. case of Iran users).