I attended my first Random Hacks of Kindness event on June 4, 2011. I am very interested in the concept of hacking for the benefit of person-kind, but unfortunately I couldn’t commit to the entire weekend. I violated the spirit of the hackathon by mostly focusing on my own work tasks … but I did contribute my Python knowledge and project management skills. I worked on the reachability of Tor relays listed on the EFF’s relay challenge webpage. Watch the video roundup here.

Tor Project

Non-profit to protect privacy about where you are coming from and where you are browsing; estimated 300,000 daily users; Can download, obtain via email, spread to friends via USB, or download via mirrors. Has played a key role in several countries with protests (e.g. Egypt, Iran, Tunisia, China), but censorship is spreading to all areas of the globe.

Regular citizens don’t want to be tracked and watched! Businesses need to keep trade secrets. Law enforcement needs anonymity to get the job done. Governments need anonymity for their security. Journalists and activists need it for personal safety.

Anonymity

Anonymity isn’t cryptography – intelligence monitoring can still figure out things about you (e.g. who you are talking to & when); don’t necessarily care what you are talking about. Anonymity serves different interests and can be packaged/marketed for different user groups – privacy to family; traffic analysis resistance for DoD/government; anonymity for researchers; business – network security; reachability for human rights activists.

You can’t get anonymity on your own – private solutions are ineffective. Bad people need it too, but they are already breaking the law well! An internet relay or single point of bypass is easy to track down what is going in. Goal of tor is to distribute through several relays; the anonymity is provided by a diverse set of relays, there’s also encryption.

Technical Problems

• Performance and stability – It’s slow since it is distributed
• Maintaining whole software ecosystem – forked Firefox
• Research & training about anonymity
• Reusability and modularity
• Advocacy, education, and training around the world
• Metrics, data, and analysis
• Better private bridge mapping and distribution

You can block it – by finger print (e.g. look for tor traffic); block the list of relays that tor uses; these are public relays and you get private bridge relays as well to get around the public list blocked one.

Tor doesn’t solve all the problems; can’t protect you from other software and hardware; how do you make sure that it’s the right Tor without a backdoor?

Random Hacks of Kindness Project Categories

Tor Projects

• Tor check correct config page
• EFF relay challenge (check reachability for nodes)
• OrBot – Tor for Android
• Usability/instructions for obfsprox

Global & Local Data

• Disaster relief & local open data sets; office of emergency management
• Climate change – aerial photos, flood data, etc.
• “Carfax” of Philly properties – office of property assessment
• Social service tools – homelessness; local resource lists.
• opendaatphilly.org – make suggestions for what to open in the future
• NASA data sets – also open to suggestion

Non-profits

• Helping people decide easier where to donate your time and effort
• Smart aggregation – instead of looking at several sites; clean UI
• Using social media; different impact tracking