Hi all. Next weekend I'm returning to ye olde isle of Vashon to feast with family, so figured I might as well send this out early. I'll be in a Thanksgiving food coma this time next week, after all...

My devious scheme for November was to finish rewriting arm's graph panel and, while that certainly made progress, Stem, DocTor, and internal discussions stole the spotlight this month...

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* We now notify directory authority operators directly of issues in addition to the tor-consensus-health@ list. This should reduce duration of outages and other issues with the authorities.

* We replaced turtles with longclaw. Sebastian deserves major kudos for orchestrating this. [1]

* Properly fixed DocTor's OOM issues by not shelling out to send notification emails. [2]

* DocTor detected a burst of relays from Google App Engine. These relays lacked any contact information so we dropped them from the network as a potential Sybil attack. [3]

If you're the operator of these then please let us know! We'd be delighted to add you back in once there's a proper family and contact information.

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* Ossi Herrala made delightful improvements so we parse descriptors ~10% faster [4], and now read from the '.new' files in Tor's data directory [5]. Thanks Ossi!

* Expanded our descriptor tutorials with an example of persisting descriptors to disk. Thanks to mmcc for the idea [6]...

https://stem.torproject.org/tutorials/mirror_mirror_on_the_wall.html#saving-... https://stem.torproject.org/tutorials/examples/persisting_a_consensus.html

* Replaced quite of bit of boilerplate in Stem with a new @with_default decorator. Mmmmm, deleting code is fun... [7]

* Updates to reflect changes in Tor's spec this month, including HS_DESC's new reason attribute, and validating the new consensus parameters.

A couple other quick things of note is that I spruced up our volunteer page [8] and attended this month's Seattle TA3M. The later had a nice bit of serendipity in that I met Anna, a UW PhD student who's looking into our Bandwidth Authorities [8]. Best of luck Anna! That's certainly an area that could do with a lot of improvement. ;)

Cheers! -Damian

[1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13296 [2] https://gitweb.torproject.org/doctor.git/commitdiff/94a2e9d [3] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-consensus-health/2014-November/00... [4] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13821 [5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13756 [6] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13774 [7] https://gitweb.torproject.org/stem.git/commitdiff/56a1f03 [8] https://gitweb.torproject.org/project/web/webwml.git/commitdiff/05c1b60