Interns wanted to Hack Tor Network

EFF is recruiting student programmers to do paid work on the onion router (TOR) this summer — this is a technology for anonymizing Internet connections. It’s intended for use by people living in surveillance societies like China, Syria, and the average American high-school.

Thanks to Google Summer of Code, The Tor project in collaboration with The Electronic Frontier Foundation has positions for several students as full-time developers for the summer of 2007.

We have a huge pile of tasks you might like, and we’d be pleased to chat with you if you want clarification or have ideas for other projects. The deadline for your application is March 26, 2007 at 5pm Pacific time.

You must be self-motivated and able to work independently. We have a thriving community of interested developers on the IRC channel and mailing lists, and we’re eager to work with you, brainstorm about design, and so on, but you need to be able to manage your own time, and you need to already be familiar with how free software development on the Internet works.

Working on Tor is rewarding because:

You can work your own hours in your own locations. As long as you get the job done, we don’t care about the process.
We only write free (open source) software. The tools you make won’t be locked down or rot on a shelf.
You will work with a world-class team of anonymity experts and developers on what is already the largest and most active strong anonymity network ever.
The work you do could contribute to academic publications — Tor development raises many open questions and interesting problems in the field of Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

To get the most out of GSoC with Tor, you might find it useful to have:

A code sample to show us — something good and clean to demonstrate that you know what you’re doing, ideally from an existing project.
Familiarity with Tor’s design, the deployed Tor network, and/or the privacy or anonymity community.
Experience with the free software development model, including interaction and coordination via mailing lists, email, and IRC.
Network security and/or crypto clue.
OpenSSL experience (extra bonus if you’ve used it on Windows).
Familiarity with Windows, Linux, OS X, BSD, etc.
Interest in privacy and freedom around the world.
Interest in giving talks about Tor in your local area, and helping to educate the world about the importance of privacy.
A professor or advisor who is interested too.

But you obviously don’t need all of these to make a useful contribution.

The two main Tor developers, Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, have signed up to be Mentors. We can figure out which mentor is appropriate while we’re discussing the project you have in mind. It might even be that one of the other developers is better suited to mentor your project.

If you’re interested, you can either contact the tor-assistants mailing list with a brief summary of your proposal and we’ll give you feedback, or just jump right in and post your ideas and goals to the or-talk mailing list.

The more applications we get, the more likely Google is to give us good students. So if you haven’t filled up your summer plans yet, please consider spending some time working with us to make Tor better!

SOULXTC: “walkin’ the streets of P2P”

Interns wanted to Hack Tor Network

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