Interview with Pili Guerra
State of the Onion. The Road to Mainstream Adoption and Improved Censorship Circumvention
Pili Guerra will give a talk about State of the Onion. The Road to Mainstream Adoption and Improved Censorship Circumvention at FOSDEM 2020.
Q: Could you briefly introduce yourself?
Hi, my name is Pili and I’m currently working as a Project Manager at Tor coordinating projects for the Tor Browser, Community and UX Teams.
Q: What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?
When people say Tor, they could mean a lot of different things: the nonprofit organization, the community, the Tor network, or Tor Browser. Everyone involved is united by the belief that privacy and freedom are human rights to be enjoyed by everybody online, and each part of Tor is working to achieve that vision in different ways.
My talk will introduce the Tor Project and Tor software, share what Tor teams achieved in 2019 including expanding our work on censorship circumvention, and talk about what we’re focusing on in 2020 to help make Tor accessible and scalable to everyone who needs it.
Q: What do you hope to accomplish by giving this talk? What do you expect?
We hope to introduce Tor to a potentially new audience and dispel some myths about the Tor network along the way. We want to make sure everyone, regardless of their technological background, can use Tor to protect their privacy online. We also want to get people as excited as we are about what we have planned for 2020 and encourage them to get involved in any way they can.
Q: The first alpha version of Tor was published more than 17 years ago. What has changed over all those years for the Tor project and the wider Tor ecosystem?
Commitments to free and open source software, transparency, and decentralization have of course been mainstays, but at the end of 2003, there were only about a dozen relays making up the network. Today there are nearly 8,000 volunteer-run relays around the world. Plus, when that first alpha was released, the Tor Project was not yet a nonprofit organization. That happened in 2006. Now, we are a global community and Tor software is used by millions of people worldwide. People are starting to demand privacy online, which we provide by design, and we want to meet that demand. My talk will go over our efforts in more detail.
Q: Have you enjoyed previous FOSDEM editions?
This will personally be my first time attending FOSDEM so I’m really looking forward to it. I know that many of my colleagues who have attended in the past keep coming back, so that certainly speaks to how much we Tor people enjoy attending FOSDEM!
Creative Commons License
This interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Belgium License.