Tor: Open Positions
Tor is hiring! We're looking for self-motivated individuals who are able to work independently and want to help make Tor better. These are short-term contract positions ranging from one to three months.
In particular, we're looking for a few people:
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.
We want you to have good communication and writing skills (in particular, you should know how to keep other project members informed of your progress), and we want you to know how to figure out what needs doing and then take the initiative to do it. Most project members play more than one role, so combination developer/activist are very welcome.
The best way to get noticed as a good developer is to join the community and start helping out. Smart code commits and ideas are welcome anytime. We have a great core group of developers working on the Tor software itself as well as supporting software like Vidalia, Torbutton, etc. All of our contractors came through volunteering first.
Vidalia Developer
Vidalia is the cross-platform graphical user interface to Tor written in C++ using the Qt libraries. It is used by millions of people successfully. Our current developer is a volunteer and otherwise occupied with finishing his PhD. We're looking for someone who knows C++, Qt, and would like to kickstart development on the next generation of Vidalia. Some suggested next steps involve:
- Implementing the KDE Marble interface into Vidalia for better and more accurate mappings of relays to countries. Plus, it just looks cool.
- Implementing the ability to click a country and instruct Tor to either start or end circuits in that country.
- Work on bug fixes and enhancements as suggested by users.
- Give Vidalia the ability to control the http proxy included, to start, stop, and possibly configure either privoxy, polipo, or an http shim we ship in the combined bundles of tor, vidalia, and polipo.
- Possibly re-design the Vidalia interface to have different modes for different levels of user sophistication. Many users see a button or a setting and feel they have to change it. The defaults are set to ensure users are sufficiently anonymous. How can we better hide the complexity of Tor configurations?
Microsoft Windows Developer
This person needs to be very familiar with Windows at a system and network level. We're looking or someone to help make Tor on Windows more compatible and work more reliably as a relay. There are a number of projects relating to Windows that current need a skilled developer:
- Develop a Tor network shim to redirect all traffic through Tor. OpenVPN has a network layer device for Windows that redirects traffic through the OpenVPN connection. Is this the model Tor should be using? Or is there something else that may work better?
- Tor relays under non-server editions of Windows run into WSAENOBUFS problems after a short while. This problem is described in detail in bug ticket 98. So far, there are no solutions. We think libevent 2.0 with its bufferevents code will help solve the problem.
Periodically we get new funding to work on more development projects. Your goal should be to get into the list of core project members so we think of you when new funding arrives.