14 DAY TRIAL // Nick Mathewson from the Tor Project announced on the 8th of November 2016, the release of yet another Alpha development snapshot towards the major Tor 0.2.9 "The Onion Router" release.
Tor 0.2.9.5 Alpha comes three weeks after the release of the 0.2.9.4 Alpha build to add a large number of improvements and bug fixes that have been reported by users since then or discovered by the TOR Project's hard working development team. Also, this release gets us closer to the new major update of The Onion Router anonymity network.
"We're getting closer to stable, but we still need testing," said Nick Mathewson in the release announcement. "Tor 0.2.9.5-alpha fixes numerous bugs discovered in the previous alpha version. We believe one or two probably remain, and we encourage everyone to test this release."
Tor client gets more performance and reliability improvements
As mentioned before, the fifth snapshot in the Tor 0.2.9 development series adds numerous changes, which you can see at a glance in the changelog attached below. There are client performance and reliability improvements, a multitude of download scheduling fixes, as well as some client directory scheduling changes.
The hidden services, logging, portability, relay bootstrap, single onion services, and unit testing areas have been improved as well in Tor 0.2.9.5 Alpha, which also updates GeoIP and GeoIP6 to the latest Maxmind GeoLite2 Country database as of November 3, 2016.
If you want to help the Tor Project devs polish the final release of the Tor 0.2.9 series, you can download Tor 0.2.9.5 Alpha right now from our website and install it on your GNU/Linux distribution, or just fetch it from the repositories of the respective OS. Please try to keep in mind, though, that this is a pre-release version, not to be used in production environments.