14 DAY TRIAL // The Tor Project, through Nick Mathewson, is pleased to inform the Tor community about the release and general availability of yet another maintenance update to the Tor 0.2.8 stable series.
Tor 0.2.8.7 comes exactly twenty days after the debut of TOR 0.2.8.6 to address an important issue that has recently been discovered in the ReachableAddresses option. Additionally, Tor 0.2.8.7 is retiring the deprecated "Tonga" bridge authority and replacing it with the much more modern "Bifroest" bridge authority.
"Only use the ReachableAddresses option to restrict the first hop in a path. In earlier versions of 0.2.8.x, it would apply to every hop in the path, with a possible degradation in anonymity for anyone using an uncommon ReachableAddress setting," says Nick Mathewson in the release announcement.
Tor 0.2.8.7 also updates the GeoIP and GeoIP6 APIs to the latest version of the Maxmind GeoLite2 Country database as of August 2, 2016, and improves support for GCC (GNU Collection Compiler) by removing an inappropriate "inline" in the tortls.c file, which might have caused warnings on older versions the compiler.
Update to Tor 0.2.8.7 as soon as possible
If you're using ReachableAddresses option when activating the Tor network for your infrastructure, or you're used to setting all bridges, the Tor Project recommends that you update your Tor installation to the 0.2.8.7 maintenance release immediately. Most probably, Tor 0.2.8.7 has already landed in the stable repos of your GNU/Linux distribution.
Of course, you can also download various binary or source packages of the Tor 0.2.8.7 release right now via our website. In the meantime, development of the next major branch, version 0.2.9, continues with the Tor 0.2.9.2 Alpha milestone that contains pretty much the same changes implemented in Tor 0.2.8.7.