Users of the anonymity network are urged to upgrade ASAP

Dec 5, 2016 23:00 GMT  ·  By

The past weekend brought us new stable and development builds of the Tor anonymity network project, versioned 0.2.8.10, as the most advanced version out there, and 0.2.9.6 RC (Release Candidate).

While the TOR 0.2.8.10 maintenance update is here to fix a couple of major bugs discovered in the Tor 0.2.8.1 Alpha build, which had an impact on client's reliability and performance across all supported platforms, it also adds workarounds for a memory leak with the OpenSSL 1.1 library when attempting to encode public keys, and a bug in the macOS Sierra 10.12 SDK.

"When Tor leaves standby because of a new application request, open circuits as needed to serve that request. Previously, we would potentially wait a very long time," the release notes read. "Clients now respond to new application stream requests immediately when they arrive, rather than waiting up to one second before starting to handle them."

Tor 0.2.9 is coming very soon with many new features

Also new in the Tor 0.2.8.10 point release, which might just be the last one for the 0.2.8 series, as Tor 0.2.9 is coming very soon with many new features, is a fix for implicit conversion warnings under OpenSSL 1.1, and it looks like the GeoIP and GeoIP6 databases have been updated to the Maxmind GeoLite2 Country database as of November 3, 2016.

Users of Tor 0.2.8.9 or a previous release are urged to update to version 0.2.8.10 as soon as possible, and if you plan on taking Tor 0.2.9 for an early spin, you can also download the Tor 0.2.9.6 Release Candidate right now from our website, which fixes the remaining bugs discovered in the previous development versions. If no other bugs are reported by users during the testing period, the final Tor 0.2.9 release will be here as soon as next week.