The Tor project has decided to stop using the Startpage search engine and will be standardizing on the Disconnect Search Engine, a project that, in theory, uses VPN technology to permit you to use Google, Bing, and Yahoo search services without revealing your IP address or any personal information that would allow companies to build a profile using data revealed as you search. Disconnect was written by former Google and NSA engineers.

Sound like a good choice of technology? Not everyone is impressed. Though the Tor project has stated that Startpage was not happy with our traffic and showed sometimes CAPTCHAs. Disconnect on the other hand approached us with respect to search engine traffic and donated some money, a few choice comments from the article reveal that many users wonder whether money had anything to do with the change in technologies.

What prompted the change in search engine? Are we now getting paid to include disconnect as the default search engine?"

and

So what's next, Torproject? Keystroke logging for Amazon or another company? Partnering with Recorded Future or something like it? Is this what the project has come to now? But that "Disconnect" Search Engine site is so pretty. So nice and clean, WOW! It sort of reminds me of the polished DoD sites I have wandered through.

and

With this new "Search Engine", I feel like a rug is being pulled out from underneath me and damn it "that rug really tied the room together."

What say the |.ers?

(Finally) after years of development, Mailman has reached its third release.

It's a big change, thoroughly explained in this (not so) old article by Barry Warsaw, the lead developer behind Mailman 3.0. In short, Mailman has been organized as a suite of 5 subprojects, each in charge of a different aspect:

• Mailman Core - the core delivery engine which accepts messages, providers moderation and processing of the messages, and delivers messages to mailing list member recipients. It exposes its functionality to other components over a private, administrative REST API.
• Postorius - A new Django-based web user interface for end users and list administrators.
• HyperKitty - A new Django-based web archiver.
• mailman.client - The official Python 2 and 3 bindings to the administrative REST API. Used by Postorius and HyperKitty, this provides a convenient, object-based API for programmatic access to the Core.
• mailman-bundler - A convenient package for building out the entire Mailman suite.

Among the new shiny things:

What's new about Mailman 3? Well, lots! Some highlights include:

• Backed by a relational database;
• True support for multiple domains, with no cross-domain mailing list naming restrictions;
• One user account to manage all your subscriptions on a site;
• The core's functionality exposed through an administrative REST+JSON API;
• All passwords hashed by default, and no monthly password reminders!
• Users can post to lists via the web interface;
• Built-in archive searching!

and more. Tons more.

Note that it is not recommended to update your lists from 2.x to 3.0 zero yet as it may not go smoothly. The update feature is planned for 3.1 but if you've got some test machine, feel free to play around with the update and report bugs.

[submitter's note]: some details in the announcements seemed a bit weird to me, notable, I quote, "The core requires Python 3.4 while Postorius and HyperKitty require Python 2.7.". Why use two different (and maybe incompatible) versions of python ? Another one is about the API numbering scheme. Well, we'll see how it goes ...