Tor 0.2.1.17-rc released

Tor 0.2.1.17-rc marks the fourth -- and hopefully last -- release
candidate for the 0.2.1.x series. It lays the groundwork for further
client performance improvements, and also fixes a big bug with directory
authorities that were causing them to assign Guard and Stable flags
poorly.

The Windows bundles also finally include the geoip database that we
thought we'd been shipping since 0.2.0.x (oops), and the OS X bundles
should actually install Torbutton rather than giving you a cryptic
failure message (oops).

This is a release candidate! That means that we don't know of any
remaining show-stopping bugs, and 0.2.1.18 will be the new stable if
there are no problems. Please test it, and tell us about any problems
that you find.

https://decvnxytmk.oedi.net/download

Changes in version 0.2.1.17-rc - 2009-07-02
Major features:

• Clients now use the bandwidth values in the consensus, rather than
  the bandwidth values in each relay descriptor. This approach opens
  the door to more accurate bandwidth estimates once the directory
  authorities start doing active measurements. Implements more of
  proposal 141.

Major bugfixes:

• When Tor clients restart after 1-5 days, they discard all their
  cached descriptors as too old, but they still use the cached
  consensus document. This approach is good for robustness, but
  bad for performance: since they don't know any bandwidths, they
  end up choosing at random rather than weighting their choice by
  speed. Fixed by the above feature of putting bandwidths in the
  consensus. Bugfix on 0.2.0.x.
• Directory authorities were neglecting to mark relays down in their
  internal histories if the relays fall off the routerlist without
  ever being found unreachable. So there were relays in the histories
  that haven't been seen for eight months, and are listed as being
  up for eight months. This wreaked havoc on the "median wfu"
  and "median mtbf" calculations, in turn making Guard and Stable
  flags very wrong, hurting network performance. Fixes bugs 696 and
  969. Bugfix on 0.2.0.6-alpha.

Minor bugfixes:

• Serve the DirPortFrontPage page even when we have been approaching
  our quotas recently. Fixes bug 1013; bugfix on 0.2.1.8-alpha.
• The control port would close the connection before flushing long
  replies, such as the network consensus, if a QUIT command was issued
  before the reply had completed. Now, the control port flushes all
  pending replies before closing the connection. Also fixed a spurious
  warning when a QUIT command is issued after a malformed or rejected
  AUTHENTICATE command, but before the connection was closed. Patch
  by Marcus Griep. Bugfix on 0.2.0.x; fixes bugs 1015 and 1016.
• When we can't find an intro key for a v2 hidden service descriptor,
  fall back to the v0 hidden service descriptor and log a bug message.
  Workaround for bug 1024.

Minor features:

• If we're a relay and we change our IP address, be more verbose
  about the reason that made us change. Should help track down
  further bugs for relays on dynamic IP addresses.