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Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

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Re: Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

#51
post #2

Why does the Tor Browser Bundle ship with HTTPS Everywhere? Surely if you're connected through a Tor circuit, HTTPS provides no extra security?

anonymity /= confidentiality you can stay anonymous while making sure anyone can read what you are sending. you can send confidential messages while making sure anyone knows who you are. you can also combine the two :)

> you can stay anonymous while making sure anyone can read what you are sending.

That depends a lot on what you're sending. Tor stops people from identifying you based on your IP address, but you can still identify yourself by logging in on http://not-encrypted.com.

Re: Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

#52
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Sametmax, big fan of your site. Apart from the existing ecosystem of content, are their any reasons you want BitTorrent over ipfs? Everyone on tor AND ipfs... Now that would be something.

Thanks :) I think IFPS needs a little more field testing before being set in stone. Indeed, if you bake in something in the browsers, then those implementation will be the boundary of what is practical to do. So any innovation will then be constraint by the browsers release and good will. IFPS is a young tech, it needs time to evolve yet. Tor and bittorrent are now quite mature.

This works today: https://webtorrent.io/

It used WebRTC which is also encrypted. So gets you some privacy.

Re: Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

#53
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimatest super-goal: make anonymity the default stance and socially accepted norm. Do with anonymous browsing what WhatsApp did with E2E encryption. Force big data suckers to invent new business models for exploiting our data without breaching our privacy.

They need to solve the issue of speed, altough maybe for sensitive queries(assuming that's enough, a very big assumption,), people may be willing to use a slow "super private browsing mode". another option is to make people pay for faster speeds ? And if i recall correctly, a "global passive attacker" listening to internet traffic around can de-anonimize TOR using ML. Seems like something that would be possible and p…

>another option is to make people pay for faster speeds

This is what Telegram is trying to acheive with their TON and Gram.

Re: Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

#54
post #2

Why does the Tor Browser Bundle ship with HTTPS Everywhere? Surely if you're connected through a Tor circuit, HTTPS provides no extra security?

Please read and play with the graphics on this page, it explains it all:

https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and-https

Re: Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

#55

Cool, now let me start an ephemeral v3 onion service from JS and have it reachable via WebRTC by a peer who has their own. It's the perfect tech marriage, removes signalling servers and NAT busters, but may be a bit taxing on directory servers and too slow to use for media streams (but I'll take data channels only).

I know some of those words. (I'm an embedded programmer)

Re: Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

#56
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't read this article because I'm at work, but unless they managed to solve the problem of Tor being very, very, very slow, this will never happen. End users will definitely notice a difference and likely won't care about their privacy. They'll just see Firefox being way slower than Chrome and switch.

I think Tor will get faster, now new protocols like TLS/1.3, HTTP/2 and QUIC are being developed. Currently Tor looks like HTTPS done with TLS/1.2 on TCP (like regular HTTPS). As these newer protocols get more and more delpoyed Tor can start using them too which will help make Tor faster.

Those standards have nothing to do with Tor's speed.

Re: Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

#57
What will Mozilla do about the Tor network's usability problems? Advanced users can workaround them and because they understand the benefits and engineering, accept the frustrations as a cost for a worthwhile (and free) technology. But what will non-technical users do?

Many public Internet websites filter connections from the Tor network, many other websites are very slow, yet others impose extra obstacles such as multiple rounds of captchas (even 5 or more) or degraded service (including high suspicion of payments), and of course you often will receive webpages in the wrong locale or language - which can trigger regional filters. Currently, workarounds requires resetting the circuit (few non-technical users will even understand what the circuit is), lots of patience and reloads, and often just giving up. [EDIT: And non-technical users won't understand what is happening and therefore won't know when to use which workaround.]

If that's the experience of typical Firefox users, they won't use it and they will have bad associations with Tor and Firefox.

Re: Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

#58
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks :) I think IFPS needs a little more field testing before being set in stone. Indeed, if you bake in something in the browsers, then those implementation will be the boundary of what is practical to do. So any innovation will then be constraint by the browsers release and good will. IFPS is a young tech, it needs time to evolve yet. Tor and bittorrent are now quite mature.

This works today: https://webtorrent.io/ It used WebRTC which is also encrypted. So gets you some privacy.

I know. Check my other comments.

It's nice, but not nearly good enough.

Re: Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

#59
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox recently whitelisted a bunch of p2p protocols so that they can be used by browser extensions. One of them is the Dat protocol [0], which is similar to BitTorrent but has better support for mutable data and random access [1]. It's far from being "baked in", but it's a step in the right direction. [0]: https://docs.datproject.org/ [1]: https://docs.datproject.org/faq#dat-vs

We always could do that with extensions since JS is turing complete and has access to the network. Webtorrent is a thing after all. The issue is not technical. It's just a chicken and egg problem. Most won't use bittorent unless it's stupidely easy to do. Remember that the average user don't know what an URL is and doesn't open new tabs willingly. Since they are the majority, they drive cost and benefits, so we must…

> and has access to the network

It does not have access to TCP or UDP sockets.

Re: Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

#60
post #56
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Tor will get faster, now new protocols like TLS/1.3, HTTP/2 and QUIC are being developed. Currently Tor looks like HTTPS done with TLS/1.2 on TCP (like regular HTTPS). As these newer protocols get more and more delpoyed Tor can start using them too which will help make Tor faster.

Those standards have nothing to do with Tor's speed.

Well HTTP/2 is disabled in the Tor Browser (for now), and it has a positive impact on speed, so they do matter: https://bugs.torproject.org/14952
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