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Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

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Re: Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

#91

Post by jerheinze »

kbrackbill wrote: post #86
Exuma wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by this: "with that the risk of being arrested for all sorts of criminal activity by non-tech-savvy law enforcement" You can be arrested for things just by using Tor if they mix you up with someone else or something?

You can be arrested for running an exit node, because other Tor users' traffic will appear to be coming from you. For example: https://www.deepdotweb.com/2017/05/01/russian-tor-exit-node-... https://www.zdnet.com/article/dan-egerstads-tor-exit-nodes-g... https://www.pcworld.com/article/2452320/tor-exit-node-operat...

All of them from people running their exit from home, which has always been warned against.

Re: Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

#92

Post by jerheinze »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #84
ogennadi wrote: post #17

> Ultimate eventual goal: Make Tor Browser obsolete, so Tor Project can focus on research instead of maintaining a fork of Firefox.

Is it a fork? I thought it was a heavily customized version of Firefox ESR with specific settings and defaults using the channels OEM configs. Looking at the binaries, it's definitely not the standard build anymore.

It's a fork based on Firefox ESR, see for the details: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/

Re: Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

#93

Post by jerheinze »

LinuxBender wrote: post #34
jerheinze wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://matt.traudt.xyz/posts/dont-https-your-o44SnkW2.html

Those are interesting preferences and perspectives. I will set up a site to counter them from my perspective and experiences. To summarize, you are a dissident. I am a news reporter. You are giving me information about your government. Your life and the lives of your family members now depend 100% on the security of the Tor Proxy transport. Tor is a proxy transport and nothing more. As a dissident, you have been trai…

> Without HTTPS, you are relying entirely on the transport for assurance of who you are talking to.

That's not the case, even with a SecureDrop setup, a Gov can compromise your SecureDrop machine and listen directly.

Re: Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

#94

Post by jerheinze »

paulie_a wrote: post #73
Hello71 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which sites in 2018 still present multiple CAPTCHAs to users with cookies and JavaScript enabled? I think the theory behind this project is that those problems are primarily caused by Tor's popular image as a 'fringe network for pedophiles and drug dealers' and that by making it more mainstream they can fix those issues. (please more replies saying "that sounds really hard" and less replies saying "tor is not a fring…

Google. Which uses a really shitty custom captcha for their services.

Google has always been showing captchas when using their search engine for quiet a long time (even for VPN users). In fact they were even straight blocking users from using that very same captcha: https://bugs.torproject.org/23840

Re: Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

#95

Post by AlyssaRowan »

dimator wrote: post #56
Lennie wrote: 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.

Not immediately, but I feel that as those protocols become more ubiquitous, _maybe_ the base Tor transport protocol (for nodes which aren't bridges) might be able to benefit from some of the same upgrades by using them?

I don't know how much (if at all) it might help—but other, similar overlay networks have previously noticed that (intuitively) inefficiency in the transport protocol is likely to be (broadly speaking) multiplied by the number of hops; so any improvements in that might be useful in improving the user experience by using the same available resources more efficiently.

What that might mean for Tor's perceived speed is a somewhat murky issue, as that's a function of the complex interaction of latency and bandwidth and crypto and routing overhead of all the involved nodes in a tunnel put together; which of course is also shared with other tunnels; not to mention it will _also_ be particularly affected by exit node outproxy bandwidth; _and_ any possible packet loss and delay caused by both incidental _and_ deliberate adverse network conditions…

Re: Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

#96

Post by jerheinze »

urda wrote: post #78

Mozilla keeps driving for the users on the internet. I know many of my own frustrations came from the fork that is Tor. This work is great to see.

> I know many of my own frustrations came from the fork that is Tor.

What are your frustrations with the Tor Browser?

Re: Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

#97

Post by benevol »

jerheinze wrote: post #91
kbrackbill wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be arrested for running an exit node, because other Tor users' traffic will appear to be coming from you. For example: https://www.deepdotweb.com/2017/05/01/russian-tor-exit-node-... https://www.zdnet.com/article/dan-egerstads-tor-exit-nodes-g... https://www.pcworld.com/article/2452320/tor-exit-node-operat...

All of them from people running their exit from home, which has always been warned against.

Just use some cheap VPN service in front of your Tor/Firefox browser (which most people should do in any case) and you're good to go.

Re: Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

#99

Post by kibwen »

devit wrote: post #98

I think Mozilla should look at using Servo instead of Gecko in this mode along with a new JavaScript interpreter written in Rust, at least optionally, since perfect security is essential when using a Tor browser without a dedicated VM.

Servo components are being uplifted into Gecko gradually. There's less benefit to rewriting the JIT in Rust because static type systems can only do so much when the whole goal of a program is to generate code dynamically.

Re: Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

#100

Post by tomrittervg »

Hi all. I am a Tor Project Developer and work at Mozilla on this project. We appreciate everyone's enthusiasm and feedback. Our ultimate goal is a long way away because of the amount of work to do and the necessity to match the safety of Tor Browser in Firefox when providing a Tor mode. There's no guarantee this will happen, but I hope it will and we will keep working towards it.

If anyone is interested in assisting development-wise, Firefox bugs tagged 'fingerprinting' in the whiteboard are a good place to start. You can also run Tor relays and help us improve the health of the network by working with Tor's new Relay Advocate (https://blog.torproject.org/get-help-running-your-relay-our-...). More people being involved in spec work (especially at the W3C) and focusing on fingerprinting and privacy concerns is also very useful - it's very hard to keep eyes on all the things happening everywhere.

We also appreciate users of Firefox Beta and Nightly (Nightly especially). The flags Tor features are developed behind (privacy.resistFingerprinting and privacy.firstparty.isolate) are experimental. I appreciate bug reports from users running these flags but you should expect them to break things on the web (resistFingerprinting especially; first party isolate is generally more stable and usually only has breakage on particular login forms).

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