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Tor Browser 8.5

blog.torproject.org

71–80 of 99 posts

Re: Tor Browser 8.5

#71
post #29
post #18

Allow me to send a big shoutout and my deepest thanks to the maintainers and volunteers of both the Tor Browser and the Tor Project in general. You make the world a better place, even if the majority of the population don't realise they should pay more attention to your work. You're the real MVPs!

more people ought to use TOR so that the users who _need_ tor gets the protection of anonymity in a crowd. If nobody uses TOR, then TOR users immediately becomes suspicious and nothing prevents the real world investigation from uncovering them.

I make everybody smile when I open Tor to watch some technical documentation. Still gave my boss a pause when I asked him if we were ever going to consider Google a competitor in any field (which we were in a niche field) and if he would be comfortable with a competitor owning the search history of all his employees.

Re: Tor Browser 8.5

#72
Dear lord, Windows antivir protection has gone full stupid with this.

I am on Win10 and it will not allow me to install it in Program Files. If I install it in Desktop, it will keep flagging tor.exe as a virus.

After marking 4 times that the Windows Virus and Threat Protection should restore the exe, i was able to start the browser.

Then the windows antivir went full dystopian mode, and flagged it again. Now it is asking me to reboot the computer to delete tor.exe from the device.

Re: Tor Browser 8.5

#73
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less than 3% of Tor traffic is to onion services of any kind (which means 97% is to websites already accessible on the public internet), and the most popular onion service on the internet by a large margin is Facebook's (facebookcorewwwi.onion). More than 2 million people use Tor every day -- are they all bad people? Heck, government agents use Tor when traveling abroad. Do bad people do bad things using Tor? Yes. Do…

> the most popular onion service on the internet by a large margin is Facebook's How do you know? It shouldn't be possible to collect this sort of data.

Exit nodes can track which sites are hit to a degree. CDNs make this more difficult, but it's not too hard to figure out what percentage of your traffic is Facebook. It also won't work if you're going to the Facebook onion site of course.

Re: Tor Browser 8.5

#74
post #60

Tor Browser might be the least mainstream safe browser on the Internet: * It permanently tracks the lagging ESR Firefox. * It puts its users on Tor, which "anonymizes" them but also flags their traffic as interesting. * It collapses all those users down to a single set of browser releases, making it cost-effective to target exploits to. Use Firefox if you really like Firefox, but use the most recent version you can p…

The one time I ever used the Tor Browser (at work, out of curiosity), my desk phone rang within 5 minutes: the in-house IT security team wanted to know what I was doing. So you're not kidding when you say it makes one's internet traffic more "interesting"!

Re: Tor Browser 8.5

#75
post #11

I'm rooting for Mozilla and the Tor Project to uplift Tor into Firefox. Imagine a world where people need to opt in to get less privacy.

It's interesting, the only way that would work is if they also turn every browser into a through node, which would be both highly controversial while also a great boon to the Tor network as a whole

Why would that be the only way it would work? Because integrating Tor into Firefox is currently planned and making clients Tor nodes is not part of that plan.

Re: Tor Browser 8.5

#76
post #29
post #18

Allow me to send a big shoutout and my deepest thanks to the maintainers and volunteers of both the Tor Browser and the Tor Project in general. You make the world a better place, even if the majority of the population don't realise they should pay more attention to your work. You're the real MVPs!

more people ought to use TOR so that the users who _need_ tor gets the protection of anonymity in a crowd. If nobody uses TOR, then TOR users immediately becomes suspicious and nothing prevents the real world investigation from uncovering them.

Aren't large internet providers blocking TOR from working or am I confusing that with something else security related being prevented?

Re: Tor Browser 8.5

#77
post #60

Tor Browser might be the least mainstream safe browser on the Internet: * It permanently tracks the lagging ESR Firefox. * It puts its users on Tor, which "anonymizes" them but also flags their traffic as interesting. * It collapses all those users down to a single set of browser releases, making it cost-effective to target exploits to. Use Firefox if you really like Firefox, but use the most recent version you can p…

> But use it explicitly, not as part of a browser bundle.

I hope you're conflating two issues here.

You surely aren't recommending users who "believe in Tor" install Tor directly and attempt to manually proxy their favorite browser traffic over it?

Not to say I disagree with your points against using TBB.

Re: Tor Browser 8.5

#78
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting, the only way that would work is if they also turn every browser into a through node, which would be both highly controversial while also a great boon to the Tor network as a whole

Using "Tor mode" instead of "private mode" in regular Firefox would be nice.

[deleted]

Re: Tor Browser 8.5

#79
post #60

Tor Browser might be the least mainstream safe browser on the Internet: * It permanently tracks the lagging ESR Firefox. * It puts its users on Tor, which "anonymizes" them but also flags their traffic as interesting. * It collapses all those users down to a single set of browser releases, making it cost-effective to target exploits to. Use Firefox if you really like Firefox, but use the most recent version you can p…

I think you underestimate how widespread ESR Firefox is.

Debian ships Mozilla's ESR releases by default. I'm sure many shops that prefer stability over latest features also deploy ESR. Judging by how often it gets updated it seems to me Mozilla is pretty diligent at backporting fixes.

My wholly-not-representative-for-the-wider-web statistics say approx. 22% of Firefox UAs are ESR release.

Re: Tor Browser 8.5

#80
post #79
post #60

Tor Browser might be the least mainstream safe browser on the Internet: * It permanently tracks the lagging ESR Firefox. * It puts its users on Tor, which "anonymizes" them but also flags their traffic as interesting. * It collapses all those users down to a single set of browser releases, making it cost-effective to target exploits to. Use Firefox if you really like Firefox, but use the most recent version you can p…

I think you underestimate how widespread ESR Firefox is. Debian ships Mozilla's ESR releases by default. I'm sure many shops that prefer stability over latest features also deploy ESR. Judging by how often it gets updated it seems to me Mozilla is pretty diligent at backporting fixes. My wholly-not-representative-for-the-wider-web statistics say approx. 22% of Firefox UAs are ESR release.

If 100% of the user pool for Debian, including all derivative distros (Ubuntu, etc), plus all users of the Tor Browser Bundle all used ESR Firefox, that would still make it a blip in the overall body of user internet traffic.
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