Re: [Tails-dev] State of TAILS accessibility with Orca; Tor …

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Autor: intrigeri
Data:  
Dla: Hadi Rezaee, The Tails public development discussion list
Temat: Re: [Tails-dev] State of TAILS accessibility with Orca; Tor totally works within Iran using Pluggable transports (ScrambleSuit)
Hi,

[no need to Cc me, I read the list.]

First, thanks a lot for your feedback!

Hadi Rezaee wrote (14 Oct 2014 14:09:34 GMT) :
> I've tested tails 1.2 RC1, And there's a big problem with Orca in general.
> The version of Orca that tails is running seems to be extremely old. It's the
> version that was released alongside of Gnome 3.4 which i think is about 2-3
> years ago.


Tails is based on Debian stable, which indeed ships a relatively old
GNOME on today's standards. There are vague ideas to use Debian
testing as a basis some day, but we're far from be there yet. The good
news is that our current focus (milestone 2.0) is about streamlining
our development and release process, and getting ourselves a more
autonomous APT repository, and both together pave the way towards
being able to do that... some day.

Anyhow, let's focus more on actual problems, than on version numbers,
if you don't mind:

> This version has serious issues with newer Firefox browser,
> Thunderbird and Pidgin.


Could you please elaborate a bit about these issues?

(During the life cycle of a Debian stable release, there is *some*
room for fixing such bugs.)

> It lacks many new features as well.


Could you please be a little bit more specific regarding what features
are missing, and what are the practical consequences in terms of
user experience?

> Is it possible to compile and include the latest version of Orca from Orca Master git
> to Tails?


If only...

I've just given it a try, and it's not easy: it depends on at-spi2
2.10+, which is not available in Debian Wheezy, and I'm not sure that
other tools we ship that use at-spi2 would work with the newer version
without substantial backporting work.

So, our best bet seems to be: speed up the porting of Tails to Debian
Jessie -- help is welcome:
https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-testers/2014-October/000074.html

> Regarding The current state of Iran vs Tor.
> Last year i stopped using tails and Tor because Tor was very unstable on Iran's
> connections and it used to not work at all.
> Last weak i gave Tor a try with the new Pluggable Transport called "ScrambleSuit",
> and It instantly connected to the Tor network, and i wasn't getting any disconnects
> and dropouts for 10 hours straight!
> This is a very huge advancement in Tor, just wanted to mention it.


Great, thanks for reporting back!

Tails doesn't support scramblesuit yet (WIP:
https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/7909), but it does support obfs3,
which may work in Iran.

Cheers,
--
intrigeri